2019 was an up and down year for my reading. In 2018, I began majorly clearing out books that I wasn’t planning on re-reading or reading at all. I started the year frustrated with the books I was reading, even as I attempted to stick to my goal to read at least 50% women. I wanted to further clear out my to-read pile, especially books I owned, but most of them were written by men. I was caught between an obligation to past me that had been interested in these books, yet at the same time not allowing for the fact that my interests had changed, and there were other things that I wanted to read. I felt beholden to past me without freeing up the space to let myself change. I realized this early in the year, and wound up clearing out more space, revising my to-read lists, and just going ahead and reading things that still felt a little daunting. It paid off. My reading basically fell off a cliff once my wedding drew near, and all fall, I’ve read like 5 books.
My plan this year is still to strive for rough parity, but also to continue to read the things in my possession, and to continue to learn from the books that I am reading. Here’s the numbers.
2019 STATS
- 53 Books Read
- 27 by Women (51%)
- 26 by Men (49%)
- By author count, 24 women to 16 men
- 7 books by authors with backgrounds outside of Britain and America. 1 from Italy, Japan, Australia, and South Africa each, with 3 authors from Canada.
- 6 British books by 6 different authors
- 39 books by Americans, with 29/30 authors represented (some books have multiple authors).
- Of all the books I read, 16 were graphic novels and 6 were non-fiction.
Looks like I hit my goal of reading women, but not necessarily reading super diversely. Most of the authors where white (even if they didn’t necessarily tell stories about white characters).
The Favorite Books I Read This Year:
The Wizard of Earthsea, Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore, by Ursula K. LeGuin
I’d been meaning to read Ursula K. LeGuin forever, but somehow this is the first book of hers that I read, on the recommendation of my friend Aaron. These books are pretty short, reminiscent of the pulp books from earlier times, though today they read a little like Young Adult books. Yet, for such a slim book, this was surprisingly slow going for me. I was also reminded of Penny Arcade’s Jerry Holkins’ writing style, which does make sense. If anything, this sold fantasy more to me as a thing that I could definitely still be interested in. The second book felt more propulsive than the first, and I liked that we didn’t necessarily stick with Sparrowhawk as a narrator. The third book read definitively more like YA, and somehow felt more conventional than the first two. I’m made to understand by the internet that I should finish the series.
A Fire Upon the Deep, by Victor Vinge
This was great, silly fun that I thought was a trilogy but instead is more just a standalone book that had some indirect sequels. I read it when I was sick in February, and found it pretty enjoyable. It wasn’t super deep about human ideas, but it had a ton of plot, which was fun. I struggled with things I wanted to read in the first few months of the year, and this book helped me shift gears mentally into focusing on things that were probably going to be fun, rather than like homework.
Lovecraft Country, by Matt Ruff
This book was all the rage two years ago, and it is great, fun, full of homages to “weird fiction” authors. It’s also overtly political, and explores the African-American experience during the mid-50’s set against a weird fiction backdrop, and using those tropes to explore redlining, interracial marriage, code switching, and other real issues in African-American culture. I liked this a lot, and I’m curious to see the HBO adaptation.
A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki
I tried reading this when it was hot back in 2013, but couldn’t quite get into it. With more perspective on Japan, and a hankering for stories not set in LA, New York, or Britain, this was very refreshing. Set in British Columbia, this book is a thoughtful, moving meditation on choice, action, endurance, the circumstances that surround us, what we owe to our loved ones, and larger tragedies in our lives. This really was as lovely as everyone said it was going to be.
Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson
I absolutely loved Life After Life, but I knew that Kate Atkinson was more famous for her mysteries. I picked this up from a Free Little Library, and then promptly devoured it. It’s got a great pace, and demanded to be read. It’s funny, twisty, turny, and reliably sets the hard-boiled private PI in the British mold.
This was sitting on my shelf, and after a book club where people held forth about how the older books were still relevant, I dived into Jane Eyre. It took me a while to get into it, but overall it was worthwhile. This is a strange book that goes places! It’s definitely got a gothic bent, but Jane is plucky, and doesn’t take shit. She survives some really hellish situations, and keeps on going. There are some conveniences with the plot, but this is a relatable book. Jane is thirsty for Mr. Rochester, and boy is Bronte not afraid to talk about it.
