Some people put a lot of stock into their first read of the year, selecting it as a reflection of the coming year’s goals, like other people choose a word (or words) to represent the year ahead.

Partly because I’m a moody reader, with an unwieldly stack including many in-progress reads, this habit never took for me. But the books I’ve read so far, in 2025, speak to how I hope my reading plays out through the rest of this year.

First, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry, a pocket-sized version of an essay originally published in Emergence (hear it here). If you’ve been reading BIP for awhile, you’ll know reading Indigenous authors is a well-established habit (Kimmerer is Potawatomi, from the other side of The Great Lakes). But last year I aimed to choose more non-fiction by Indigenous authors, like this book, and I am craving more of that.

Mark Anthony Jarman’s reflections on travelling in Ireland (a 2002 memoir, read in conjunction with his recent short story collection The Burn Man) speaks to exploring backlists. Often on a first visit to a restaurant, I locate the item I would instinctively order and then the item I would avoid—and choose it instead. (This led me to the Borscht at Futures on Bloor in Toronto, proving this a winning strategy. We make borscht at home, so I guess I thought it wouldn’t be very interesting, but everyone’s version of a classic dish is a little different.) Normally I would choose fiction first, but the memoir was great.

adrienne maree brown hosts the Octavia’s Parables podcast with Toshi Reagon, so I borrowed emergent strategy to explore more. More often, I have duedates in mind, and the idea of “what’s next” has me “reading towards” when I truly love “reading around” (and I don’t circle back as often as I hope). So I want to read responsively (which will, hopefully, include more seasonal reading too).

In The Serviceberry, Kimmerer writes about baking Juneberry muffins, about how she distributes an abundance of berries when they are in season. In Métis writer Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s the old moon in her arms (2024), she tells a similar story about carrots. One of Bookish Beck’s moments of bookish synchronicity! After reading Glenn, I had planned to read another memoir, by a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) writer, but set it aside (because one pitch landed and the other did not).

Nimbus Publishing

Sometimes I get so focussed on the next Juneberry muffin, on how delicious the next bite will taste, that I forget to make room for the carrot cake, and forget to savour the present. (This is not at all the point these wise women are making about the gift economy and reciprocity: I urge you to read them for yourself.)

My reading goals have changed over the years. Once upon a time, I set a goal to read more books by Indigenous writers and now their work effortlessly comprises about 10-15% of my reading and I’m getting particular about including more non-fiction. Now, it feels like that underlying habit “just happened” but, in the beginning, I had to think about it every time I chose a book (and every time I didn’t choose a book) to change another habit. At some point, earlier yet, I made a choice to read more often than I chose to watch TV or chat or game, so that it became natural to read a lot of books each year. Those early changes in habits are nearly forgotten now.

It’s like that Annie Dillard quote (reading Annie Dillard was a reading goal back in 2000-ish) about how the way you spend your days is the way you spend your life. The reading we do each year assembles our reading lives. At every year-end there is a lot of chatter about reading goals and how useless and fruitful, annoying and exciting it is to track and list the books you read. It’s all of those things for me, in various instances; but over time, setting intentions reveals patterns that I find interesting and, when they dissatisfy, it’s an incentive to change.

It also helps me narrow the gap between how I aim to live and what I actually do—more of a life goal there, than a reading goal, but that’s a blurry line because I spend a lot of time in my life reading.

What most intrigues me is this idea of reading along a different trajectory, introducing unpredictable elements, not simply following a line of deadlines and duedates. It’s fairly simple to determine how many Indigenous-authored books one reads in a year. How does one track whimsy? Is it an impossible variation on the plan-to-be-more-spontaneous theme? Maybe I would prefer a goal with a check-list. (More translations? Here. More African writers? Here. Thanks to Paula for including these links in one of her weekly wind-ups.)

So, I hope at the end of 2025 to see that I’ve followed these general ideas in my reading choices: more Indigenous-authored non-fiction than fiction, a reinvigorated curiosity about backlists, and a more engaged approach to the next read. (I’ve got Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller in my stack right now, rereading in double-digit negative temperatures with a gorgeous snowscape outside my window.)

But I do have one measurable 2025 goal as well, and I’ll share that under separate cover. 

Anyway, what do you think? Is it the goal that’s important or the thinking about it? Is it more about the trying or the achieving? And have either of those things changed over time for you?

Or would you rather not think about any of that…and simply read?!