By Phoebe Farag Mikhail

Since I shared my latest Lenten book list I’ve been asked by many people how I find time to read. This is an important question. Even I, a voracious reader and bibliophile, have been through seasons of my life when I fell out of the habit of daily reading. And while there is a lot of information out there for helping children become readers, there isn’t as much advice for adults on how to become a reader or get back into reading after you have dropped off. Yet, we all know that there are so many treasures to be gained from reading, especially spiritual reading. For Christians, in addition to reading Scripture, we greatly desire to read books that will be helpful to us, but encounter frustration when we can’t focus or can’t finish. In this post I share some ideas for getting back into reading and finding time for reading.

Start by reading Scripture – slowly and daily

No spiritual reading is useful to a Christian without the foundation of the Holy Scriptures. If you are already diligently reading Scripture, some Holy Lent Scripture reading challenges might encourage you to do more. But if you don’t have this habit, the place to start is the Gospels, one chapter at a time. With Bible reading, consistency and quality trump quantity. Reading one chapter a day, every day, is more fruitful for our spiritual lives than seven chapters a week, or thirty per month. Reading and meditating on that chapter, perhaps committing a few verses to memory, is more fruitful than trying to skim through and finish in a short period of time.

If you are someone who struggles to read other books but can commit to consistently reading the Bible, you are in a better place than some avid readers of books, who can fall into the temptation of neglecting Scripture for the novelty of other types of reading. I confess I have had seasons of neglecting my Bible reading for other types of reading. Thankfully, most good spiritual books will always point the reader back to Scripture. Even other spiritual reading should still be done hand in hand with Scripture. It doesn’t replace it.

Make reading pleasurable (again)

Many people who don’t enjoy reading but want to read don’t enjoy it because they see reading as an obligation and a form of self-betterment. So they’ll read nothing except what might be assigned by school but later, when given a choice, might only pick up a book because it is necessary for work or school. Later, they will hear how important this or that book is, especially if it’s a spiritual book that might strengthen their faith, and they will pick one up, only to take years to complete it, because a personal reading habit has been lost, or never established in the first place.

Even those of us who have enjoyed reading since childhood can fall out of a personal reading habit. For me it happened during graduate school, when I had to read so much for my studies that I stopped reading for pleasure. I remember clearly the day I had to travel by train and didn’t have any studying to be done. I thankfully had enough time to pop into the train station bookstore and pick up a novel by Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies. I finished it right before I reached my destination, emotionally wrecked inside by the story and also, somehow, refreshed, the novel having transformed the familiar DC/NY corridor into the war-torn Dominican Republic. I had gone to another world and returned safely to the one I was in. I remembered how much I missed this kind of reading and started back into my reading habit.

Thus, the first advice I can give to someone who wants to start (or re-start) a reading habit is to start by reading things you really enjoy, are pleasurable, and less challenging in terms of vocabulary, or concepts. A great genre for this is Middle Grade and Young Adult literature. With time, you will start feeling that sense of accomplishment from finishing books and the fun of reading itself. You can then move into reading that requires a little bit more concentration, like a longer adult novel.

“Novels? Stories? Pleasure? During the Great Lent?” You might ask. “Lent is for serious books that will make us closer to God,” you think, “not for beach reads.”

My answer is twofold: First, just as no one trains for a marathon by running 26 miles on their first day, no one can start a reading habit by jumping into reading deep spiritual writing on day one. The church itself institutes this for us – the first week of the Great Lent is called “preparation week” in the Coptic Orthodox Church. During this week we start to train ourselves for our Lenten disciplines. We don’t start with the 500 prostrations of Good Friday. Second, a good story can be just as spiritual as St. Cyril’s Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke. Our Lord Jesus Christ spoke in parables—short stories—to teach us. The Gospel itself is the great story of our salvation—and we are in this story. Stories can be pleasurable and spiritual.