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik
Continuing my theme of getting back into fantasy, we read this for Book Club, and I really, really loved it! I devoured it! I’ve read some of the Temeraire novels, which Staehli loved, but this, woo boy, this was a fun read, definitely set in a Polish and Jewish tradition that made for a fun spin on everything.
The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, by Kim Fu
This book may have given me the most to think about this year. I was surprised to see the relatively negative chatter on GoodReads about this book. I thought The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore was an insightful exploration of trauma, and how traumatic events do and do not affect our lives. Kim Fu uses lives of the five girls affected by a traumatic accident while at a summer camp for 9-11 year olds to explore different responses to trauma and grief
The accident, where the girls’ camp counselor dies while they are on an overnight camping trip, sets off actions for our five girls: Nita, Andee, Isabel, Dina, and Siobhan. After the initial discovery of their camp counselor dead, Fu changes gears. The next chapter flashes forward to a close perspective on Nita, following her life just a few days to show that the incident resolves with all the girls alive, but with an experience that may shape their whole lives. Or doesn’t, it turns out. What happened at camp doesn’t define Nita, but it does inform how she responds to future incidents that have a much stronger impact on her life.
The rest of the novel seesaws between the unfolding tragedy of the girls trying to make it to safety over the course of two days and we begin to see how each girl behaves in a life-or-death situation as the action continue to unfold. Fu follows each advance with a further exploration of one character’s life. One girl is more passive in the incident, one lashes our, and we begin to see how personality traits defined at 10 manifest themselves more fully during the teen years, and young adulthood. Some allow what happened to them to define who they become, whereas others have a whole litany of harrowing life circumstances that they have to navigate, of which the traumatic summer camp is just one in a sequence of terrible events they have to deal with.
To me, the special part of this book is that it made me angry, and part of that anger was the good writing. Fu writes the different manners in which trauma expresses itself in the subtle ways that characters think and feel that I found myself getting angry with character’s decisions. The girl who was the most passive maintains an element of that passivity for the rest of her life, and I railed against that as a reader. I wanted her to make choices! But at the same time, I understand that people who have been through traumatic incidents do have this reaction, they go catatonic, they shut down, wait for the danger to pass, before picking up again as if nothing has happened. This isn’t healthy behavior, but Fu crafts realistic characters, not healthy ones. I really appreciated this book, and it left me thinking and wanting to push it into the hands of my friends.
Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado
Again, this book has been getting a great-deal of well-deserved buzz. A series of masterful short stories that range from seemingly confessional autobiographies to twists on urban myths to compelling, elegant horror stories. I loved this, and barely read anything after it, though I did get married this year.
Things I Hated:
If On a Winter’s Night A Traveler, by Italo Calvino (book club). I really did not like this. My book club selection. God, I hated this. Sexist, meandering, and dated.
Shanghai Dancing, by Brian Castro. This was a Did Not Finish for me, after reading half-way through. At around 250 pages, I had to give in and admit that I did not really care what happened to the alcoholic sad sack narrator. Some of the language was beautiful, but that wasn’t enough to keep me involved.
I was first exposed to this book by the Millions Review, which described it as a great book about memory and being, illustrative of other Western authors but set firmly in the Pacific, a very different milieu. I was excited to read about this interplay, especially since Brian Castro has seemingly won every literary award Australia has to offer.
The writing is admittedly beautiful, but what it describes is all so ugly: grime, trash, drunks, syphilitics, leaky roofs, ugly plastic, all piled on top of one another. And the polyphonic family, with so many relatives, both blood and informal, they all rammed together in my head. We bounce back and forth between uncles, aunts, fathers, sons. But none it is distinct, it’s all hazy, and when I don’t like our main character, I ceased to care. I’ve read and enjoyed other memory novels, but this one was so sprawling as to seem more like a stunt. I admired the writing, I just wish it was put to better use.
Ringworld, by Larry Niven
Big classic sci-fi in good ways and bad ways. Explores an interesting idea, but is very, very sexist.
