How to Make 2024 Your Best Reading Year (and Lessons Learnt from the Great Books) (Patreon)

Dear Book Club Readers ---

Today I would love to share my reflections on the year just passed and talk about how to make 2024 your greatest reading year yet.

We're talking about lessons learnt from living the great books, creating strong habits and routines, personal growth, powerful mindsets, goals, intentions, practical exercises for deep reading imaginative literature, and much more.

Please feel free to use the timestamps below to navigate the discussion. As it's a long one, you might like to break your viewing down into parts.

Timestamps:

• 0:00 wishing you a very Happy New Year
• Part One: Reflections on Great Literature
• 1:20 principles for effective deep reading
• 1:40 a mindset for reading difficult books
• 3:00 overcoming different kinds of difficulty
• 5:00 why these great books are for you
• 6:00 how you read is who you are
• 8:00 Shakespeare as Rorschach Test
• 10:00 Tolstoy & Dostoyevsky’s characters
• 12:00 the most difficult books last year
• 12:40 life lessons from Milton’s Satan
• 14:00 mindsets from Shakespeare’s Hamlet
• 15:00 how the mind is its own place
• 16:00 my favourite passage for the year
• 17:00 creating our reality with our words
• 19:30 Dostoyevsky & the Grand Inquisitor
• 20:30 literature expresses the inexpressible
• 22:00 great art is born from great pain
• 23:00 tragedy and comedy are linked
• 24:00 the healing power of great literature
• 25:40 great literature offers companionship
• 27:00 great literature is sublime perspective
• 28:50 why reading is the most important skill
• 30:00 deep reading is creative collaboration
• 31:20 rereading is more important than reading
• Part Two: How to Deep Read Great Literature
• 32:30 how to climb these literary mountains
• 34:00 Reader’s Sublime & our personal canon
• 35:30 consider one page to be a success
• 38:00 the importance of setting up easy wins
• 39:00 going into your reading session with aims
• 41:00 the power of building your imagination
• 43:00 how to be an expansive reader
• 44:00 what counts as effective reading?
• 45:00 why the work is never finished
• 46:00 the story is frequently off the page
• Part Three: Setting Goals & Intentions
• 47:00 how to set goals going into the new year
• 48:00 walking through my goal setting routine
• 50:00 goals to make your reading rewarding
• 52:00 exercises for powerful personal growth
• 54:00 the value of having a morning routine
• Part Four: Deep Reading Exercises & Practices
• 57:30 warming up for our first literary adventures
• 58:00 recommendations for securing your copies
• 59:00 breaking down Steinbeck’s East of Eden
• 1:00:30 advice for multiple book readers
• 1:02:00 solidifying the habit of consistent reading
• 1:03:30 our next play in our Shakespeare journey
• 1:04:00 appreciating the poetry of Walt Whitman
• 1:05:30 orientation exercise for reading poetry
• 1:08:00 imaginative literature reading exercises
• 1:10:00 advice going into Steinbeck’s great novel
• 1:12:00 immersive reading vs targeted practice
• 1:13:00 advanced stretch goals for your reading
• 1:15:40 expressing my gratitude for you

Resources:

• Journalling & Marginalia: If you would like to get into journalling and marginalia this year, you might find it useful to consult the following video, which runs through my process: How to Journal on Great Literature. My recommended journal is the Leuchturrm1917 range of bullet journals, and the favoured pen is the Japanese gel ink point pen from Muji.
• Morning Routines: As mentioned in the video, I find the structure that Hal Elrod offers in the Miracle Morning to be a powerful way to start your day: Silence, Affirmations, Visualisation, Exercise, Reading, Scribing. You can read more about this routine here. For further discussion on creating a daily reading practice, you might like to check out this podcast.
• Securing Your Copies: For Steinbeck, I'll be working from this paperback edition from Penguin Modern Classics. For Whitman, I recommend this paperback of his complete poems. If you would like to check out the chapters I mentioned above from How to Read a Book, then this edition is great. I've provided my recommended editions for the rest of schedule in the document attached at the bottom of this post.
• Reading Challenge: To warm up for a rewarding year, focus on establishing a consistent reading habit over the next few days. Discover what place and time of the day is best for you. What routine will you be able to adhere to most of the time? Follow the imaginative literature reading exercises we outlined in the above video. 
• Reflection: You might also like to reflect upon the year just gone and think about what you would love to get out of this year. The questions below will help you. These are the reflection questions that I personally ask myself each year. I like to think and walk, then journal.

Life Reflection Questions

A) What are you proud of this year? What inner victories did you experience? Did you make any life-changing decisions? What parts of your reading are you most impressed with? Let us know how you feel about your wins this year.

B) What obstacles have you overcome? This may not be the happiest thing to mull over, but it's worth confronting our difficulties rather than hiding from them. It's empowering to realise that we are resilient and resourceful in the face of what life throws at us.

C) Do you have any New Year's resolutions/goals? Which books are you most keen to read? What would you like to get out of the year ahead? Are you creating any new habits or routines this year? What would make 2024 an amazing year for you?

Questions to Reflect Upon Your Reading

1) What book resonated with you the most this year? Was this a reread of an old favourite, or a meeting with a new author? What did you love about this work? What book would you give your younger self to read? And how would you rate your reading year?

2) Who was your favourite character? Were they sent to teach you anything about yourself? Did they remind you of anybody? How did it feel spending time with them?

3) What insights did you uncover this year? These need not be grand insights. The subtle is frequently profound, wisdom can sound obvious, and we find our own thoughts in these great books.

4) Have you adopted any new approaches to reading that you will be taking into the next year with you? And has your reading had any bearing on your relationships?

5) What quote from your reading has resonated with you the most? Is there a quote or sentiment that you couldn’t help but possess?

Happy reading & Happy New Year, everybody!