How to create good reading habits in 2025
Plus: Rachel Joyce celebrates the enduring brilliance of Anne Tyler’s work; and we look back at one of the prize's most controversial winners, 40 years on
From routine to ritual: How to create good reading habits this year
Remember the last time you got completely lost in a book? That moment when the world around you fades, and all that matters is what’s waiting on the next page. It’s one of life’s greatest pleasures – yet sometimes, even for seasoned readers, it can feel like an uphill struggle.
From smart ways to fit books into a busy schedule to inspiration for your next great read, here’s how to make 2025 your best reading year yet – one page at a time.
Rachel Joyce on A Spool of Blue Thread: ‘Anne Tyler’s skill is in laying skeletons bare’
‘To step into an Anne Tyler novel is to inhabit a world that becomes more real and known than the one you live in. Her eye misses nothing. Not one lift of an eyebrow, not one word muttered into a hand. She takes the mundane, the day-to-day, the dust beneath the carpet, and she lifts them through the clarity of her prose – prose that never draws attention to itself – to a place where those details transcend the ordinary and become universal.’
Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, shares her admiration for Anne Tyler’s 2015 novel – and our Monthly Spotlight title for January – a book where the ordinary becomes universal and the mundane is transformed with razor-sharp insight.
How Keri Hulme’s outsider story became one of the Booker Prize's most controversial winners
Forty years since it won the prize, Keri Hulme’s violent, disturbing, poetic and striking book The Bone People remains one of the most divisive novels in Booker history. While judges Marina Warner and J.W. Lambert, along with Norman St John-Stevas – the Chair of judges – supported the novel, Nina Bawden opposed the book because of its violence, as did Joanna Lumley, whose first choice was Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist.
‘This is over-my-dead-body stuff for me,’ wrote Lumley of The Bone People in a letter to her fellow Booker Prize judges. The letter continued: ‘I can’t bring myself to approve any of it; its poetry (to me) is whining, and its subject matter finally indefensible.’
What’s on your TBR pile this week, readers? Let us know in the comments below!
I've been thinking about how reading can be more like rest than work. This piece gave language to that.
All very good tips 📖