This week on The Gospel Coalition’s blog different people are writing about their reading habits. The author of yesterday’s post talked about the importance of deciding in advance what you want to gain from the book you’re about to read. One of his paragraphs was particularly insightful and convicting.
[T]his need for pre-deciding about your level of reading commitment is one of the reasons that our new and emerging habits of reading online are dangerous. When we’re browsing and scrolling and following links, we tend to make all those decisions about attention with less reflection. We tend to make them with our eyeballs, fingers, and central nervous system. These technologies make it easier and easier to fall into bestowing our limited reading time on things that don’t deserve it.
Even if I were paid to read all day, my reading time would still be limited. So often I find myself spending a lot more time reading the sites and blogs I follow than reading physical books. It’s not that what I am reading online is bad, it just isn’t always the most deserving of my time. And with a shelf full of books I have yet to conquer and a penchant for buying more (I picked up a nice little copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations the other day at Half-Price Books), I have committed to setting aside a minimum amount of time every day for reading books. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to go read.