My Sunday ritual: a reading plan for the week

Really I just like making lists

For the past couple of months, I’ve had a fun little Sunday morning ritual of writing out my upcoming week’s reading plan. What started as a quick list of several reading assignments—some for pleasure, some for work—became a dedicated page in my notebook, and then a whole notebook of its own.

I’d been feeling a bit scattered, what with several meaty group readalong projects plus a stack of middle-grade novels to read for my Brave Writer work, not to mention occasional works of memoir or nonfiction as prep for upcoming podcast interviews. Plus, you know, just goof-off reading! And craft reading!

I’ve always been a promiscuous reader. Maybe not this promiscuous, but if you enjoy reading in community, Substack offers an embarrassment of riches.

(Simon Haisell, host of incredibly rich readalongs for War and Peace and Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, both of which I’m participating in, has recently created a directory of these group reading experiences. You should check it out!)

Endnotes June 2024 & Book Group Directory

I do enjoy reading in community. I find it exhilarating to compare notes with other minds.

It occurs to me that “maybe not this promiscuous” is a comically inaccurate statement. My kids’ entire education has been shaped around long, slow, group reading experiences of several books at once. That’s the core of our educational model. Several books, savored slowly, at a pace that allows discussion, reflection, rabbit-holing (deep dives, otherwise known as research), and rabbit-trailing (tangent-following, connection-making, a different but equally enriching kind of discovery)¹.

I’m laughing at myself now, because I started this post thinking my weekly reading plan was some kind of recent (for me) innovation; when of course it’s no different from the kinds of reading plans I’ve been drawing up to enjoy with my kids since, oh, about 1999.

Okay but the NOTEBOOK is new!

Anyway. What’s on deck this week includes:

• War & Peace, one chapter a day, and I read the daily chat threads but don’t chime in

• Bring Up the Bodies, the second Cromwell book. We’re nearing the end, and I must confess I raced ahead a few weeks ago. But I’m rereading each week’s section in anticipation of Simon’s excellent Wednesday posts. What I learned from gulping the last month’s worth of readings at once is that I like keeping pace with the group much better. For The Mirror and the Light, I intend to keep to the schedule.

• Billy Budd, the second half, for the Frizzlit Book Club’s final Melville meeting. Guess what! It’s going much better than it did in tenth grade. The tension is stressful (gah, Claggart) but I’m finding Melville so funny, even when the subject matter is serious. He feels like one of my people, which is to say: an overexplainer.

• A Well-Trained Wife, a harrowing memoir by Tia Levings, whom Julie Bogart and I are interviewing on the podcast later this month. After I finish Billy Budd, this one takes priority.

• The new Murakami! This one is a maybe, but Netgalley has only made the ARC available for a week: The City and Its Uncertain Walls. A week is…not enough time. I could keep my Kindle in airplane mode until I finish, but that gets in the way of other plans. So we’ll see.

The blurb has me at hello: “The long-awaited new novel from Haruki Murakami revisits a Town his readers will remember, a place where a Dream Reader reviews dreams and where our shadows become untethered from our selves. A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for these strange post-pandemic times…”

• If I do read it, that means setting aside my reread of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. That’s okay. Jansson is ever-present in my life. I’m hardly ever not dipping into one of her books.

• A book I’m totally living in at the moment: Bob, a delightful middle-grade novel by Wendy Mass and Rebecca Stead. I’m writing a Dart literature guide for it, due this week. Home stretch!

• With the teens: our Odyssey readaloud (Emily Wilson translation) continues, and we’re discussing “The Cask of Amontillado” this week in our American Gothic unit. The kids have read that one more recently than I have. The Poe graphic novel was one of Rilla’s early favorites. Plus all my kids have grown up on the Edgar Allen Poe song from Snoopy: The Musical. It’s a hoot.

(“Dickens’ Christmas Carol”—oh Charlie Brown, you kill me.)

Are you a one-and-done reader? Or a book glutton like me?

Thing is, this list demonstrates actual restraint. You wouldn’t believe the number of titles I left off.

And don’t even get me started on the length of my Substack queue.

1. This is a post I’ve been working on. Rabbit holes vs rabbit trails. I’m obsessed with both.