I did not mean to take a year off from the blog, but
here we are. This past year was somewhat unexpectedly hectic and difficult, at
least as far as maintaining schedules for my personal projects, such as reading
widely and writing, both for this blog and otherwise. We bought a house, and
moved, and sold a house, and spent the last months of the year watching and
waiting for the time for a beloved old cat to leave us. Just life, really, but
the kind of “just life” upheavals that can make finding extra energy pretty
darn hard.
The last I was here, I shared my goals for reading in
2019. They were nice goals, reflecting my values in conjunction with my reading
life and my hopes for the ways I might tweak my reading life throughout the
year. They were nice goals, and they did not work for me in the slightest for
the year 2019 turned out to be. It was a year of pulling in for me, of feeling
even more orientated toward home and safety than is usual for me, a natural
homebody. Perhaps this should not have surprised me, given all the uprooting we
did and all the subsequent attention that needed to be paid to recreating home (and
severing ties with the house that had been home). Perhaps the fact that we only
moved from one house to another in the same town we’ve lived in now for eight
years fooled me into thinking that the move would not disrupt my normal.
Psssht. I ought to know by now that big changes are, for me, Big Changes, and
they will not be brushed aside as if they were not.
The fact that I woke up a few days into 2020 feeling
renewed and ready to start something—anything, everything—afresh tells me that
I needed that pulling-in time, which took the form of creating very little (not
much writing, virtually no yarn craft) and stretching almost not at all when it
came to my reading choices. My reading in the past year was largely comfortable—I
didn’t stretch to read things that might challenge me, not in content, not in
form, not in genre. I didn’t want reading to be work, even the minor
work of fulfilling goals I had set myself, like reading some of the nonfiction
from my shelves, working through some of the Book of the Month books that accumulated
over the time I subscribed to the club, or reading more from my shelves. I just
wanted to read whatever came to me in any given moment, whatever felt good,
whatever wouldn’t ask much of me. And that was fine, that was what I needed to
get back on even footing with myself. But it came with a cost.
I didn’t read much last year that really resonated
with me, I didn’t read much that rolled up my socks, or even that strongly
stuck with me. I lucked into a few reads that were great, but for the most
part, my reading year in 2019 was… fine. Pulling in meant not reaching out, not
seeking, and that meant just okayish reading. I suspect this in turn contributed
to the downswing in creativity too. Curiosity breeds creation, after all.
So this year, while I am setting myself virtually no
specific goals, I am looking to get back to trying things in my reading—new authors,
maybe new genres—and not shying so much away from books I’m afraid won’t land
smack dab in the middle of some sweet spot of perfect comfort read. I’m hoping
this will lead to more wonderful reads and more creativity all around.
What are you looking to do with your reading life in
2020?
**The title is from the end of The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien. But you knew that.
