I’m back! It took me all of the last four months to come to a sense of routine now that I’m back to working full time. The last time I was a full time employee, it was February 2020, and I had forgotten what it was like. My brain was so full at the end of each day, I had no thoughts other than “what would be the most relaxing thing right now?”, and that usually meant watching a bit of TV and going to bed early. I barely even read, something I felt tremendous guilt about.
I have been reading something, almost without ceasing, since I learned how at the age of four. Books are, and have been, my constant companions, through every circumstance, life stage, emotion, and curious thought. I am historically old-school about reading: it has to be a physical book, and (up until recently) I used no apps for rating, gathering, sharing, or note-taking. I only started recording what books I read a handful of years ago in my daily planner, because I was reading so much that sometimes I had forgotten if I’d actually read something or merely heard of it. Many people, over the years, asked if I had a Goodreads, and I would politely say “No, that’s not for me”. But at the end of 2020, I thought, maybe I’ll just give it a go.
I had fun adding piles of books to my Want To Read list, adding friends, and contemplating just how many books I thought I could read in the year. I set myself a reading goal of 75 books. On average, I read about 60 or so a year, so it seemed like a fun way to kind of “gamify” something I already loved; usually, as soon as something is gamified for me, I’m a sucker for it—I point to my 365+ day streak on Duolingo as proof.
But right away, I fell behind. Goodreads tells you how on track you are to meeting your goal, and I slowly watched the number grow larger. “Four books behind schedule.” “Eight books behind schedule.” “Eleven books behind schedule.” I felt like I had to hurry up, but I was losing the joy of reading, and it was getting harder and harder to pull myself out of my phone or the TV and into a book. I began to be self-defeatist—“Well I’ll never make the goal, and no books are even holding my attention, so why bother.” My curiosity and enthusiasm slowly died. In the end, I “only” read 46 books, which felt sad; the year before, I had read 68, a much more typical number for me. (Let me also just say that this is a personal number, and in no way is an attempt to make anyone feel bad or “less than”—if you read anything at all, no matter how much, you a reader, full stop.)
As January began, and Goodreads asked me to set a reading challenge for 2023, I realized that I needed to recover reading for myself. I used to read up to six books at a time, dipping in and out depending upon my mood. I used to stop reading something I didn’t like. I used to pick up books based on how they sounded to me when I read their jackets, not based on how they were rated by strangers on the Internet. I used to share about what I read out of excitement, rather than out of a need to prove how many pages I can tuck under my belt in a year.
And so this year, I named a very simple goal: to simply choose books. Whichever book I like in the moment. No need to force myself to finish something, to only read one thing at a time, to let everyone know where I’m at in my arbitrary goal. No. This year, I want to recover my love, and restore my curiosity. I’m going to practice letting go of the self-inflicted rules I’ve made on how reading is supposed to look, both to myself and to others. I’m just going to read, instead.
On that note, I do still enjoy sharing what I read, and there were some great ones this past year! Here’s a full list of everything I read in 2022, with those I especially adored marked in bold italic:
How to Be an Antiracist —Ibram X. Kendi
Crooked Kingdom —Leigh Bardugo
Bringing It To the Table —Wendell Berry
Hidden Valley Road —Robert Kolker
To Paradise —Hanya Yanagihara
The Nineties —Chuck Klosterman
all five books in the A Court of Thorns and Roses series —Sarah J. Maas (**God, I loved these!!**)
The Other Black Girl —Zakiya Dalila Harris
The Last Thing He Told Me —Laura Dave
Dune —Frank Herbert
Brideshead Revisted —Evelyn Waugh
The Glass of Fashion —Cecil Beaton
Cecil Beaton At Home —Andrew Ginger
Cecil Beaton Portraits & Profiles —ed. Hugo Vickers
Cloud Cuckoo Land —Anthony Doerr
All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep —Andre Henry
Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002 —David Sedaris
Raven Smith’s Trivial Pursuits —Raven Smith
A Carnival of Snackery —David Sedaris
Raven Smith’s Men —Raven Smith
We Were Liars —E. Lockhart
The Book of Lymph —Lisa Levitt Gainsley
The Book of Eels —Patrik Svensson
Somebody’s Daughter —Ashley C. Ford
A Flicker In the Dark —Stacy Willingham
Yolk —Mary H. K. Choi
Beautiful Country —Qian Julie Wang
Hurricane Girl —Marcy Dermansky
I’m Glad My Mom Died —Jennette McCurdy
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow —Gabrielle Zevin
Pure Colour —Sheila Heti
The School for Good Mothers —Jessamine Chan
An American in Provence —Jamie Beck
Ghost Lover —Lisa Taddeo
Tin Man —Sarah Winman
A Single Rose —Muriel Barbery
The Candy House —Jennifer Egan
currently…
doing a lot of home cooking. I’m on a big soup kick, and have made three in the last week, all from my new book, The British Cookbook by Ben Mervis. The curried parsnip and apple soup was a favorite!