We keep saying our attention is fractured. Reading is what helps me scotch-tape it back together.

Sure it's a cliché that books can change our lives. But, the act of reading, and what I'm reading, has profoundly changed mine.

There is no such thing as too many books. (Image: B.G. Merkle, ©2025)

Last summer, I wrote about how I was dedicating myself to re-finding something to love about writing. More recently, I’ve mentioned writing that made a big difference in how I think about my life and time (personally and professionally). In January, I’ve reckoned with why I don’t have a strategic planning habit for myself and why writing has helped me realize that I should. And now, I’m mid-application to a writing residency, and the application asked me to detail my relationship to writing and reading.

All of this is converging on a topic I bumped into on one of my favorite corners of the internet a couple of weeks ago: “what is self-help? isn’t everything self-help?” The writer pulled those ideas together with a prompt: “discuss a book that has helped you figure out how to be.”

These various thread have nudged me to affirm that reading itself is a fundamental part of my experience of writing. Reading for pleasure, reading beyond my discipline, reading to learn about how the world and societies can and should work—all of this reading helps me stay in love with words. It also exposes me to innumerable ways of putting together a sentence, conveying an idea, making meaning with just 26 symbols. I’ve been a voracious reader since I was young. Every time I commit to a book, I still feel the same sensation of anticipation, and also, a sense of…familiarity might be the right word. It feels like coming back to myself to read books.

With all this in mind, I looked back on my books-read list. I keep track in a fancy notebook I had saved for years (and hauled through several moves); I was saving it “for something special.” At some point, I realized that reading is special. Vital. And I needed to use that notebook or give it away. So now, the books go into this notebook to help me remember them.

This year, I stopped numbering my reading list. It’s not a competition, the tally doesn’t matter. I’m not reading to get it over with, I’m not reading to have read. I am reading to read. To settle into the luxury of learning something, being surprised or delighted, brought to tears, carried off into another culture or era. I read to be emotionally moved such that I reconsider something of what I understand to be true in the world or how I make sense of my self. I read for fun, I read for work, I read because I cannot not read. For me, in my life, it has always been so.

And yet. I keep hearing people say they’ve lost their ability to concentrate on paragraphs, let alone chapters. I’ve heard people say they wished they could concentrate enough to read a book, or even a long article. With ADHD, I’m as readily distracted as anyone. But I’m grateful that somehow, reading still pulls me in1.

And, I don’t actually need to look at that notebook to tell you the top books that have had this effect on me.

I had a "happiness book" hobby for about 2 years. (Well, actually, I’ve had a happiness book hobby for several years; more recently it has expanded a bit to encompass many relevant topics.) This hobby has led me to rove widely through many of the world's ways of studying, thinking, and practicing how to find meaning and contentment.

A few books in the stacks of such books I’ve read have profoundly and enduringly shifted how I think and experience and react, how I rest and play, and the careful approach I take to work these days.

These include:

• Man’s Search for Meaning, which I finished earlier this month. The book is a grim yet inspiring account of a psychologist who survived four concentration camps during the Holocaust. Because of his experience in the camps, he came to an explanation for the ways people get through harrowing ordeals with their values and will to live intact. His insights are brief, powerful, and essential reading. I now recommend this as a foundational text; read it first/next.

• The Art of Happiness for its emphasis on object meditation2 and the concepts (a) that desire is the root of all suffering and (b) that all beings desire happiness/seek to avoid suffering. In particular, the notion of self-inflicted suffering has permeated my approach to many aspects of my life. For the better, it now informs my expectations of everything from how people behave to my/our desire to control the future.

• The Four Agreements for how it guided me to stop trying to change my loved ones, (see desire = suffering!).

• Happier Hour for very applied, concrete exercises to identify what's important and then prioritize how I spend my time.

• The No Club also helped me get a grip on my unsustainable levels of volunteerism and over-doing "unpromotable work" at my job. That shift made time for more reading and other leisure activities that fill my life with pleasure.

• Four Thousand Weeks, which I am reading right now after a failed attempt last summer (not the right time, ironically). The liberating concepts of the book are that we do not and cannot control time, that we are not actually apart from time at all, and that this all means that our to-do list will inevitably, and forever, be unfinished. So, it matters what we put on it, especially at the top of the list.

• Our Souls at Night, Under the Whispering Door, and Grief is the Thing with Feathers are novels that also inhabit this pensive-yet-applied corner of my reading list. The former deals with two elderly people and the devastating3 consequences of all the “adults” around them judging and trying to control their efforts to be happy. The latter two offer alternative visions of death and grief that are riveting, deeply moving, and incredibly cathartic for someone (moi) raised with a fire-and-brimstone version of death. They are also acutely relevant as I’ve lost three family members and two chosen-family elders in the past two years.

• The Other Significant Others somehow ties all this together and neatly connects back to Man’s Search for Meaning. It expounds on the myriad ways that people create community and alternative kin networks, how people commit to caring for each other into old age despite no marriage or blood ties, and the complex web of legal navigation required to truly create and sustain these kinds of communal bonds. I can’t stop thinking about how many people I know who say they feel lonely, how contrary that is to how humans evolved, and how the solution might be as “simple” as making mutual commitments to each other that we actually plan the rest of our lives around.

What does any of this have to do with what I usually write about? Well, for one thing, reading makes us better writers (and we know publishing is the counted bean). Plus, staying focused is a premium skill these days, and without it, we’re not going to be writing anything. Moreover, we need to be reading to connect and expand our ideas as scholars. But, above all that, the work and writing I do aims to make the world a better place. Reading about how to experience the good parts of the world—now, already, not in some vague dream of retirement—is not merely relevant. It’s essential: we have to identify what is meaningful and what is valuable to us, in order to have motivation to do or be anything in the world. If we can take these lessons and embed them in our lives, we can see the good in the places we are/the work we do. (And that recognition is key to sustaining our efforts to make things ever better).

How about you?

If you listed 5 or so books that changed your life, what would they be? Is it a different list at this stage of your life than the list would have been 10 or 20 years ago?

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[1] I actually can’t read anything with a narrative after supper, or the compulsive side of ADHD hyperfocus kicks in and I stay up all night, not wanting the experience to end.

[2] he way the Dalai Lama describes it, this is not so much “stare at one thing for a long time” and more so, “notice a thing. appreciate it. then send a wish into the universe that everyone else will experience such a moment of attention and appreciation in their day.”

[3] But don’t worry, it’s not creepy or horror. (I can’t read that stuff; my body thinks it’s real.) It’s just a remarkable, quiet book about relationships as we age and the risks of attempting to control other people’s lives.