Some time ago, I packed up a lot of the books on my shelves in anticipation of our upcoming move. Robin and I figured that we could get a head start on preparations by packing up some of our non-essentials. Since I didn't plan on using all of my books, I picked up a handful to read over the coming months, and put the rest in boxes in our office. On the shelf in the photo to the left, I lined up the books I wanted to read, and started to dive into them (the number of books on this shelf has nearly doubled since then, thanks to some new purchases, and I don't intend to read all the books on the shelf there anymore).

While I have gotten through a few of them, overall I haven't gotten very far. If you pay any attention to the little Goodreads widget on the sidebar of this blog, you'll notice that it hasn't changed very often. After I finished seminary last May, I decided that I needed a bit of a break, and so I took up reading a bit of literature and some other things that did not require a great deal of mental energy. Before long, though, I found that I was not reading very much at all, and now I am at the point where I am finding it a bit difficult to get back into it.

There are all kinds of excuses I could make, of course, and some of them are legitimate. Up until about a month ago I was working well over sixty hours a week, and that took away a great deal of my time. Others are not so legitimate, such as wasting time browsing through photo albums on Facebook. Either way, I have come to find that it is not as easy as it once was to sit down and so some sustained reading.

My to-read shelf contains what I think will be some very interesting reads. In the summer, I started to read Harvie Conn and Manuel Ortiz's Urban Ministry: The Kingdom, the City, and the People of God, because one of the main responsibilities I will have in the role I'll eventually be taking up at St John's Church in Hull is to find ways in which the church can minister to the city. I didn't get too far in the book, but Conn and Ortiz's exploration of the role of the city in the Old and New Testaments was fascinating, and I'm not sure why I ever put it down. I made my way through a few of the essays in Herman Bavinck's Essays on Religion, Science, and Society, and although they were quite intellectually challenging, they are all marked with Bavinck's characteristic erudition, wisdom, and pastoral sensitivity. There are also a few books up there that I have read in the past but wanted to read again – Martin Lloyd-Jones' Preaching and Preachers, Al Wolters' Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview, and Mike Goheen and Craig Bartholomew's The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story (which I originally read in draft form in college while they were still making final revisions to it), to name a few. I added a few new volumes recently that I want to get into as well, such as a recent book by one of my university professors, James Payton, Getting the Reformation Wrong: Correcting Some Misunderstandings, and another by one of my seminary professors, John Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God. Not yet on the shelf is Jamie Smith's little book, Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition – the bookstore was out of it when I went over there a few days ago – but that is another I plan on reading when I get my hands on a copy.

I can't make many excuses about the lack of time anymore, since my hours have been cut back quite a bit. Now it is just a matter of getting back into the habit of reading. I need to regain my focus, to be able to sit down and read for an extended period of time. There are any number of distractions when I try to do this, but I need to find a way to ignore them and focus. Oddly, I have found that some of my best reading has happened in places like a coffee shop, where there is lots of activity and noise around me. But I can't afford to spend an hour in Starbucks every night just so I can get some reading done.

This turned into a far longer post than I imagined it would, so let me end by asking, are there any tips or suggestions you have when it comes to reading? What helps keep you focused?