I’m not sure how to talk about my reading this year. My downwards trend continued—58 books in 2019, down from 72 in 2018 and 102 in 2017. I don’t love reading any less, but I am having a hard time figuring out what to read—as far as I can recollect, there are 19 books that I thought I would read or abandoned part-way through. And those are surely as much of my year in reading as the ones I did read through. How do we know what we want to read? How do we pick out what our moods are and read in sympathy with those moods (sad books for sad days) or decide to read against those moods (fluffy books for difficult days)? I read both ways according to some emotional process that I let wash over me without understanding. Sometimes I misunderstand and think I want fluff when…