You'd think every pastor has a natural inclination towards reading and a natural aptitude for it. If that's the stereotype then I fit the first half but have always struggled with the latter. Endless are the books I've bought - just ask my wife - and endless are the part-read books on my shelves (and you can now add ebooks into that mix). I've always found it easier to read smaller pieces - articles and such like - but books have always been far harder, certainly non-fiction works that demand sustained concentration. (Publishers, please note: books don't all need to be long)
About two years ago I decided that I needed to do better. Part-digested food doesn't really help a person to be healthy and part-finished books are likewise limited. I decided to set myself a daily goal and see if I could work towards it (I'm pretty sure I read something by John Piper that suggested doing so).
At first I thought a target of ten pages would be sustainable but, happily, that was soon revised upwards - probably because most chapters seemed to be longer than ten pages. Somehow I settled on 30 pages, Monday to Friday. That would mean 150 pages a week which would usually add-up to a book a fortnight or even quicker. It seemed a suitable challenging target without being too daunting and unrealistic.
I set 30 pages as a recurring weekday task in Todoist, my productivity app of choice. That would at least keep it before me as a goal, set one level of priority lower than my daily Bible reading (that is marked highest priority). I had also joined Goodreads, a website and app that allows you, among other things, to track your reading and serves as a database of all the books you've read; you can also follow others and share book reviews and so on.
With those parameters in place, I set off. And it has mostly - wonderfully - worked. A simple system has encouraged me to sustain reading through books and to finish far more than I ever did before. Other than books I'm reading as part of sermon preparation, I try to limit myself to reading through one book at a time. That doesn't work for some people; it does for me. I get less distracted and, if it's a book I'm finding less helpful, I shouldn't be too long in being able to move onto something that will hopefully be more useful.
I've read some very long books and a lot of relatively shorter ones (I don't choose them on that basis - book selection is another topic entirely). Some books I've read through very quickly, mostly novels for relaxation but sometimes more weighty works - Sinclair Ferguson's The Whole Christ was read in less than a day.
Apart from the satisfaction of finishing books, and hopefully with the attendant benefits of working things through, I think I've got better at focussing on what I'm reading; I'm also probably able to read faster, not that that was a particular goal.
Goodreads allows you to set an annual target of books read - I decided not to set one but made a mental note of looking to read 40 books in a year. That seemed pretty ambitious but, being only a soft target, wasn't something I was particularly focussed on. I think I read 50 books that year and then 60 the following year. Colour me astonished.
But something I need to remind myself of frequently: it's not how much I read that matters most, it's how much thinking that reading leads me to do. Colour me unfinished.
