Transform your reading life with the year of reading strategy
Jan 1 2021
Is there one book that you’ve always wanted to read, but couldn’t find the time for? Here is a reading strategy that could change your life.Hundreds of readers have used the “Year of Reading” method to tackle classic books with friends. Instead of trying to read without time limits, these readers spread a single book over an entire year.“We make the pace of reading so slow that it should not require sacrificing your time or making big changes to your schedule to be able to follow,” explains, Zhoq, the Reddit moderator who helps people read all year long.This year, Zhoq is leading the Year of Anna Karenina community and the Year of Don Quixote community—reading classic great novels with hundreds of other readers.“We split the task of reading a big classic that seems inaccessible to many into just a few minutes per day, achievable by everyone, regardless of your schedule. Having a book accompany you through the year makes it quite memorable, and the classics are classics for a reason; brilliant stories written by brilliant people,” says Zhoq.
Anna Karenia & Don Quixote on Fable
To celebrate these Year of Reading challenges, we’ve created two free Reading Clubs on Fable so you can read along with the Reddit communities.Once you have the Fable app, simply open the following Reading Club links on your smartphone or tablet to join the group discussion! We'll be reading the excellent free editions of the books created by Standard Ebooks. Anna Karenina Reading Club: Tolstoy’s classic novel about a woman entangled in “a chain of events that will ripple through families and the unforgiving society of wealthy Moscow and St. Petersburg.”Don Quixote Reading Club: Cervantes’ epic book about the misadventures of a dreamer who longs to be a hero.How It Works
If you want to see how a real “Year of…” schedule works, check out the “A Year of Les Miserables” community. In 2020, nearly 1,000 readers gathered for this reading challenge and crossed the novel’s finish-line together. “People share resources from around the web, footnotes from their edition, discuss different languages translations, many things you would not likely come by reading on your own,” says moderator Zhoq.“It also makes slow and boring parts of the books more fun, trudging along together, finding joy in suffering. During the sewer sections of Les Misérables, we had a civil engineer at hand to explain the history of sewage systems and intricacies of public and environmental health!”A Public Space and Chinese author Yiyun Li led a similar reading of “War & Peace” last year with a shorter time frame.Other Books We Can’t Wait To Read This Month
If classic novels don’t interest you, our Fable shelves are packed with more brand new books that we all hope to read this year."Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land" by Toni Jensen
"Toni Jensen grew up around guns: As a girl, she learned to shoot birds in rural Iowa with her father, a card-carrying member of the NRA. As an adult, she’s had guns waved in her face near Standing Rock, and felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. And she has always known that in this she is not alone. As a Métis woman, she is no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies of Indigenous women, on Indigenous land, and the ways it is hidden, ignored, forgotten.“A Girl Is a Body of Water” by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
"An intoxicating tale that combines mythic and modern elements to make the headiest of feminist brews.""Mill Town" by Kerri Arsenault
"Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working-class town of Mexico, Maine. For over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that employs most townspeople, including three generations of Arsenault’s own family. Years after she moved away, Arsenault realized the price she paid for her seemingly secure childhood."“To Be a Man” by Nicole Krauss
“The stories set up an opposition between the safe, orderly suburban American life her characters are used to and an unstable world of passion and intuition that they’re destructively drawn towards.”“What Are You Going Through” by Sigrid Nunez
“A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer.”"No Rules Rules" by Reed Hastings
"Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings reveals for the first time the unorthodox culture behind one of the world's most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies.""The Splendid and the Vile" by Erik Larson
"On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons."And don’t forget, we release a new collection of Fable Folios for our members every month — exceptional books handpicked by tastemakers, experts, acclaimed authors, world-class athletes, and industry titans. Each comes with a custom Discussion Guide to help you read the book with friends.