My latest Lenten book list includes a picture book and two works of fiction (a business fable and an historical fiction novel), in addition to more straightforward spiritual books. One Lenten book that I often go back to for my own reference is a children’s book called Make Room: A Child’s Guide to Lent and Easter by Laura Alary. Last year I also featured another a book of daily literary readings for Lent, Between Midnight and Dawn by Sarah Arthur, which includes plenty of poetry and fiction. All these genres can lead us to God.

For a few truly engaging Middle Grade books that also do touch upon the spiritual, consider the Sam and Saucer series by Melinda Johnson, the Every Tuesday Club series by Grace Brooks, the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis, and the Wrinkle in Time series by Madeleine L’Engle. For great Young Adult reads, consider the Lord of the Rings series by JRR Tolkien (there’s great podcast on this very series for Lent here), Letters to St. Lydia by Melinda Johnson, and Icon: A Novel by Georgia Briggs. For a Lenten themed graphic novel, consider Anastasis: The Harrowing of Hades by Creative Orthodox or his latest graphic novel on St. John the Short, A Forest in the Desert.

All of these books can help restore the joy of reading, help ease you (back) into the habit of reading regularly, and also inspire you to focusing your thoughts on God and renewing your own spiritual practices of prayer and fasting.

Read shorter spiritual works

No one said you needed to plow into the City of God by St. Augustine right away during the Great Lent. There are some wonderful shorter spiritual books that I return to, again and again. These include On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius (the SVS Press translation is very accessible), The Holy Spirit and His Work in Us by Pope Shenouda III, Beginning to Pray by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence, In Thy Presence by Fr. Lev Gillet, and The Illumined Heart by Frederica Mathews-Green, among so many others. There are four short books on my book list this year: The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, The Two Ways, The Prodigal Returns by Fr. Peter Farrington and Great Lent and Me by Fr. Bishoy Kamel. (For even more Lenten reading recommendations, check out this list compiled by the dean of the Pope Shenouda III Coptic Orthodox Theological Seminary).

Once you start reading, you will want to read more. You will find the writers that speak to you more than others, and you will read more from them. You’ll find topics you want to learn more about, or topics you are struggling with and want more help in, and you will seek those out. Your reading will be driven by your interests and needs, and not by obligation. You will begin to build this habit. Eventually, if your mentor or spiritual father recommends a book to you, you won’t be intimidated by its length or depth, and it will come more naturally to you to pick up the book and read.

Surround yourself with books and take them everywhere

This advice, so often applied to children, applies no less to adults. Keep the books you want to read visibly around you. Have a stack by your bedside and shelves in your living space. You don’t need to have as many books as I do, but when they are all around you, you will be more likely to pick them up to read—much more likely than if they are stored in some trunk or not there at all.  Book minimalism is not the way to go to build a reading habit – declutter other things and make room for more books.

Carry the book you are reading with you wherever you go. I have the Kindle e-reader app on my phone (there are others, too, such as Kobo, BookShout and Nook), and I have a dedicated e-reader by my bedside. I carry around a hard copy book too. If you enjoy audio books, these are also a great way to get reading done in the car, or while doing chores around the house. An Audible membership is nice, but your public library also probably offers many, many audiobooks that you can listen to for free with your library card (my library uses Hoopla). Other writers have even more tips: read Anne Bogel’s, a homeschooling mother of four, runs the hugely successful blog, Modern Mrs. Darcy; Laura Vanderkam’s, a working mother of four and author on time management; and Gretchen Rubin’s, a writer and podcaster on the subject of happiness. Despite how busy we are, there are lots of little pockets of time that can be used for reading, and that are better used for reading than say, scrolling your social media feeds. You will be surprised how they add up to more and more books read, and to a richer life as a result.

Finally, in the words of St. John Chrysostom, “When you immerse your mind and heart in spiritual books, you will always be filled, for spiritual reading gives you a foundation in God” (Third Homily on Lazarus). Blessed reading, and blessed Lent!

My 2019 Lenten book giveaway ends on March 7, 2019! Take a look and find out how to enter here.

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