Reading Goals for 2019

Often I set myself some manner of reading goals at the beginning of the year. I find that doing so can give my reading a sense of intent that is helpful for keeping my reading satisfying and to avoid feeling totally aimless when I choose my next read. For 2019, I'm keeping the same diversity goals I had in 2018, but switching up my more specific category goals. My numbered goals/challenges mostly arise from things I'm trying to tweak about my reading life (for instance, reading what I already own, reading what I buy rather than letting books sit around for months before getting to them, reading diversely). So, in 2019, I'm aiming to read: 

*At least ten books by POC authors
*At least ten books by LGBTQIA authors

and

1.) A book of poetry
2.) A short story collection from my shelves
3.) Any nonfiction work about religion from my shelves
4.) A nonfiction work about religion from my shelves not by C.S. Lewis
5.) A nonfiction work about science
6.) A mystery novel
7.) An sff novel from my shelves
8.) A novel in translation of a language I did not read in 2018
9.) A graphic novel from my shelves
10.) A middle grade novel from my shelves
11.) A Book of the Month book from my shelves
12.) A book I've purchased within 48 hours of starting it
13.) A book from my shelves purchased before 2010
14.) The second book in a series I started before 2019
15.) A book I have abandoned in the past
16.) A book that satisfies the American Authors Challenge on LibraryThing

"From my shelves" essentially means "came into my possession before 2019."

Do you set reading goals at the start of the year? What are yours for 2019?

Favorite Reads of 2018

As we celebrate the passing of 2018 and look forward to 2019, I’m looking back at my favorite reads from this year. As my reading is probably 85% backlist, these books were mostly not published in 2018; this is very much a list of my favorites from recent reading rather than any attempt at marking the best books of 2018. Links take you to my original review of each book on my 2018 reading thread on LibraryThing.

Grumpy Monkey, Suzanne Lang and Max Lang

While I just love, love, love the messages in this picture book about emotions, namely that negative emotions are okay to feel and that they will pass, what really makes it stand out to me as one of my favorite reads of the year are the illustrations. The emotions on Jim the monkey’s face are so expressive, helpfully illustrating the story and the message of the book while also being fun and humorous. Go look at the illustration on the front cover. I dare you not to smile.

Seven Days of Us, Francesca Hornak

One of the great surprises of my 2018 reading, Seven Days of Us absolutely charmed me with its story of a family forced to spend a holiday week in close proximity. I expected to enjoy the book but not nearly as much as I ended up doing. The story was fast-paced and fairly light while also providing more substance than I was expecting. Ultimately this was a fully satisfying family drama that I couldn’t put down.

We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nahesi Coates

Coates’s collection of eight essays from the eight years of Obama’s presidency plus reflections on each of them was definitely my hardest read of 2018. It was also the most important by far. I learned so many things from this book that I didn’t know before, and many of the essays also clarified for me things I sort of knew but which were a bit jumbled up in my mind. If you’re looking to understand race relations and racism in American today, this is an excellent place to start.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Becky Chambers

Becky Chambers’s first novel is a cozy space adventure peopled by a complex, delightful found family making up a ship’s crew. I can’t recommend it more if you want a sci-fi story that will make you feel things, many of them warm and fuzzy.

The Tea Dragon Society, Katie O’Neill

Ah, The Tea Dragon Society. Has anything ever been as pure and warm and delightful as this middle grade graphic novel? The story presents the idea of tea dragons, feline-like dragons whose horns produce tea leaves. The dragons are adorable, and the story focuses on their care, which is exacting and requires great commitment from their carers. The book is largely a meditation on hard, rewarding work. Recommended in the strongest terms to just about anyone.

The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennet, read by the author

I read Alan Bennet’s novella about Queen Elizabeth II becoming a devout reader for the second time in 2018, but this time I listened to the audiobook, read by Bennet himself. The story is masterful, compelling, and fun in any format, but Bennet’s reading of it adds that little something that pushes it into possibly all-time favorite territory.

There you are, my favorite reads from 2018! What reads did you enjoy the most this past year?

For We Read a Little Christmas

One of my favorite things to do to get into the Christmas spirit is read a nice Christmassy book. Here’s a list of some of my favorites, along with a good few that I haven’t gotten to yet but have high hopes for.

