Reading Life #14: Define your reading season

The method I used to build a seasonal reading list I'm pretty dang excited about

This is Reading Life, a monthly series featuring a short essay on reading reflections, tips, and the bookish life. Start finding book recommendations you love by upgrading to paid today!

One of the reasons I love reading self-help books is because you can often transpose the ideas from them onto other areas of your life.

A book about digital minimalism helped me build healthy technology habits but also taught me how to happily miss out on all the books I was overwhelmed by. A book about mindful photography helped me slow down in my photography practice and inspired me to bring more intention into my reading and reflection habits.

In March, I read Alison Bornstein's Wear It Well. It gave me a much-needed refreshed mindset about getting dressed and making my closet feel like me. The biggest takeaway that helped me was the popular three-word method that Bornstein developed.

This method encourages you to drill down on the three words that define your style and let them guide your choices when putting together an outfit or purchasing something to add to your closet. I love this framework and have started thinking about how I could implement it into my reading life.

A few weeks after I started mulling that idea over, I was thinking through the reflection questions in

Katy O.

’s Summer Reading Program. They are fantastic questions designed to help you determine what you want out of this reading season. This reflection, paired with the idea of the three-word method, led me to realize I could pick out three words (or, in my case, phrases) to apply to my summer reading to help guide it.

It felt like a great guiding light to create a season of reading that feels like me and makes picking up books fun.