finding what feels good in reading

week 8 in the "become a close(r) reader" series: the final installment

Welcome to our 8th and final week of the become a close(r) reader series!

I take a deep breath on my yoga mat and one of my shoulders makes a clicking sound. I grimace. I put my other arm down. My hips sink awkwardly. I sit on my butt, feeling defeated, and then I hear her say it: “Find what feels good.”

Adriene, of the wildly popular Yoga with Adriene channel on Youtube, is guiding my creaky lazy winter-break-addled body through a simple morning flow. I am not feeling good as I follow her directions and attempt to hinge myself forward, to balance, to remember to breathe (rather than hold my breath) as I shake through a series of poses. Defeated, butt on the mat and legs quivering, I press pause.

There was a time, about fifteen years ago, when I had what Adriene and other yogis refer to as “a home practice.” I did yoga seven days a week; five in a studio, and at least two at home. Whenever I got tired or bored or unmotivated or sick, I didn’t reach for my iPhone. I reached for my yoga mat and I found what felt good.

Of course, this reminds me of something the brilliant Kate Jones wrote earlier this week: “I realised that something life-changing had happened to my concentration and focus in the intervening 6-7 years since completing my first degree. Namely: I had obtained a Smartphone and all the distractions that came with it.”

It is a rarity now that my impulse, when exhausted or burnt out or feeling unwell, is to reach for a book or my yoga mat. Instead, I reach for the distraction of my phone.

And as I’ve pondered this realization, I’ve come to better understand that what Adriene means by this phrase, “find what feels good,” is not “find the numbing distractions of an endless scroll of muscle agitating content.” What she is saying, instead, is an invitation. She is asking me to consider the wild possibility of what might happen—and how it might feel—if I continue moving and stretching and relaxing and breathing, even within spaces of profound discomfort, until I find something that feels good.

“Find what feels good” is not an easy echo of that siren song of retreating from yourself because you experienced something uncomfortable. Nor is it an invitation to stop trying just because you’re not perfect at something on the first try. (Guilty of this, I am, I am). Finally, it is importantly and also not the type of punishing refrain a muscly or macro-obsessed personal trainer grunts at you while encouraging you to hurt yourself into complete self optimization.

No.

Notice the words she has selected. Closely read them, if you will:

Find — seek, search, discover, become curious about…

What — the amorphous and unknowable “what” of your discovery

Feels — emotional, physical, sensationally (not “thinks,” this is critical)

Good — generous, open, inviting, safe

Find what feels good is an invitation to find comfort in the discomfort; to keep pushing forward even when your butt hits the mat and you feel like giving up or wonder how you got so out of condition for this kind of movement.

It’s a moment to pause and ask: what would feel good right now?

Perhaps, most importantly, it’s a reminder that feeling good is worthy marker of your goal-seeking successes.

This is my hope for you and for me: to find what feels good when it comes to building a reading practice across the months of 2025.

A reading practice is, after all, a lot like a yoga practice. It requires a bit of discomfort as we twist and turn with new ideas and open up neural pathways in our brains that may be hitherto undiscovered—or stiff with cobwebs and dust. It requires that, even when you fall on your ass, you take a deep breath and hit pause for a moment and ask yourself: what if instead of retreating to the distractions, I stayed right here in this moment of change or pain or not knowing what comes next.

Sometimes, that might mean:

• Deciding not to abandon the difficult book you’ve challenged yourself to read just because you hit a dry spell in the plot or lost track of what’s happening

• Putting down the annotation materials and just reading without anything but the book in your hands for a while (be wary of how quickly annotating a book can become more important to you than the contents of the book itself; if that is happening to you, I encourage you to set down your pen for a few chapters)

• Taking yourself on a quiet date to a local library or bookstore, just to walk through the shelves and get inspired by the very presence of the written word surrounding you

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A final exercise for you

As a final gift from this series, I’m sharing 10 writing prompts you can use at any time to check in with yourself and wake up your readerly self.

