According to GoodReads, she has read 62 books this year. Her 2023 reading goal, which she met in September, was set to 55 books. She started this goal off strong with “Demond Copperhead,” by Barbara Kingsolver and wrapped it up with “The Boys from Biloxi,” by John Grisham. She has added seven more books to the goal since then.
This isn’t the profile of just any GoodReads user. This is none other than Principal Ashley Agans.
Agans, who confidently considers herself an avid reader, started reading when she was five. However, what really got her into reading was a book set in Savannah, Georgia that was given to her by her grandmother: “Lighthouse,” by Eugenia Price.
“[Eugenia Price] wrote a whole bunch of historical fiction books about the starting of Savannah, and I just fell in love with those books,” Agans said. “And then I felt like I would just read all the time. I’ve always been that way.”
Agans tries to read a book a week, she said. Since her schedule is so hectic on weekdays (being a school principal will do that), she mostly reads on Saturdays and Sundays.
“It’s sort of like my little reward,” Agans said. “On Saturdays, I always make a list of things that have to be cleaned around the house. So I’ll clean the bathrooms, and then I’ll get to read. And then I will clean the kitchen so that I can read again, you know what I mean? And then I get to a place where I just pretty much read the rest of the afternoon.”
Agans has been using GoodReads for the last two or three years she said, after being introduced to it by a neighbor. In 2021, her reading goal was 55 books, and she read 47. In 2022, she lowered her reading goal to 50 and read 63. In 2023, her reading goal is back to 55 and she has read 61 and counting.
She has a reason for this pattern: “Because I’m a checker-offer,” she said. “I like to make sure I’m going to hit [my goal].”
Agans has two explanations for her high book-count in 2022: vacations and “World War II women books,” she said. (These are fictional books that take place during World War II and are told in a woman’s, most often an army nurse’s, perspective.)
“I read a book a day while I’m on vacation,” Agans said. “Like, that’s all I do. I sit on the beach and read a book all day. Right? And so, in 2021 I got all of those World War II women books, you know what I mean? And I just got overloaded with them. So at the end of the year, I sort of got tired of reading, because I just kept getting the same thing, those same books. I needed to scale my goal back because I felt like I was there. I don’t like pressure to hit the goal.”
Another factor that adds to Agans’s high book-count is her connections with other people who give her books.
Enter another one of the school’s avid readers: one of the school’s Guidance Counselors, Frances Meredith, who has read 40 books this year for her 50-book GoodReads reading goal.
Meredith and Agans have known each other for over 10 years, Meredith said. Back when Agans was an assistant principal at Autrey Mill Middle School, Meredith was her counselor partner. They also worked together at John’s Creek High School.
For almost the entire time they have worked together, they have traded books with one another.
“When we first met, we knew we’d be working together, so we went out to dinner together to have a ‘get to know you’ chat and talked about how we both liked to read,” Meredith said. “That was the start of the book trading.”
Along with Meredith, Agans also trades books with Media Specialist Laura Morgan and social studies teachers Lauren Hall and Brad Coulter.
Agans has also been sighted restocking the Free Little Libraries around the school with books she has finished.
In reference to the Little Library by the teachers’ lounge, “there are a lot more than there used to be whenever I go take a look,” Morgan (who has read 80 books this year) said. “That’s how I know she’s been there.”
Meredith also puts her books in the Little Libraries.
“I get a ton of books from Mrs. Agans and other friends, but most of my books I bought, and I don’t keep them because I’m not a re-reader,” she said. “So once I read them, I pass them along. So if not to Mrs. Agans, I’ll put them in the Free Little Libraries around the building or pass them onto somebody I think would like them.”
Members of Agans’s family and Agans’s friends also drop off books for her.
“I’ve always had access to books. The women in my life were always giving me books,” Agans said. “Once I started to read a lot, my grandmother funneled them to me a lot. Right now, it’s a lot of friends that drop them off. My husband is a huge Costco person, so whenever he goes to Costco he’ll take a picture of the book table and say, ‘Which one do you want?’”
Meredith, who also considers herself an avid reader, recently learned to be okay with labelling a book as “did not finish,” or DNF. According to Book Riot, DNF-ing a book is a hard choice many readers, particularly avid readers, make to stop reading a certain book for the sake of still enjoying reading.
“There are so many things out there, why am I going to spend time on reading something I don’t enjoy when I might like the next book better? That has been a really big learning lesson for me, even though it sounds kind of silly. It took me a lot. It’s hard.”
For Meredith, “School was not easy for me in terms of the social aspect of it,” she said. “Middle school was super hard because I got picked on a lot. And so books were a way for me to kind of escape all of that. My job is pretty stressful, and it’s good to kind of step outside what happens during the day and go learn how to fly a starship or travel to Africa or do things that I don’t have the ability to do in real life.”
Agans said she reads to see how other people think.
“I just liked the idea of stepping into somebody else’s life and psyche, you know?” she said. “I always feel like I learned something, even if it’s just how somebody else saw a situation. It’s fun to go down this experience in this story, and then be able to just sort of step out and be back to real life.”
Morgan said something similar.
“We’re all limited to our experiences and our perspectives,” she said. “When reading from a different perspective or about a different experience, you can understand more about what’s around you. Reading does that.”
audacious new yorker • Nov 13, 2023 at 1:39 pm
anna and i have friended ms. agans on goodreads aka we’re better than everybody else