Hungry for Deep Reading?

My project about paying attention and re-membering myself to this place (and to nature) flows from a hunger for more depth in my life in general. I feel pulled in so many directions, so shallow and frenetic with my attention. I don't like the feeling or the kind of person this makes me. Therefore, I've decided to add another layer to my attention practice: deep reading. My reading the past few years has been about quantity: my sense of mortality pairs with how many books exist and how relatively few I'll get to read in my lifetime, and so I've been rushing through books. As a result, I've enjoyed many great reads (adhering to a strict policy that if I don't like the book in the first fifty pages, I'll move on to something else) but remember very little about them. Bummer.

I'm going to change this for myself with a goal around quality reading, deeper, slower reading: for 2024 I'm embarking on a deep reading of some classics that I didn't read well the first time, difficult reads that I gave up on, or books that I should have read by my age but haven't. I thought I'd see if anyone else out there is hungry for this kind of activity and would like to join me.

I'm going to start with a pairing of two books, devoting four months to them (January - April): Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays and Journals and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Next, I'd like to tackle Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in two months (May - June) and a summer read (July - August) of Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo. Finally, for the last four months of 2024, I'd like to do the pairing of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals.

I'd like to meet via Zoom the last week of each month on either Sunday or Monday nights, depending on which is best for most participants, and discuss. I'll take the lead on bringing in secondary sources and such but mostly I'm eager for the discussion on the primary text itself, discussion being one means of making the effect of a deep reading practice more firmly rooted and lasting.

If you'd like to join me for this year-long deep read, please send me a reply to Tayo.basquiat@gmail.com. I'll send a follow-up email January 1st with info about schedule and the Zoom link. And similarly, if you'd like me never to email you again for any reason, also send along (a not too mean) email asking me to do so and I'll happily oblige.

Happy holidays, whatever the holidays you observe at this season, and I hope at least a few of you will want to join me for the 2024 year of deep reading.