With the New Year, comes new resolutions: for many, that means reading more books or visiting your local library. For parents, this often involves reading out loud to their children before bed. For me, as a student, reading for leisure (rather than for academics and, more specifically, my degree) has been crucial to me since last summer, but with the New Year, I also told myself that I would stop buying new books until I finish the current one I’m reading at a given time.
As an avid reader since a very young age, so far, I have two more books to read until I can freely buy a new book – those being the popular Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, as well as the more academic Good Arguments by Bo Seo – despite my resolution to read more for leisure rather than academics, I am looking forward to both books equally.
My most recent read (only finished a few days ago at the time of writing this article) is Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, which I generously rated 4 stars on Goodreads – as my first novel of 2025, I was glad to have found a book so descriptive and elaborate about modern-day womanhood across different social classes.
My current read of Here is the Beehive by Sarah Crossman – which, ironically and despite my own recent reading-related resolution, was another impulsive buy at some point last year – is so far also proving to live up to its majority of positive reviews.
To me, reading is an opportunity to give my brain a break from my degree whilst also keeping it active and working as I focus and enter the world of a story. Both research and opinions show that reading one book per week has a long-term positive effect on individual well-being.
To me, reading is an opportunity to give my brain a break from my degree whilst also keeping it active and working as I focus and enter the world of a story.
However, this may seem overwhelming at first glance, especially to new readers – in which case, perhaps starting off with one short chapter a day and, gradually, building up the number of pages read as time and effort allow, is a good starting point for one of the most popular New Year’s resolutions – and one of the easier one to keep up with without giving up.