Feels Like Christmas... Even If It's Not

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling

Some books put me in mind of Christmas even though they have little or nothing to do with the holiday itself. I’m not sure what it says about me that the books that do that for me are fantasy novels, but perhaps the connection is not all that odd. After all, both of these series are deeply invested in the messages of Christianity, even if they are not overtly about Christianity or Christmas.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year... to Fall in Love

How the Dukes Stole Christmas, Tessa Dare, Sarah MacLean, Sophie Jordan, and Joanna Shupe

True-Blue Cowboy Christmas, Nicole Helm

Winter Wonderland, Heidi Cullinan

Nothing says Christmas reading to me like a lovely holiday romance novel. How the Dukes is a collection of four novellas with historical settings by four big names in historical romance. Each of these four stories is in light conversation with a famous Christmas story, and part of the fun of this collection is picking out the references and echoes. True-Blue is a contemporary cowboy romance and hits traditional things associated with 21^st century Christmas celebrating pretty hard—you’ll find tree trimming and cookie making and so on here. Wonderland is an m/m contemporary with slight BDSM overtones. Like many of Cullinan’s works, it’s most excellent in its exploration of male friendship and found family. While the steam levels for these recommendations vary, note that none of them is “sweet”—there’s sex on the page in each of them. So heads up if that is not your flavor.

Deck the Halls with Deductive Reasoning

Silent Nights: Christmas Mysteries, edited by Martin Edwards

The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, edited by Tara Moore 

Here are two collections of Christmas tales that are on my TBR. Since I haven’t read them yet, I can’t vouch for them personally, but I am excited to give them a go. Silent Nights collects fifteen mysteries set at Christmas by British writers, and Ghost Stories presents thirteen Christmas-set ghost stories from the Victorian age. As a fan of A Christmas Carol, I’m particularly interested in tucking into the latter.

Oldies But Goodies

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

A Child's Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas

The Homecoming, Earl Hamner, Jr

Carol and Wales are two of my all-time favorite Christmas stories. I reread Carol every year and have done so since I was in my late teens. If you have never read it (especially if you have only ever seen one of the many admittedly very wonderful film adaptations), I encourage you to give it a try. It’s just the right length to satisfy any desire for Victorian vibes you may have (everyone gets wistful for Victorian times at Christmas, right? No? Just me?) without bogging you down, the details are exquisite, it’s funny, and it’s a wonderful redemption story. Wales is a short story just brimming with old-fashioned Christmas delights and absolutely stunning language. The Homecoming is the novel upon which the TV movie of the same name (which in turn spawned the TV show The Waltons) was based, and it’s a fascinating evocation of Christmas in depression-era Appalachia. Hamner captures his characters (especially the children) so quickly in small moments that they seem to jump off the page.

A Little Bit of This, a Little Bit of That

The Snow Queen and Other Winter Tales, Barnes and Noble

A Family Christmas, selected by Caroline Kennedy

A Christmas Treasury, Barnes and Noble

These three anthologies all provide a variety of Christmassy and winter tales and stories. Winter Tales is heavy on traditional tales and fairy tales, including many by Hans Christian Andersen, though stories by Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde also appear, as well as a few traditional Native American tales. A highlight may be Alexander Dumas’s novella-length The History of the Nutcracker, which retells E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” (which, unfortunately, is not included). Family Christmas includes mostly shorter Christmas pieces, and contains a lot of songs and poems as well as stories and articles. Be aware that not everything in this collection will be suitable for (or appealing to) children. Treasury collects ten stories and nine poems and would be an excellent one-shot for snagging several classics of Christmastime, including Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, and Clement Clark Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” This anthology also includes lovely full-color and black and white illustrations.

And This Is All True

Perhaps you prefer your Christmas reads with a side of learnin’? This pair of nonfiction Christmas books may suit you. These are also on my TBR (so again, I can’t recommend them personally, except to say that I want to read them).

Why Was the Partridge in the Pear Tree?, Reverend Mark Lawson-Jones

A Jane Austen Christmas, Maria Grace

Partridge is an illustrated little book that explores the history behind popular Christmas carols, examining the meaning of the lyrics, the relevant biblical passages, and the historical context of the carols. In thirteen chapters, Lawson-Jones discusses the history of carols and caroling, the Puritan dislike of Christmas, and the “golden age of carols” before devoting ten chapters to a carol each. Carols discussed include “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” "The Holly and the Ivy,” “Good King Wenceslas,” “The Coventry Carol” and two of my most favorites, “In the Bleak Midwinter” and “Once in Royal David’s City.” Austen Christmas illustrates what the celebration of Christmas looked like during Jane Austen’s time (the Regency), before the advent of much of the traditions we associate with Christmas now, many of which began later, in the Victorian period. Topics addressed include dress, games, caroling, gift-giving, food (including recipes), and charity.

