My Reading Year

I started keeping a reading diary in the spring of 2006, in the middle of grad school. I knew that at the end of that summer I would be meeting my thesis supervisor he would perhaps want to know what I’d been reading so I had better keep track, something I’d never done before. And then I never stopped. So I can tell you that since April 2006 I have read 1307 complete books. 18 years of data is enough to tell that a book a week is my natural pace, with occasional extras for vacations and very short books, and dips for crises of both the personal and the professional variety. In short, I read about 60 books a year, although in very bad years, occasionally, I don’t. This year I’m on track to have read 55 books, for a fairly standard, slightly challenging year. I count ebooks, audiobooks, unpublished manuscripts, and book-length literary journals—in short, anything that occupies the place in my life where reading with a critical eye, a creative mind, and a joyful heart—or at least the potential for these three things—exists.

In 2009, apparently, I joined GoodReads. I was encouraged to join as an author in case readers of my own books want talk to me there but that has almost never happened—the best use case for GoodReads I’ve ever seen is for readers talking to each other. I probably could have used it better as an author but I never figured it out/tried that hard. I like to keep track of my reading there, although of course I can’t log the journals/unpublished material there and it has limited or odd metadata for very small presses—there’s still an draft cover on there for one of my titles?? I like to be able to read reviews and get a general sense of what folks are thinking about a title and sometimes I post little reviews of my own if I feel I hold an opinion no one else has shared yet. I’m probably going to leave GR soon but for the moment you can still find me there, if you are curious. And I might not leave—I’m on the fence.

I’m making the move to Storygraph the past few weeks, in search of better data and a site not affiliated with Am*zon. They do it turns out have better user-generated content data about the books in their system than GR but owing to being a small young upstart site they have less actual metadata and fewer books in their system. So we’ll see how it goes. You can find me there too, if you are interested.

Which is all to say, I like keeping track of my reading—it’s fun, it’s another way to think about books, and it fixes them in my brain in a different way (and if it doesn’t fix them in my brain, it provides me with some notes to look back on). Perhaps this year-end reflection post will do that too. Anyway, after that long preamble, let’s try it. I think this is going to be a two-parter.

This was a novel-heavy year, though more memoirs than usual too. Short stories took a surprising back seat for me—I’d like to go back to reading a few more of collections in 2025. I read even less poetry than my never-very-high number in 2024, something I’d also like to rectify. I was a member of three bookclubs this year—a general one, a 250-pages-or-less one, and an Indigenous Voices on, the last of which I think has more or less ended. They have all been good in opening up new reading avenues for me. I’ll try to remember to flag what was a book club pick and not strictly my own, in case that’s relevant.

Carol Shields: At the beginning of the year I finally read Unless, one of Mark’s favourite novels and my friend Kerry’s and lots of brilliant people and I just don’t know why it took me so long. This novel swept me away and astounded me—not even with the big plot, about a woman whose daughter leaves the family to live on the street and won’t speak to them—but in the small day-to-day minutiae of being a person who feels things. I liked it so much Mark and I tried watching the film version to extend the magic, but we didn’t like it much (was nice to see Honest Eds in the background of many shots, though). I loved Carol Shields’s Stone Diaries when I read it in university, and soon after, when linguist-in-chief Anne-Michelle Tessier moved abroad for a year and asked me to store her books, I decided to “store” them on my bookshelves and just read them—she had Larry’s Party and The Box Garden, which I also enjoyed. But there’s been a big gap of years and I’m sort of sad I wasted the time, Shields-less. When I mentioned Unless to my friend Carolyn, she recommended Dressing Up for the Carnival Shields’s surprising and delightful book of short stories. So this was a lot of January.

Rereads: I’m not a huge rereader—time just seems so short, plus I kid myself that my memory is good (it is, but not for everything). I reread more as I age, as needs must, as the time since I’ve read some books lengthens, and my memory weakens. I reread both Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Mavis Gallant’s Overhead in a Balloon this year—the former being something I do reread every few years, because it’s so good, so relevant to my interests as a self-critical woman with publishing ambitions, and the latter was a bookclub book (but I chose it, so I don’t know if that counts). I loved both for their grim ironies and subtle dark humour and wonderful cityscapes. They stood up—10/10 would reread again. Oddly, those were both January books and then I reread nothing until December, when I read Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris, which I used to love and now cringe-chuckle at—time has not been kind to the harsh and occasionally racist humour in that odd collection of essays and fiction. Sedaris developed a much better sense of where to aim his scorn and a sense of nuance in later collections, almost any of which I would recommend but not Holidays, I’m afraid. And then I reread My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout after seeing the stunning stage play and reading the sequel, Oh William—both brought a lot of layers that I didn’t see on my first, lukewarm reading, and I liked it much better this time.

Sci-fi and Speculative Fiction: In 2024 I made an effort to read outside my usual genres and since there was already a generic hurdle to overcome, I always went straight for the top of the pops—no undiscovered gems for me. Which is why I read The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu; I still don’t know if they are related and I would honestly really like to know). It was the sci-fi novel I heard the most excited raving about and I figured even if I hated it I would at least know what people were talking about. Oddly, I did not hate it, even though this was hard science fiction, and a lot of it was just pure science. But there were chunks that were also history of the cultural revolution and parts—my favourite parts—were descriptions of people playing video games—and yet other parts were struggles of people trying to makes sense of it all, just like me, who struggled very much with this book. So, for whatever reason, even though there were big swaths of it that I didn’t understand, this book worked for me. I was slightly annoyed to discover late in the book that it is the first part in a trilogy—I don’t think I will read the others, both because this was a lot of effort and because the video game for various plot reasons is unlikely to appear in the other two, and that was the best bit. But I’m sure the sequels are good too. Oddly, reading about people playing video games is my favourite part of an upcoming book club book, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which isn’t really science fiction, just a character driven novel with some slightly technical sections about making video games, but the best parts were long descriptions of people playing various games. It’s not, in my estimation, a great book, but those sections are great. Why do I like this so much? It doesn’t sound fun to read? Other sci-fi-ish reads this year include The Humans by Matt Haig and Greenwood by Michael Christie, both of which were pretty good, and very different from each other. The Humans is all slam-crunch speedy instant gratification, which Greenwood, which is structured like the growth of a tree, takes forever to even make sense and it was, at various points, tempting to give up. But is is fantastic in the back half, and very worth sticking with to see it all come together, if you have the patience. Also Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice, a satisfying sequel to his earlier novel Moon of the Crusted Snow and Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. These books belong to a kind of subgenre I would call—and I think many do—Apocalypse Novels. They are what they sound like, with a few survivors struggling to keep on surviving after large-scale civilization-ending events. I would not have thought I would get into this genre, but I really have, and enjoyed both of Rice’s novels, and Mandel’s books very much—I think it might just be what’s in the air right now, for our society, that this is what I want to read. Mark had actually been urging me to read Station Eleven for years, calling it “an almost perfect novel” for years, and I tend to agree with him. It’s a beautiful, funny, weird book, slightly more hopeful than some of the others of its genre. I tried to watch the TV show that was adapted from it and I really could not stand it, even though I think it might be good?? I was just so deep inside the novel and the show was different from the one I had created inside my head. I didn’t get past the second episode but that’s not a pan, my problem.

Wow, this is very long and I still have a lot to say about books I read this year. I read more sequels than usual this year and I guess this post will have a sequel too. I would be happy to read other Reading Year posts if anyone wants to link them in the comments, or just share your highlights with me. It is interesting to look at what I thought was random reading and see what were the themes and connections.

<3

RR