What January Me Never Understood About Reading

Every January first, I do the same thing. I sit at the kitchen table with a fresh notebook — the same kind I use for drafts, which should have been my first warning — and I write out a reading list for the year. Twelve titles. Sometimes fifteen. I leave room in the margins for little notes to myself, things like read slowly or this one you've avoided long enough.

This year's list was a beauty. Moby-Dick, finally. A doorstop biography of Grant. Three translated novels a friend in Portland keeps recommending. A book about lighthouses that I bought because the cover was gorgeous and I told myself the cover wasn't the reason.

It is now late June. I have read one book from that list.

One. And I skimmed the whale chapters.

The Books That Ambushed Me

Here's what I actually read in the first half of this year: a mystery I found in a rental house on the Oregon coast, left behind by some stranger whose taste I will never know. A reread of a novel I'd assigned myself in college, pulled off the shelf at midnight because I couldn't sleep. A library book about bird migration that I checked out for my nephew's visit and finished after he went home. A slim memoir bought at an airport in Denver because my flight was delayed two hours and the bookstore was right there.

Not one of these was planned. Not one of them was chosen by the person who wrote that tidy January list.

And that's the thing I keep turning over. The list was written by a version of me who believed the year would cooperate. Who assumed I'd have long, unbroken afternoons and a steady mood and a clear sense of what I needed. January me was organized, ambitious, and — let's be honest — performing a little. That list wasn't just a plan. It was a portrait of who I wanted to be seen as.

The rental-house mystery, though? That was chosen by the actual me. Tired, on vacation, unwilling to work for my entertainment. The bird book was chosen by me-as-uncle, wanting to have something to show a nine-year-old. The airport memoir was chosen by me-as-stranded-traveler, hungry for company.

The List Is a Costume

I don't think I'm alone in this. Every reader I know keeps some version of the list — a Goodreads shelf, a stack on the nightstand, a note in their phone. And every reader I know has watched the year stroll right past it. We treat this as failure, as a discipline problem. If I were more serious, I'd have gotten to Tolstoy by now.

But I've started to wonder if the gap between the plan and the reality isn't a flaw in the system. I think it might be the most honest data we collect all year.

The planned list tells you who you aspire to be. The actual reading tells you who you were on the random Tuesday when you needed a book. One is a costume. The other is a diary you didn't know you were keeping.

Look at it that way and my first six months say something like: you were tired in February, curious in March, homesick in April, and you needed comfort more than improvement. That's a more accurate self-portrait than anything I could have drafted in a notebook on New Year's Day.

Reading the Unplanned Reading

So here's the small experiment I've taken up for the back half of the year. Instead of beating myself up over the abandoned list, I'm keeping a second one — an accidental list. Every book that shows up uninvited, I write down, along with a line about how it arrived.

The rental house. The delayed flight. The insomnia. The nephew.

It turns out the circumstances matter as much as the titles. A book read because you were stuck in Denver tells you something a book read because you scheduled it never can. Context is a kind of annotation.

I'm not ready to swear off January lists. There's something sweet about the ritual, about a person sitting down with a fresh notebook believing the year will hold still for her. I'll probably do it again in December. But I'm holding the list more loosely now. It's a suggestion, not a contract. A wish, not a sentence.

And if you're reading this in July with a half-finished to-be-read pile gathering dust somewhere — the lighthouse book, maybe, or the Russians — take it from me: you haven't failed at reading. You've just been reading the year instead of the list. The unplanned books knew something January you didn't.

They knew who you were going to become.

As always, I'd love to hear what ambushed you this year. The letters about accidental books are, historically, my favorites. Write me — I answer the way I read now: eventually, and better for the wait.