Well, I'm back.

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.