Philosopher Whim’s Reading Preferences

In this blog I plan to discuss my reading reflections for this upcoming year. My overall goal is to try to record my thoughts on what I read in order to track my reflections as I move forward in my intellectual life. Before recording my first reading posts, though, I thought I would share my thoughts on my current reading practices and trends. 

From my perspective, my reading interests are constantly fluctuating, but from an outsider's point of view they might seem to have a number of common themes. I like to think that while I am not an especially BOLD reader in terms of reading things that no one else does and being unafraid of difficult texts (for I often am 'afraid'--in the "first world problems" sense of 'afraid'). I am, though, interested in a fairly large range of issues-especially those related to empirical psychology, literature (British, American, and Russian mostly), American and European history, social science, economics, and issues in popular natural science. I realize that in many ways this is a pretty limited domain all things considered, but it continues to grow as I age and it is significantly larger than it was when I first began reading seriously (i.e. reading with a self-conscious aim of self-education and edification). I really hope that five years from now I look back and think, "Man, I knew NOTHING--NOTHING--about this stuff that is really darn important." I say that since that is how I feel now about much of my past reading habits, and, like most of us, I expect the future to resemble the past. I know that already within these interests I face the problem of being interested in too many sub-fields and items and that I will never get to the end of all that currently occupies me. As many reader before me has observed, “books beget more books,” and it is hard to “close off” any one area of interest since new ones keep popping up as one continues to read and understand more.


 I've been trained at the graduate level in both philosophy and history, and both of these fields inform most of my reading preferences and biases. That said, I don't really read too much philosophy for fun since it is quite hard indeed and is what I do for my 9-5 job. I love talking about the philosophy that I am reading and/or teaching, and I love how philosophy, pardon the cliché, has changed the way in which I examine various issues.  Outside of what I read in philosophy for my work, though, I generally want to explore issues outside of philosophy, since what I really love in life is to connect with other people over shared ideas. As I see it, if I spent all of my time reading philosophy, then I would be pretty limited in who I could really share my ideas with. Ever since I started my college education, I have been afraid of being that guy who was totally interested in his own research and had no idea or way to connect with other thinkers or regular people. I’m not sure how well I, in fact, have avoided turning this fear into reality, but it is my aim nonetheless. I will always read philosophy and love being able to pick up professional philosophy articles and books and read, understand, and comment on them (and it has been a long and expensive road to accomplish this), but I suspect that, unlike some people I know, this isn’t how I will really change the world.   

I should say that my reading practices are such that I like to have several books going at once, so I should be able to make some contribution to the blog as I go through my weeks. I typically have several books going at the same time, and I also like to be listening to lectures and watching documentaries while I exercise. My standard fare is to be reading at least one text for fun in non-fiction of some sort, one fiction work, one work related to Christianity, one lecture series, and be making progress on some documentary that I watch while working out. That is to say, this is what I consciously recognize as my reading practice. Whether this actually holds, is something that this blog should bear out in good time.