Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

Today’s guest post is by author Andrew Welsh-Huggins.

Like many people recently, I’ve become enamored with the Stoic philosophers and now include passages from Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, and others as part of my morning coffee ritual. I admire the four pillars of Stoicism—justice, courage, wisdom, and temperance (or moderation)—as a road map for living and thinking.

A few weeks ago, however, I came across a reflection from Seneca that gave me pause. On the subject of reading, he wrote:

What is the use of possessing numberless books and libraries, whose titles their owner can hardly read through in a lifetime? A student is over-whelmed by such a mass, not instructed, and it is much better to devote yourself to a few writers than to skim through many.

(On Tranquility of Mind, 9.4, Aubrey Stewart translation)

I couldn’t disagree more with the specific sentiment, for reasons I’ll discuss in a moment. What concerns me equally, though, is that this recommendation has been echoed by some modern interpreters of Stoicism as a valid way of curating one’s reading. The stakes are high, especially given Stoicism’s renewed popularity and the ubiquity of Stoic promoters via multiple books and across the Internet. Meanwhile, though doomsayers’ predictions of the Decline of Reading may be somewhat overblown, there is no question that writers—especially those from underrepresented groups—are facing unprecedented competition from non-literary sources as diverse as Instagram to the latest Netflix streaming hit. (“Stop Scrolling, Start Reading,” the Upper Arlington, Ohio, library recommended in a recent newsletter.)

I’ve kept a book journal since 1998, recording every title I read each year. I currently average between seventy and eighty books annually, or approximately six to seven books a month. The older I get, the more I consider this a bare minimum, and the more I regret that there isn’t more time to read everything I want. As a mystery writer, I’m partial to crime fiction, whose authors dominate my journal. But I also read widely in the genres of horror, fantasy, narrative nonfiction, and literary fiction, among others, while devouring memoirs of all stripes (I recommend both Cher: The Memoir, Part One, and Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton). Unlike Seneca, I confess that I rarely re-read books, with the exception of children’s classics like C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series, and one of my all-time favorites, Dodie Smith’s 1956 classic, The One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

Why do I read so much? A love of books, first and foremost. I was that kid who read books by the family car’s glove compartment light and never looked back. I’m a reader first, writer second. I also know I’m not alone. Just look at the worldwide interest generated in 2025 by news of the six-decade-plus book journal of 3,559 titles kept by the late Dan Pelzer of Columbus—with titles ranging from thrillers to history to self-help and many more in between (including several books on the Stoics).

The professional importance of reading widely also matters. As everyone knows (or should know), the master (Stephen King) put it best in On Writing: A Memoir.

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools), to write. Simple as that. Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.

This is a good start, especially given the number of aspiring writers who want to talk to me about their book idea, only to acknowledge that, in fact, they “don’t have time to read very much.” But we can take this further, meaning to read not just widely, but as writers, far outside our genre. As Adrian McKinty put it in a 2017 Lit Hub essay:

To understand the world you have to be a magpie. You have to read everything you can get your hands on. You can’t allow snobbery and insecurity to trap you in biblio prisons. Yes, race, gender and geography complicates the whole class equation but complicates it in rich and rewarding ways. You’ll only get rewarded by reading books outside your race, ethnic, gender, sexuality and class comfort zones.

This is not just a good idea: there’s actually a movement dedicated to it. As award-winning mystery writer Rob Osler explained at the 2025 Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in New Orleans, the “Every Fifth Challenge” encourages readers to make every fifth read a book by an author whose lived experience and main characters are distinctly different from one’s own. I means-tested my own reading and found that at least I’m on the right track: among recent titles I read that meet the challenge: Missing Sam by Thrity Umrigar, Crime Ink: Iconic: An Anthology of Crime Fiction Inspired by Queer Icons, edited by John Copenhaver and Salem West, and The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan.

Back to Seneca. In truth, I appreciate the notion that in a world of sensory overload, there’s value in focusing on things that really matter. For me, though, those things are the profusion of brilliant, evocative, thrilling, funny, and informative books published each year, which I can hardly wait to add to my TBR pile. I hope you will, too.