Isn’t a bit weird that we do end-of-year reading highlights? By “we” I of course mean me, but also I’m not the only one who does this. Is this the turn from 2022 to 2023? Is this the middle of 5753? Is this also the 1036th day of March 2020? All these things are true, time is a construct, I think I’ve said all this in other years, too, so I guess time is also a circle or something. It’s been a pretty good reading year for me. I read slowly (so slowly) and just barely hit my goal of 50 books for the year. I don’t usually set a goal for myself, but BookWyrm prompts you to, and I thought an actual goal would help me remember that I do love reading books more than I…
Tag: year in review
still reading
I can’t believe I called last year’s reading post “reading in a hellscape” when 2021 was lurking around the corner. Is 2021 worse than 2020? By sheer dint of not being dramatically better, yes, yes it is worse. This has been a shit year of rollercoastering. I know Biden says this isn’t March 2020 and it’s not, but it is December 2021 facing another winter of isolating and feeling like you can’t avoid covid even though you already waited hours and hours for your first vaccine and then the second and then the booster and waiting for a vaccine to approved for maybe some of your children, and then maybe your younger children, and then will they ever find something that works for the youngest kids and who is getting boosters and how are you feeling, anyway, can you come into work tomorrow we’re very short staffed and customers/readers/students are…
reading in a hellscape
Well, this year didn’t go the way we thought it was going to at the start, did it? And I can’t even really remember this year accurately it turns out. I thought I hardly read anything, but I read slightly more than I did last year—65 books over last year’s 58, although last year’s numbers were down over 2018’s, and those were lower than 2017’s. I did read a lot of fluff, which is true to my recollection, but there were also more serious books in there that I had already relegated to a more distant past. I’ve written before about the value of reading whatever it is that strikes your fancy in the moment that you need to read: I don’t need to have everything I read be important or moving or revealing. Sometimes I just read to pass the time. I’m a big believer in reading whatever and…
reading for endings
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…
reading when you are crumbling
I’m not sure what to say about this year’s life as a reader. Looking back at my list, the books from the first half of the year seem so long ago—I could’ve sworn I read Mohsin Hamed’s Exit West a couple of years ago (was it even out then?) and haven’t I always been worrying about Julie Buntin’s Marlena? It’s partly that those books stuck into me and wound themselves around me in ways that feel like I’ve been carrying them forever. But it’s also this year. This year is too long. There’s too much in it. We all joke about this—the Tuesday afternoon tweets saying “I can’t believe it’s Friday already!” But it’s not really a joke. There’s the Friday afternoon news dumps, the revelations day after day about some shocking, previously unthinkable thing happening, the radical cracking of what so many people (wrongly) thought were the safe foundations…