In a sentence, 2022 is what I would call a good book year. In a more elaborated form, it was a year in which I very much enjoyed nearly all the books I read (just one clunker) and there was enough material that I truly forgot three or four of them happened this year.
Undoubtedly, in many ways, 2021 was a weird year. It was also allllllmost a record year for my reading output. In the 14th year of keeping a spreadsheet to track my reading, I came just a few pages short of my highest total page count. It was not a record for the number of books I read, but after setting a goal of 18 for the year, I am happy to report that as of this morning I completed my 19th read in 2021.
If there is one thing I can say about my 2020 reading year, it’s that I was significantly better at reading in Spanish. Among my 17 overall reads were two in Spanish, the same as last year. But whereas last year it took me 71 and 60 days to read those two books, this year it was just 55 and 54 days, and the 2020 ones combined were nearly 200 pages longer. Bonus points for me.
I think we can all agree that 2020 was the kind of year that allows us a grace period on just about anything. So it is that I am writing on January 4 about a book I actually finished reading on January 3 and that I’m counting as having finished on December 31.
Consider this my official apology for what happened during our super special family Christmas celebration last year. I take full responsibility for the events that led to you slipping on the icy roof, for not catching you when you started to slide down the shingles, and for the way your ankle snapped when you landed in the bush. I further apologize for the bush itself, both its placement and the fact that it wasn’t worthy of catching a 185-pound man in a 20-foot freefall. I’m sorry about the eight weeks you spent in the cast and struggling around on crutches. I’m sorry the hallways in the house I bought before we met are too narrow to use two crutches at a time and that you had to jump around on one foot always feeling like you were on the edge of tumbling back to the ground again. I’m sure that was traumatic. I’m sorry I signed your cast in bright green marker when everyone else used black. I’m sorry my message was sappy and full of my love, but also kind of embarrassing to you in front of your friends. I’m sorry Nancy now calls you Snoopykins.
I’m so very tempted to write, “I read John Steinbeck’s ‘To a God Unknown,'” and leave it at that. It was a book, it had pages and I would say I enjoyed about half of it.
There are times I get excited about a book announcement. I’ll write down the title in my running notes app file and one day I’ll be at a book store or a few dollars short of free shipping for an order and think, “Aha! Now’s the time.” Rarely though, a book rises even higher on the scale and leads to the kind of quick action that leaves you wondering if you were even in control of what just happened, or if something in your brain hijacked control of your life and your credit card. Allie Brosh’s “Solutions and Other Problems” was the latter.
Men have thrown obstacles in the way of women in many fields for many decades, and journalism is not immune. In her book “The Women Who Wrote the War,” Nancy Caldwell Sorel describes the experiences of women who worked as correspondents during World War II.
“Sunja-ya, a woman’s life is endless work and suffering. There is suffering and then more suffering. It’s better to expect it, you know.”
At some point this year I saw a series of tweets. I cannot recall exactly when they were, or how far apart, but they led to me ordering Marcie Rendon’s “Murder on the Red River” from Birchbark Books in Minneapolis.
