2019 was a good year for my reading development. I read a lot of books, and I managed to balance reading with my work and personal life. I even managed to keep up this blog reasonably well, at least far better than I anticipated. I didn't always get reviews written as soon as I would have liked, but I'm quite happy with my progress. Writing frequently has been excellent for my development both as a writer and as a reader, as I think I'm spending more time actively engaging with the texts and finding key insights, with the goal of being able to later write those down for long-term retention.
With a new year comes new goals. I've spent a few weeks mulling over my reading goals for 2020. I've come up with a few and I want to just go through them here.
More Philosophy
In 2020 I want to be more intentional about reading philosophy. The blog in 2019 was essentially a grab-bag of random books, which is pretty indicative of my scattershot approach to reading at the moment. I think that sort of reading is good and has its place, but I want to narrow my focus. My reading time is likely to become more restricted this year for reasons both personal and professional, so I need to prioritize my reading. Hence the refocusing onto philosophy.
I've collected quite a few philosophy books this past year that I haven't read yet, so for 2020, I want to focus primarily on those. I'm shooting for probably a 70/30 split, philosophy to non-philosophy, with a minimum of 50/50. The goal is to read primarily philosophy, with maybe every third book being a non-philosophical book.
Feminist Literature
This year I would like to read more feminist literature. It's a subject that I've long neglected, and I would like to at least get acquainted with it. To that end, I've collected several books that I intend to read this year, and I hope to find a few more as well. I have an eclectic mix of these: some on feminism proper, some novels written by feminist authors, some novels that are simply recognized in the feminist canon, and some that aren't about feminism per se but are written by feminist authors (for instance Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed). In short, this will be a broad effort to read more books by and about women and women's issues. I plan to start with Luce Irigaray's The Speculum of the Other Woman because it intrigues me.
Economics
I never took an economics class in college, and I feel that economics is a subject in which I'm rather lacking. Therefore, I'd like to remedy that by reading not only some primary texts in the subject but also a textbook or two on economic subjects. I have a textbook on macroeconomics that I intend to read, and possibly I'll pick up another one on microeconomics. I intend to read not only economics books that support my preferred position (communism) but also ones that disagree, sometimes vehemently. I hope to read Keynes's General Theory and Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which isn't exactly an economic text but seems to mostly fit in this general section. I also want to read the copy of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population that I picked up a while ago. I also am very excited to read a book that fits in two of these sections, Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers, a book about economists who were also philosophers.
I'm hoping that with these changes to my reading priorities, I'll be able to look back on 2020 as a more productive year of reading. I've got so much to read and so little time, if only I didn't have to work!