you're sitting on the couch with a book and your phone. Which do you pick up first?

Books I Bought, Read and Finished in December

Books Finished:

The Antique Hunter's Guide to Murder by C.L. Miller (I think the voice was what kept me in for this cozy)

Rental House by Weike Wang (literary writing eliminates our secret thoughts about our families when stuck with them)

The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter (like someone wrote a book JUST FOR ME, writers, glamour, action-movie pacing fun)

Bluebird Day by Megan Tady (mother daughter snowy road trip, even better than her first)

Twice in a Blue Moon by Christina Lauren (famous people, film set, second chance bc honestly blew the first, so fun, needed better title)

Much Ado About Margaret by Madeleine Roux (love my feminist regency, had everything, like Tessa Dare with the mod illustrated cover)

Christmas Is All Around by Martha Waters (holiday romance fun, England, movies, traditions, decorations, check)

Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (and now I will turn it over and read it again bc it is now my book of devotions)

Books Read but unfinished:

The Holiday Honeymoon Switch by Julia McKay

Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik

Reasons Not to Worry by Brigid Delaney

All the Signs by Jessie Rosen

The Guilt Pill by Saumya Dave

Books Acquired:
($$=I bought it with my own hard-earned cash, 1/2$=I used my author discount, Gifted (usually from publisher although a few brave people give me books as gifts, or Library, shamefully rare)

Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik ($$)

The Antique Hunter's Guide to Murder by C.L. Miller ($$)

All the Signs by Jessie Rosen (Gifted)

The Other Side of Disappearing by Kate Clayborn ($$)

Rental House by Weike Wang ($$)

The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter (Gift from Sarina Bowen)

Bluebird Day by Megan Tady (Gifted)

The Guilt Pill by Saumya Dave (Gifted)

Much Ado About Margaret by Madeleine Roux ($$)

I kind of hate myself for this one. Phone. Because the book is a commitment. It’s gonna ask things of me! I’ll need to have some emotions, probably, and get invested, and also remember what’s going on, and maybe learn something in order to understand something and…

somebody wrote a blog post about sweaters! I love sweaters. I’m wearing one right now. And there are links…

Dang.

It’s hard enough to get into a book I’m already reading and liking. But a NEW book… I can carry that around with me for days before it wins out over “What I Wore This Week”.

I had to decide. (And maybe get a little tired of looking at sweaters, as unlikely as that seemed.). I had to stupidly look at said phone late into the night on many, many occasions before connecting it with my inability to fall asleep, and then I had to accept that 10 minutes of reading after 3 hours of scrolling (reading articles on phone: still scrolling, I had to quit kidding myself) doesn’t do it.

And I had to plug the phone in somewhere and open the book.

It wasn’t hard! I wasn’t sad! It was just—hard to get over the hump. The phone might deliver an unexpected reward, usually in the form of my buying myself another sweater which somehow does constitute a reward somewhere in my confused brain systems. The phone let me feel finished, if I scrolled through all my available articles (which only made me look for more). The phone… have you noticed that it’s not even rude any more, to look at it at dinner? Even my mother does it. It’s just always fine, the phone, it’s part of the conversation and mostly that’s okay but I feel it, that need for a scene switch, a new something, a little brain snack, don’t make me just sit here and do just the one thing I need more more more but not more hard, more easy.

Feed me spoonfuls of peanut butter and chocolate, phone.

I mean, peanut butter’s not bad for you! Nor is chocolate. But as a steady diet…they don’t satisfy, like the phone doesn’t satisfy, not like books do. Once I started, the habit came back. I went to parts of my house where I usually read, chairs that I don’t associate with the phone. I set limits on the articles.and offered myself, instead, Spelling Bee which is just as demanding as a book. And then I read the next book I wanted to read, even if I’d just bought it and there were other books waving from my #tbr shelves. And I flung books that weren’t satisfying me aside willy nilly. And then I finally found myself dying to get back to my book.

It wasn’t instant, and while it wasn’t hard, it wasn’t exactly easy either. I love my phone, I do. But there’s room in my life for both—I just have to be intentional about it, and not leave it up to the book to pull me away from the phone, which rarely happens even with the very best books. It’s always easier to read a blog post.

Do you have to persuade yourself to put books first? How? And what are you reading? I always want to know.