Coming on the heals of reading and reviewing Tony Reinke’s book Lit!, I thought it would be wise to have a game plan going into 2012 for devouring some books. I am not certain how many books I read in the last year—though if I were to guess it would be somewhere around 40-50. I am thinking ambitiously for this next year and I’m hoping to blaze through 75-100. Here is what is going to help me accomplish such a goal:
- I am setting a goal of reading 2 biographies a month for the year. I will do this reading primarily at home during the evening hours after dinner. So far I have picked out 15 to read, but just read one of them yesterday and today so I am now down to 14. Biographies are easy to read and don’t tax my mind like reading theology does. Learning from other people and their lives is very rewarding.
- I’ll begin work on my dissertation in this next year and that will force me to crank though some material. I will do a good bit of this work during the day while in the office. I figure that I will set aside 2 hours a day for reading. This obviously won’t work for every day, but it gives me something to shoot for.
- I am teaching a course this spring on the book of Genesis. Doing so will allow me to keep reading books on narrative, genre, commentaries about Genesis…which will all fuel my dissertation work as well.
- Also in the mix I am hoping to throw in some fiction. This is an area I identified I need substantial growth in while reading through Lit! and want to grow in. I’m not sure where I should start so if you have suggestions on what I should tackle first I am all ears.
The number one excuse people have when asked why they don’t read is typically all about time. I am personally going to make time. However, if people just redeem the small amounts of time they do have then they would be shocked at how much they could read. I read something just recently that pointed to a logical statement by John Piper:
Most of us don’t aspire very high in our reading because we don’t feel like there is any hope. But listen to this. Suppose you read about 250 words a minute and that you resolve to devote just 15 minutes a day to serious theological reading to deepen your grasp of biblical truth. In one year (365 days) you would read for 5,475 minutes. Multiply that times 250 words per minute and you get 1,368,750 words per year. Now most books have between 300 and 400 words per page. So if we take 350 words per page and divide that into 1,368,750 words per year, we get 3,910 pages per year. This means that at 250 words a minute, 15 minutes a day, you could read about 20 average sized books a year!
So those of you that think you have no time…start by redeeming 15 minutes of your day then build that to 30 minutes. You’ll be amazed at how many books you’ll be able to get through.
I’ll have a few more things to say about books and reading as we move into the new year. Until then though, figure out where you are going to start using your 15 minutes!
Over the last couple of days I’ve been reading Jonathan Dodson’s new book Gospel Centered Discipleship. The book is simple…almost too simple. The problem is that so many of us have missed the simple connection between the gospel and discipleship.
Starting in a week or so I’m going to start reading through G.K. Beale’s 