What do you like to read at Christmastime? Are any of my favorites your favorites too?

When Someone Changes My Mind about a Book

Have you ever written off an unread book, thinking you were just never going to want to read it, and then had something change your mind? This has happened to me quite a few times lately--usually because I heard the book discussed on a podcast--and it's always a startling "Ooo, really?" moment where I feel my understanding of the book in question shifting. 

Some books I've shuffled back onto my mental TBR pile after thinking I was done with them include Dune, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Great Gastby, and Unsheltered. I had tried reading Dune and Owen Meany before and given up on them without getting terribly far. Then I heard a small piece of information about each of them that made me say, "What? I didn't know it was about that." In the case of Dune, it was the incorporation in the story of Arabic mythology and culture; for Owen Meany, it was its exploration of the Vietnam War. I imagine that these are not, like, well kept secrets about these books, but I hadn't picked up on them before hearing someone talk about why they enjoyed the stories. The Great Gatsby I have read before--twice--and just do not get. But hearing how much others have loved the book makes me want to try at least one more time. And Unsheltered, Barbara Kingsolver's latest novel, simply sounded not my kind of thing... until I heard it discussed on a podcast, and suddenly it sounded compelling and well worth my time.

For every one of these books, the thing that changed my mind about wanting to read them was hearing someone else talk about them--not reading reviews or seeing them on "best of" lists, but getting to hear the enthusiasm in another reader's voice. Some of them were discussed on PBS's The Great American Read; some came up on A Good Read, a BBC podcast featuring guests discussing a favorite read with host Harriet Gilbert; and some of them were a topic of discussion on the bookish podcast From the Front Porch. For inspiring me to read (or reconsider reading!) a book, nothing matches listening to someone who loves it talk about why.

What books have you reconsidered after hearing someone else love on them?

Laura Recommends...

...a podcast: The Anthropocene Reviewed
This podcast from author and Vlogbrother John Green is basically a series of spoken personal essays about things he finds interesting. He describes it as "reviews [of] facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale." Episodes consist of two "reviews," usually on unrelated topics. They are packed with interesting information about the topics and always consider them carefully. Past reviews have considered the penny, the weather, Hawaiian pizza, and the Lascaux paintings. The Anthropocene Reviewed never fails to make me pause and  reflect about an aspect of our world. 

...and another: Annotated
Annotated is a monthly Book Riot podcast which presents a radio documentary about a book-adjacent topic. Their tagline is "stories about books, reading, and language." I always learn something listening to Annotated, often about a subject I had never even heard of before. Past episodes have explored Louie Braille, Andrew Carnegie and the American public library, the workings of the New York Times bestseller list, and Truman Capote's short story that ended his career. New episodes come out on the first of the month.

...a TV show: Mars
Mars started its second season this week, and it's a television show unlike any I've ever seen. Part of each episode is a fictionalized story set in the 2030s about a group of scientists trying to establish a permanent research station on Mars. The rest of the program is a present-day documentary about how such a mission could be prepared for an accomplished. It's a unique and effective blend of fact and speculative fiction, the result of which is riveting TV. The first season is available on Blu-ray; the second is currently airing on the National Geographic Channel. The website (linked above) is also well worth checking out. Be warned that the while there's nothing particularly graphic about the show, the fictionalized portions can be intense--there's every reason to believe that life might be lost in such a mission, and the show does not shy away from that fact.

...a documentary: The Most Unknown
A science documentary with an unusual format, The Most Unknown follows nine scientists as they meet fellow scientists working in fields other than their own and learn about those  disciplines from their colleagues. The film starts by following one scientist, who then meets and learns from a colleague. Then that colleague meets and learns from someone else, and so on until the chain circles back around to the first scientist. This format allows for a fascinating glimpse into nine different fields--including psychology, marine biology, and particle physics--and showcases learning, science, and curiosity. This is one of the most enjoyable programs I've watched in a long time. The Most Unknown is available on Netflix. 


(Podcast links above take you to a web presence for each show, sometimes a website, sometimes a patreon, whevs, something associated directly with that podcast. Invariably, the best way to listen, however, is to subscribe through your podcatcher of choice. If you're looking for a new (or your first) podcatcher, your Googling skills should snag you some good recommendation lists for iphone and Android. I use Podcast Addict. It does the thing.)