Other things I read:
Fiction:
- Murder in G Major, by Alexia Gordon (book club)
- Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett. I don’t like the Witches books as much as some of the others
- Hey Ladies: The Story of 8 Best Friends, 1 Year, and Way, Way Too Many E-mails, by Michelle Markowitz and Caroline Moss. Fun! Cringey! Some other friends had read it and identified with the horrific e-mails.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. This was interesting in that Wilde actually put forth a central argument about art, and people’s place in art. I think its all terribly wrong, but he certainly did it.
- Creatures of Will and Temper, by Molly Tanzer. Refutes Wilde in some big and small ways that are interesting: we don’t see Dorian’s friends, we don’t see his community, and it’s not “one big decision to be evil.” I liked this much better that Dorian, but still not as much as her first novel Vermilion, which was one of my favorites two years ago.
- Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison. I started but never finished this book in college. I liked it well enough to keep it on my shelf for a long time, and now I’ve finally finished it! It’s weird and good and interesting.
- The Gunslinger, by Steven King. Simpler and quicker than expected. Still interesting though. Younger Brandon would have OBSESSED over this.
- All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders. Good, but also seemed sort of inconsequential a bit at the end. The ending was a little pat.
- Peace, by Gene Wolf. Not your typical sci-fi, almost like a horror novel. A slow burn that took me a while to read.
- Gnomon, by Nick Harkaway. Felt slightly let down by this one. My friend Aaron loved it and loaned it to me.
- Eve’s Hollywood, by Eve Babitz. This took longer to read than I expected, and had its more serious, more light sections. Almost like a diary novel. I liked it more than Joan Didion for portraying LA.
- Broken Monsters, by Lauren Beukes. A perfectly fine horror novel.
- Company Town, by Madeline Ashby. A pulpy sci-fi novel. Liked it, interesting ideas, but not too memorable.
- The Berlin Stories, by Christopher Isherwood. The basis for Cabaret, which I’ve still never seen.
- Nova, by Samuel Delaney. Good, but definitely a riff on Moby Dick. Definitely a 70’s book.
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. Dreamy, symbolic, and prepped me sort-of for Japan. I liked it a fair amount, much more than Norwegian Wood, and would try reading his other stuff.
- Blackout, by Connie Willis. I’ve loved most of Connie Willis’ other time travel books, but this one is a little too hectic as it tries to balance three different characters.
Non-Fiction:
- A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson. This was quicker than expected, and read basically like Wild, but with male privilege.
- The Secret History of Wonder Woman, by Jill Lepore. The scope was so narrow: it was more the history of Feminism through the lens of Wonder Woman. It was super informative, but also didn’t go any further than the 1970s.
- Cork Dork, by Bianca Bosker. I re-read this for book club and liked it less the second time around. People were good to point out the various amounts of privilege Bosker has, which were much more glaring on a second time through.
- Hollywood’s Eve, by Lili Anolik. A non-fiction book about Eve Babitz, made me feel both better and worse about the book I had just read.
- Ranger Confidential, by Andrea Lankford. I didn’t actually like this very much. It’s like bar-room stories from a former Park Ranger (who are more like police than I thought).
- I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution, by Emily Nussbaum. A series of collected essays about Television. I think that she is moving toward a good argument, but I was already sold on that argument, so overall, this was a confirming read, not a revelatory one.
Graphic Novels:
- Ms. Marvel, Vol 1, by G. Willow Wilson. This was really good, you could tell it was aimed a bit at kids, but it was smart, and worthwhile.
- Lumberjanes, Vol 1, by Noelle Stevenson. Better than I remembered. I should continue reading this.
- The Immortal Hulk: Or Is He Both, by Al Ewing. Interesting deep dive into the Hulk mythos, which is rooted in a horror comic background. I really dug this.
- Sex Criminals, Vols 4 & 5, by Matt Fraction. I have found this a little hit and miss.
- Smut Peddler, edited by C. Spike Trotman. Some stories were more for me than others.
- Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride, by Lucy Knisley. The emotions hit a good number of beats, but at the same time, I realized how privileged (even though she was trying to keep her dollar amount down) she was. I was hoping for more applicable advice about my own wedding, mixed with memoir, but there wasn’t that much I could necessarily take away. I really did like her voice and style, but at the same time, it didn’t feel applicable to me.
- Saga, 1-9, by Brian Vaughn. I caught up with Saga, and it’s still pretty zippy and great. Surprises throughout.
This year, my resolution is to read more things that make me happy.
Word Choice 