Actually, thanks to my wiseguy wife, I will be doing something more than goofing off on vacation. I’ll be reading. Books.

One day, earlier this year, out of the blue, she declared with somber seriousness that we had fallen into a malign rut: We’d wake up, put on some coffee, empty the dishwasher, then click on the TV. We would watch the morning news, and it’s all weather disasters, airline near-misses, and Trump being Trump, pictures of kids dying in Gaza, civilians bombed in Ukraine.

It is, without a doubt, a lousy way to start the day, worse than reading those same stories in the newspaper, because the televised images are so visceral.

We’d finish our coffee, get up off the couch, sigh heavily and think, “Well, this day is going to be terrible.”

So my wife’s idea was to introduce a new morning routine, in which we get up, put on coffee, empty the dishwasher, grab a cup of coffee, climb back into bed, prop up the pillows, and then open and read actual books. Ideally, they’re novels, but they can be whatever strikes our fancy, as long as they’re books. We have to read for at least an hour. Audio books don’t count.

When she suggested this, it occurred to me that I hadn’t read a novel or a good nonfiction book for a long time. Instead, I was reading newspapers, magazines, newsletters, Substack. Instead of watching reality TV, I was reading reality.

Here’s the deal: If Dan Shaughnessy can run a mile every day, I can read a book for an hour every day.

It has been liberating and exhilarating. It’s like doing 10,000 steps, but for your brain.

Since the new routine began, everything I’ve read is worth being on a summer reading list.

“I See You’ve Called in Dead,” a laugh-out-loud novel by John Kenney about an obituary writer who gets fired for posting his own obit when he was still very much alive; “Women And Children First,” a brilliant debut novel by Alina Grabowski, who grew up in Massachusetts, that depicts a tragedy from the perspective of women in a fictional North Shore town with the voice of someone who actually grew up in such a place.

Jacqueline Sullivan Wyco’s “Fear Knocked: It Was Alzheimer’s,” a memoir about her Boston firefighter dad’s journey through that terrible disease, and the financial exploitation that often destroys the finances of families trying to navigate it, hit close to home. Best book on Alzheimer’s since Charlie Pierce’s “Hard to Forget” was published, gulp, 25 years ago.

I didn’t think I’d like Graydon Carter’s memoir, “When The Going Was Good,” given his editorship of Vanity Fair seemed so obsessed with shallow celebrity, despite also publishing the brilliant journalism of, among others, Marie Brenner, Christopher Hitchens, David Halberstam, Maureen Orth, and Dominick Dunne. But never judge a book by its cover. It’s a great read. Carter, with an assist from ghostwriter James Fox, gives a rousing tour of the golden age of magazines, not just Vanity Fair, but Time and Life and some hilarious takes on Spy magazine, which Carter edited with Kurt Andersen. The takedowns of Big Apple big egos pulled off by Spy more than make up for all the celebrity name-dropping. Besides, Carter grew up in Canada playing hockey as a kid. How can you not like a hockey guy?

Years ago, I read a couple of Zadie Smith’s books. The new routine gave me the excuse to read one I missed when it was first published 13 years ago: “NW.” She captures as only she can a Northwest London near where I lived with my family in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

And while I will goof off on vacation, I will also read books, or more precisely re-read books — including classics from as far back as high school — that were so good I want to read them again: “To Kill a Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee, “Slaughterhouse-Five,” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain, “Native Son,” by Richard Wright, “Catch-22,” by Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.”

I will not try and fail to get through “Ulysses” for a fourth time, but I will make it up to Mr. Joyce by re-reading “Dubliners” for probably the fifth time.

All of this life-affirming, new, old routine, thanks to my wife, who doesn’t get nearly enough credit for putting up with me all these years.

She could write a book about it.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com.