Great American Read Result Is a Yawn... But the Process Was Eye-Opening

After months of voting for PBS's Great American Read, readers  have named To Kill a Mockingbird America's favorite book.
.
.
.

Shocker. 

The result had to be something that scads of people have read and loved, and even though The Great American Read was about finding America's favorite book, not finding the great American book, it seemed likely that Americans would stump for an American work (although the top ten out of the one hundred books up for voting was 50/50 American and British books). Given the continued prevalence of To Kill a Mockingbird on middle school and high school syllabii, its accessibility, and its themes that speak to what feel like distinctly American issues with near-universal applicability, it would have been *wild* to me if To Kill a Mockingbird had not come out at the top of this list of one hundred titles.* Just, statistically, how could it have been otherwise?

Which leads me to the question I asked myself when I first heard about The Great American Read, which was, why bother? "Harry Potter, Rings, Pride and Prejudice, possibly Jane Eyre and Moby Dick will all be high on the list," I thought to myself as soon as I heard about this summer of voting for "our" favorite read. "Gone with the Wind probably on the list, and Great Gatsby. To Kill a Mockingbird wins." Here are the top ten, per PBS's site:

1. To Kill a Mockingbird
2. Outlander (Series)
3. Harry Potter (Series)
4. Pride and Prejudice
5. Lord of the Rings
6. Gone with the Wind
7. Charlotte's Web
8. Little Women
9. Chronicles of Narnia
10. Jane Eyre
11. 
    
12. 
    

 Gatsby was #15, Moby Dick #46.

Look, I'm not trying to toot my own horn here. It's not that I have some remarkable magic finger on the pulse of bookish America or something. My point is that you don't have to have your finger on the pulse of anything to predict this with decent accuracy.** If you have any sense of what Americans are made to read in school and what has historically resonated with a lot of them, this list was utterly predictable. And there's been some confused noises along those lines from some bookish media. (A recent episode of the Book Riot Podcast gives a decent discussion of the Heh? aspects of The Great American Read as a project. Minute 18:18-26:55.***)

But I wonder if focusing on the result, on the "winner" after all this voting, is maybe to look past the value of doing something like The Great American Read the way PBS did it. They didn't just do a poll, giving out a list and asking people to pick their favorites. They made a series of documentary programs about the one hundred books on the original list and organized community and library events related to the book list. I've watched most of the documentaries (if there were community or library events in my area, I didn't hear about them), and while those TV episodes certainly aren't the most inspired bits of documentary television you're ever going to see (it's mostly talking heads, with the occasional kinda neat animated graphic), I  enjoyed watching them, and most of all thrilled to see people talk passionately about the books they love. The episodes feature interviews with many authors, both about their own books that are on the list and about other books on the list that have meant something to them, as well as interviews with other book-adjacent folk discussing why various books are important to them personally, or culturally, or historically. The documentaries aren't terribly nuanced. You won't, for instance, find much considered criticism of any of the books.**** However, the point wasn't to consider these works fully, but to convince you to read them. And as much as I also find the idea of voting to name Americans' favorite read a little pointless (see the top ten list), impossibly fraught logistically (who actually voted? who had the opportunity to vote? in what ways was the voting system that allowed you to vote for each book once a day for months being gamed? which huge swathes of readers didn't have their voice represented because they don't watch or pay any attention to PBS?*****), and rather reductive (the one hundred books they started with is a much more interesting and representative list than the final "winner," or even the top ten), I'm glad The Great American Read was there trying to convince me to read these books. After watching the various episodes of the show, I am inspired to read (or in two cases, reread) these eight books:
  

1. Ghost
2. Tales of the City
3. Bless Me, Ultima
4. The Great Gatsby
5. A Prayer for Owen Meany
6. A Separate Peace
7. Dune
8. The Joy Luck Club
9. 
   

Some of these I'd never heard of before, some I'd known about but just never heard anything that prompted me to read them, some I've read and thought I was done with. Maybe that was the point all along. To encourage us and inspire us to read, and to read beyond our current horizons. And that is no bad thing.


What did you think of The Great American Read? Did you watch the show? Did you vote? Is your favorite on the top ten list? 