I recommend writing down your favorite prompts from this exercise in your reading journal, or on a notecard you can keep on your desk throughout the year. (You might even put it on an index card to use as a bookmark!)

I recommend giving yourself at least 10 minutes on a timer for each of these. Of course, you can always do more—or less—as your schedule and timing permits.

Prompt 1
How important does reading feel to you today, on a scale of one to ten? What do you have going on that’s making it easier to sit down with a book? What do you have going on that may be getting in the way of reading?

Prompt 2
Think about where reading fits into your life right now. If you’ve been prioritizing reading a lot lately, how has that made you feel? What kinds of feelings—emotions, sensations, modes of understanding, empathy—do you feel are available to you when you are reading more? What about when you’re reading less, or not at all?

Prompt 3
What’s the best thing you’ve read this week? (Was it the Costco coupon book? Your child’s recent book report? A great piece on Substack? A poem or novel or essay?) Why did you love it so much? What do you remember most about it, right now? What feelings do you have while remembering it?

Prompt 4
Think back on your 2025 reading goals. Can you remember what they are without looking at a list? Which ones are working out for you? Which ones are proving very difficult? Write about how your goals have evolved or shifted since you last thought about them.

Prompt 5
How is your reading environment? Is it comfortable? Does it make you feel excited about reading or writing or sitting with your thoughts? If no, what are three things you can do today to make sure it feels that way tomorrow?

Prompt 6
Write a letter to your future self. Date it for exactly one year in the future—and write about all the reading goals, habits, or practices you plan to adopt. Write the letter as if you have checked every box on your list and feel great about what you’ve accomplished.

Prompt 7
Write about the relationship between reading and writing. Do you write about what you read?

If yes: what do you tend to write about? Do you write about plots? Characters? Style and voice? Author history? Are there new things you want to try writing about?

If no: what’s stopping you? Do you want to start? Where could you start? Brainstorm a list of places to start: the best part of the plot from a recent page-turner you loved. The angst from a recent romance you loved to hate. (Anywhere could be your starting point.)

Prompt 8
Write about what’s been aching or bothering or breaking your heart lately. Set a very intentional timer and let it fly. Clear the clutter from your mind; put it all on the page. When you’re done, unless you’ve penned something deeply meaningful to you that feels important to keep, crumple the paper in your hands and throw it across the room. Or burn it in the sink. Or rip it into tiny pieces and blow it onto the floor. Or some combination of all three.

Prompt 9
Think about the best book you read as a child or adolescent. Sink back into the memory of that reading experience and write about it as freely and fluidly as you can. As you work through your memories, focus on your five senses. Can you remember what you saw, smelled, tasted, heard, and felt as you read? Did the storytelling conjure any sensory experiences for you? Write about them.

Prompt 10
If you were to create three new reading goals today, what would they be? Why? Are they different from the goals you’ve already set? Or are they brand new goals you want to incorporate into your routine? Explore your ideas. Make a mind map. Feel free to change the goals you had yesterday, if they no longer serve who you are today.

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My revelations

Last week, I said I’d let you know about some of my answers and free writes from the last eight weeks. So I wanted to share three things I learned from creating and participating in this series.

In no specific order, here are my top 3 takeaways—along with the goals they’ve inspired—that I hope will help me become a closer reader in 2025:

1. On goal setting

   I loathe quantified reading goals. The numbers, they madden me! I hate saying “I’ll read 55 books by December 2025” or “I’ll read 12,597 pages this year.” I also hate timed goals: “I’ll read for 30 minutes a day,” or “My goal is to spend 1 hour each week reflecting on my reading.”

   I’ve never really investigated this hatred; I’ve simply worked around it. But as I was free writing a few weeks ago, I recognized that a lot of my resistance to requiring timed sessions of myself has to do with the fact that I have a chronic illness—and I start to feel really bad about myself, really quickly, if I can’t physically show up in the ways I planned to. I’m working on new goals that accommodate for that reality.

