Even though I’ve had this spreadsheet on various computers for the whole time, and I enter data into it every few weeks, I am a bit astonished to see that my reading tracking has now completed a 17th year.
Even though I’ve had this spreadsheet on various computers for the whole time, and I enter data into it every few weeks, I am a bit astonished to see that my reading tracking has now completed a 17th year.
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.
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.
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.
Something I find myself thinking about a lot in these times is what rather mundane tasks now would look like to us a year ago. Take, for example, my reading of Celeste Ng’s “Little Fires Everywhere.”
