Hugh McGuire talks about and perhaps demonstrates the negative effects of giving ourselves to digital media on our minds. He says though he loves books, he wasn’t reading them. He had too many distractions. This year, he has set digital boundaries and seen positive results.

“When the people at The New Yorker can’t concentrate long enough to listen to a song all the way through, how are books to survive?”

If that’s the norm in New York, they need a revolution.

Oh god. Put down your books. STOP READING. (Actual article from San Antonio Texan newspaper, August 26, 1858) pic.twitter.com/2edR2nR8U9

— Letters of Note (@LettersOfNote) March 5, 2015

Dorothy Sayers encourages readers to engage the work in their laps, not just kill time with it.

“Pray get rid of the idea that books are each a separate thing, divided from one another and from life. Read each in the light of all the others, especially in the light of books of another kind,” she says.

If you don’t like what you’re reading, think through your reasons. “Does the subject displease you? — and if so, is it by any chance one of those disquieting things that you ‘would rather not know about’, though you really ought not to shirk it? Does the author’s opinion conflict with some cherished opinion of your own? — If so, can you give reasons for your own opinion? (Do try and avoid the criticism that begins: ‘We do not like to think’ this, that or the other; it is often so painfully true that we do not like to think.)”

She also thinks marking up your book is foolish, perhaps because you won’t remember where to find your notes afterwards.

In response to this, Alan Jacobs observes the different occasions for reading and how they aren’t all the same. We read for fun and we read for specific purposes, and not necessarily at the same time.

What many of these people really want, it seems to me — and I base this on decades of talking with folks who are anxious about their reading — is not to read Henry James but to be the kind of person who, when left at loose ends, positively wants to read Henry James, wants to read Henry James so much that he or she will toss aside Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Fifty Shades of Grey without even noticing what they are in order to get to that precious copy of The Ambassadors that someone has inexplicably left at the bottom of a stack.

I think it’s okay not to be that person.

“Many struggle to find a good route into being a good reader,” Kathleen Nielson observes in a new roundtable video with Rosaria Butterfield and Gloria Furman. How does ones move past an understanding of the importance of reading to an enjoyment of it? (via ISI)

John Wilson of Books and Culture offers his favorite books from last year. Here’s one recommendation which may resonate with you.

The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany. Donald E. Westlake. Edited by Levi Stahl. Because he mostly wrote crime fiction (some of it under the name “Richard Stark”), and—even worse, from the standpoint of the guardians of our literature—a lot of it very funny, Donald Westlake (1933-2008) is almost never mentioned in canonical accounts of contemporary fiction. But that hasn’t prevented countless readers from savoring his sentences. This nonfiction miscellany, lovingly edited by Levi Stahl, will give those readers a clearer sense of the man behind the books while providing a good deal of instruction and delight.

The Millions offers this list of anticipated books for 2015.

The Globe and Mail is looking forward to these titles from the first half of this year.

The Historical Novel Society has a long list of books being published this year. Don’t talk to me about watching all the Oscar-nominated films for the year. This is the list you need to tackle (not that you actually have to read every page of every book–we have our limits).