​'Tis the Season for Resolutions January 2025

As the new year approaches, I have been seeing a lot of articles about how to make New Year's resolutions and how to set goals for 2025.  A book club friend sent me an article from The Atlantic titled "The Adults Who Treat Reading Like Homework." The article summarized testimony from readers who spoke about their experience participating in the Goodreads Reading Challenge. Apparently, the challenge of setting a number of books to read in the new year can be the opposite of motivating.
 
As I was thinking about attaching a number to the amount of books read in a year, my mind was transported into the living room of Miss Edith Morton Chase's Topsmead house. If you have gone on a house tour led by me or another Friends of Topsmead docent, you know that this room is lined with bookshelves, including my favorite one that fills the space above the door to Miss Edith's office. You may also remember that there are almost 2,000 books in the house. Clearly, Miss Edith and her lifelong friends Lucy and Mary Burrall were voracious readers. (Well, not so much Lucy--her choices were more inclined towards cooking and flower tending.) 
 
In the living room, Miss Edith's reading chair was the leather one next to the French doors that open out to the cutting garden, and Mary's was the smaller upholstered chair at the other end of the room.  Another favorite spot to enjoy a book, and perhaps a cup of tea, was the comfy embroidered chaise lounge in front of the windows at the top of the main stairs. Based on the titles on the shelves, their tastes focused on nonfiction with lots of classics and philosophers.  Not surprisingly, because Miss Edith was quite the anglophile, titles of the old British white guys predominated, with a complete collection of Shakespeare's plays. 
 
While the Goodreads Reading Challenge didn't start until 2011, I nevertheless wondered whether or not the women set numerical goals for their book reading. My hope is that they did not.  I like to think of them as reading to savor and enjoy rather than reading to check off goals.
 
Docent Chris King has suggested that we docents set a personal reading goal for over this winter: each of us will choose a title from one of the books on the Topsmead shelves that catches our fancy, find a copy of it, read it, and prepare a brief report to share at our mid-winter docent get-together.  Well, that may sound a bit like "treat[ing] reading like homework," but I am up for it!  Chris has already chosen his title, Nonsense Novels, and found it on Amazon. 
 
As you settle on your resolutions and goals for 2025, perhaps set a personal reading goal or maybe plan to go on a house tour in the summer and check out the book titles on the Topsmead bookshelves. Whatever you choose, be sure it is something that motivates you and that you will savor and enjoy.
 
Happy New Year!
 
Margaret Hunt
BlogMistress