Having dealt with Scripture in his 15th maxim, Hopko now adds
‘Read good books, a little at a time.’
This maxim encourages the love of learning while gently discouraging behaviour that can lead to burnout or intellectual pride. ‘Good books’ here means writings that nourish your faith and sanity – Scripture commentaries, lives of the saints, solid theology, spiritual classics, or well-chosen books in your areas of interest that help you see creation truthfully – rather than doomscrolling endless social media or polemical blogs.
The society we live in encourages skim reading, multitasking, and speed. For those of us who find that the pressure to read more and faster leads to overload or who tend to binge read or treat reading as form of escapism, ‘A little at a time’ advises us to receive what we are reading as steady, digestible food. Hopko is, in fact, commending the art of slow reading.
Slow reading rejects the productivity metrics of contemporary society. It favours deep reading over speed reading. It involves giving structure and pacing to our reading. This might involve choosing one ‘good book’ at a time, setting a clear limit (e.g., 5–10 pages, or a single chapter, per day), perhaps reading selected passages aloud, meditating on striking ideas, and/or capturing key sentences and thoughts in a notebook. In effect, it is about applying the spiritual practice of lectio divina to books other than the Bible.
This maxim is a blessing for the many autistic people who have been shamed either for reading ‘too much’ or for not being able to keep up with a demanding reading list. If you are not sure where to begin, you might ask your priest or a trusted guide to help you curate a short reading list – perhaps one Gospel commentary, one biography of a saint, one modern spiritual work, and one non-theological ‘good book’ that honours God’s world – and consciously ignore the pressure to read everything. If your special interest is, say, ecology, science fiction, or photography, you can allow some of your ‘good book’ time to dwell there, offering that focused attention to Christ instead of treating it as a guilty secret. Lived this way, Hopko’s maxim welcomes your autistic love of knowledge, while teaching your mind to eat slowly, gratefully, and in a way your heart and body can actually bear.
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