   2025 goal inspired by this takeaway

   1. Take advantage of energy when I have it and rest when I don’t have it.

   2. Create simple post templates I can use to make my editing time move more smoothly, rather than creating each post from scratch every time.

   3. Do not write long-form content ideas on my tiny phone screen! It drains me!!! Instead, I am going to focus on writing my ideas in any one of the billion notebooks I have, or move to my computer to type them up.

2. On annotation

   I annotate more clearly on my second read of a book. Even better on my third. When I am reading a book for the first time, my annotations are much looser and funnier. I put a lot more “reaction” notes in the margins (things like “omg!” or “?!?!?!” litter the margins of my Victorian lit collection). I don’t always use a ruler on my first read. I don’t always know what themes or ideas I want to track until I’m halfway through a book. I have realized that this is without a doubt a major contributing factor to why I love to slow read: I have more time to pause, make notes, and get intentional about what I’m marking. It’s also why I loooooove to re-read.

   2025 goal inspired by this

   1. Explore annotation tools, like the sheer post-it notes or large unlined index cards, as a way to take more freeform notes during my first read-through of a novel, or as a way to take more in-depth notes without crowding the margins.

   2. Incorporate more annotation thoughts and ideas in our book club discussions, so we can learn from each other’s methods.

   3. When I know I am reading a book I want to write an essay on or do academic research on, be intentional about setting aside different and extra hours for those endeavors (rather than trying to cram it all into a single reading/research session).

3. On focusing and creating the right environment

   When I’m deeply reading, I will forget to eat, drink, stretch, move, blink…for HOURS upon hours. I have a tendency to hyperfixate (in fact I’d argue this is how I got my phd!) and therefore need refreshments. My therapist constantly reminds me that I need to take care of my body, not just my mind.

   I realized during the environment free write that there are a lot of habits I have adopted a bit mindlessly to help myself not come out of a reading session dying of thirst with numb legs. For example: burning a taper candle is a really quiet way to signal to my brain that time has passed. I want to do more subtle cues like this to help myself stay in tune with my body.

   2025 goal inspired by this

   1. Be more intentional about my writing time, including brainstorm time. When I’m going to work on Substack, take a few extra minutes to clear the desk of workday clutter and set up my writing station so I can sit, write, type, and reference the books I’m writing about with ease.

   2. Keep a clean and full water bottle within reach every time I sit down at my desk, regardless of how quickly I plan to get something done. (When I tell you checking my email sometimes turns into 4-hour research sessions on JSTOR…)

   3. Keep a small stock of protein bars, jerky, and crackers in my desk, so it’s easy to grab a snack during long writing or editing sessions.

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Thank you for the last eight weeks

I’ve had so much fun creating these exercises for you—and have been beyond thrilled to hear from many of you about what you’re learning, discovering, and thinking about as a result of the provided prompts.

These exercises are scaffolded by design—meant to be done in chronological order, so that you have something to reference each week. But you can also use any week’s individual prompts to jumpstart your inspiration or creative journey, whenever you need. If you enjoyed these exercises and want to come back to them during the year, you can bookmark this page right here.

• Week 1 was all about exploring your reading habits

• Week 2 was all about discovering what you need from your reading environment

• Week 3 was all about literary theories and different lenses that we can use to understand or unpack the stories we read (and tell!)

• Week 4 was all about identifying which lenses are most interesting to you

• Week 5 was about getting all the fodder of your mind onto the page and listing out all kinds of different reading goals and ambitions for 2025

• Week 6 was about focusing your goal list and making sure it aligns to your beliefs about reading

• Week 7 was about investigating annotation styles and deliberately brainstorming some methods or tools you want to try to incorporate this year

• Week 8 is all about coming back to your goals and your ideas any time you feel your will to read lagging—so you can jumpstart yourself back into the amazing ideas and habits you’ve explored over the last eight weeks.

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