*According to The Great American Read finale episode, To Kill a Mockingbird started out on the first day of voting in the number one position and never fell from it.
**I think the only genuine surprise in this top ten is Outlander, a book I love (I've only read the first of the series) and which I know a lot of other people do too. But I would never have thought of it in this context. There's been some speculation that there was a concentrated effort by Outlander fans to vote as often as they could to get the book/series as high up the rankings as possible. *shrug* The Great American Read voting system was designed in a way that clearly allowed (even encouraged?) people to do just that, so the fact that some people may have done so feels like a legit part of this particular voting process. It does make me really curious to see data on numbers of unique votes for each of these books though. Like, if Outlander received 100 votes (small numbers here for convenience), how many of them came from the same ten people over time? I'm curious about this for every book on here; Outlander just brings the question to the fore. The finale claims that it took at least 56,196 votes for a book to make it into the top twenty list, but they said nothing about how many (or whether they even know) of those were unique votes.
***For a correction to/discussion of the statement in this episode that the top ten list is 100% white, see the next episode of the podcast. It's to do with Diana Gabaldon's Hispanic ancestry.
****If you haven't read Roxane Gay's article in which she explains why she doesn't "harbor reverence and nostalgia" for To Kill a Mockingbird, do.
*****According to the final episode of The Great American Read, over four million votes were received. If every one of those were a unique vote (certainly they weren't, based on the voting system's design allowing individuals to vote many more times than once), that would only be slightly more than 1% of the population of the US. Also, while many of the books by authors of color on the list of one hundred ended up high in the rankings, the fact that the bottom ten of the one hundred books was almost fully books by authors of color was both heartbreaking and telling about whose voices maybe weren't included here, despite the project's clear efforts to make the episodes of the show themselves pretty inclusive.

Identifying the Core Books of My Heart (and Head)

As I continue to think about books and how I want them, their physical selves, in my space and what I want that to look like, I keep coming back to the idea of the "core" books that hold meaning for me. These core books are those (relatively) few out of the thousands in our house that are the absolute most important, the ones that, if I had to reduce my book collection to only what would fit in one or two bookcases, would be the ones sitting in that honored space.

I can't quite imagine actually reducing my collection that far (unless out of necessity brought on by circumstances, such as dramatically reduced living space), but it has been helpful to me to think about what those collections would be--and to create them digitally through the collections function on LibraryThing. I have created four collections there:* Core Heart, the clutch-them-to-my-chest reads that are my absolute favorites; Core Head, the books that speak more to my head than my heart that I would feel somehow lost without; Secondary Heart, chest clutchers that just aren't quite important enough to me to be core; Secondary Head, ditto for those "head" books that I could probably do without but would very much rather not. 

This has been a fascinating process, though one that constantly threatens to descend into the depths of absurd hairsplitting. (Is Harry Potter's Bookshelf head or heart? Okay, but is it core or secondary?) I find that if I stop thinking about it so hard, most of the books I've considered (many of my books are definitely not even in contention) fall pretty solidly into one of those four categories. The trick is to stop thinking. That's the hard bit.

Some things I've learned by doing this so far:

*Most of my Core Heart books are things I read early in my life--if not in childhood, then certainly by my early twenties. This feels both right and slightly sad. (Cue Kathleen Kelly quote about childhood reading.) Right because, well, childhood reading. Sad because *sobs* why can't reading be like it was when I was twelve anymore?

*Despite the fact that I mostly can't seem to read series these days, a lot of the books in my Core Heart collection *are* series (Harry Potter, the Little House books, the Minnesota Christmas romance novels, The Lord of the Rings (that one is not really a series, but in the sense that I read three books back-to-back-to-back.) I suspect this points to my love of character over any other element of fiction. 

*Books I've read more recently that end up in Core Heart are more likely to be graphics-based than not (comics, graphic novels,  picture books).

*The line between Core Heart and Core Head is not terribly logical, but it is the distinction I have the least trouble feeling. JRR Tolkien's collected letters are Core Heart; C.S. Lewis's are Core Head. Pride and Prejudice is Core Heart; the rest of Austen's novels are Core Head.

I still have some work to do on the collections--every other day or so a thought strikes me in the shower or over breakfast: "Did I put such-and-such book into one of my core collections?!" And of course they will get fine-tuned over time, with books shuffling among collections, new reads getting slotted in, and perhaps, the odd book falling from favor entirely.

What books would you put in a core collection? And would you divide them differently than I have (or not at all?) 

*If you're, like, super interested, you can navigate to those collections on LT through my profile.