What is the Book Report Project?

As a kid, my favorite spot in my house was my reading corner. This corner was a small triangle (bordered by the back of a couch, a section of wall, and a sliding glass door that opened to our backyard) that contained just enough space to fit a few pillows, a small bookshelf, and an even smaller reader. Here, I devoured abridged versions of ancient stories, flipped through picture books that took me inside medieval castles and science labs, and fell into worlds that were nothing like mine. Whenever I looked up, though, there was that sliding glass door: a clear view back into my own world.

For most of my life, books have been doors out of and back into my world, a way of living somewhere else — another time, another place, another person — for a few hours and then re-entering my own reality with a fresh lens. There’s nothing unique about this: that’s exactly why many people read. Like many people, though, in recent years I’ve found myself using these doorways less often than I used to. Sure, part of it is reduced free time, but the main change is that I now seem to chop the free time I do have into tiny little segments, each dedicated to a discrete glance at another place rather than a full-fledged walk into that world: a rapid-fire succession of 800-word articles as I sit on a train, a scroll through Twitter or Instagram in between answering texts, a 20-minute hit of a podcast while walking to work. In these moments, I still have one foot planted in my day-to-day reality; the other foot is just making a thousand tiny pivots along the way.

All those pivots get tiring. So, as I head into 2019, I’m trying to go back to basics — back to books. I’m curious to see how it feels to intentionally move at a slower pace, to take a deep-dive and then process it in a meaningful way. In school, a book was a whole unit in class: maybe you’d research the author, or learn about the historical context in which the book was written, or talk about parallels between the book and current events. You might make a diorama of a key setting, or go on a field trip related to the book’s themes. It was a pretty good bet that there would be some kind of book report, a written wrap-up of the work you’d just spent so much time with. It’s that approach to books that I’m assigning myself this year and calling the Book Report Project.

As I do this, I’m thinking about reading books not as an escape from the troubled world around us (though there’s absolutely value in carving out space for that, too), but as another way of engaging with that world. I’m hoping to let books guide me in and out of my world like they once did, serving not to isolate me but to help me see opportunities, challenges, and communities in new light. As idealistic as it sounds, I’m wondering if that might help me see new ways I might contribute to making my world a little bit better, reducing burnout and attention fatigue to give me fresher eyes. A children’s biography of Martin Luther King was my crucial first introduction to social justice and the movements that carry it forward; picture books on artists and museums ultimately led me to my work on creativity, access, and education. Can books do this for me again?

In exploring this question, I’m imagining a loose collection of approaches. I plan to write about what I’m reading (it wouldn’t be a book report project without that), and let books guide me toward new explorations or engagements with my community. I’m also thinking I’ll explore some bigger questions on my mind, like questions around the increasingly porous boundaries between books and digital technology, around reading and empathy, around libraries and communities, and more. Mostly, I’ll just see where this experiment takes me, and write about it along the way — documenting whatever doors I walk through.