Wednesday Reading Meme - January 3 2024

Happy New Year!

I have a vague intention of doing a proper “This Year in Reading” reflection post for 2023, but I got back from my holidays and work as begun to kick my butt, so I don’t think it’s going up today. If you have any thoughts about interesting forms of reflection to spur a conversation, I would be happy to look at them! I found the “AO3 Wrapped” questions from tumblr very helpful for thinking about the stuff I have read!

What I’ve Read:
Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti – Gayer than expected! I like to start the year off reading something short that I can finish in a day, and this was a very quick one indeed. But it was a book on Storygraph, so it counts!

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York– Robert Caro – 4% This book is enormous and quite engaging. I fell for the 99% Invisible Podcast’s book club idea, so I’m going to try to read parts 1 and 2 before January like…. 19Th, I think?

Guards! Guards! By Terry Pratchett – I loved this! Which not surprising, since I generally have loved the Discworld that I have read. I think I mentioned some months back that I had read things wildly out of order – and yes, I know, it’s Discworld, don’t start with Colour of Magic. But the internal track of particular characters is fun to follow, and this is the start of Sam Vimes and of Carrot, and it was a real pleasure.

The Pack Survives by Astolat – Astolat dropped this massive Game of Thrones fixit fic focus on Robb Stark just before the New Year and, well, I read every word and really loved it. Multiple happy endings! A version of Robb who isn’t an idiot! Talisa is actually cool!

What I’m Reading:
Ninefox Gambit – Xing Book Club – got to the mandated 50% mark and I’m actually quite engaged! No one who talked about this book mentioned the body sharing. I *love* body sharing – it’s one of my favorite tropes.

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation – Mo Xiang Tong Xiu – vol 1 of 5. This is a re-read, sort of. I had actually finished vol 1 in December 2021 when it was first officially translated into English, but I hadn’t really clued into the fact that the story was so long it really had to get broken up. I also hadn’t actually finished the show, so I was quite clueless about some elements of the story. So I decided to wait until the whole thing was available to read so I could get the whole story, and actually get a handle on the story.

It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections in Horror - Joe Vallese (Editor) – SPN Seminar – 38%
-Short essays where queer authors talk about horror cinema’s impact on them, with a focus on particular movies.

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson – read a few more short stories – I’m now into section 2 of the book. 29% I feel like I should write about these short stories – they are really damned good at capturing a particular feeling very concisely.

What I’ll Read Next:

When Women Were Dragons - Xing Book Club

Owned and need to read: Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, California Bones, Raven Song by IA Ashcroft, At The Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard, Tamryn Eradani's Enchanting Encounters Books 2 and 3, Tom Stoppard, Invention of love, "You Just Need to Lose Weight" and Other Myths about Fatness by Aubrey Gordon

Reading Reflections for 2023

Year two of the Reading Journal has come to a close!

So, since January 2021, I have been logging my reading and using a paper journal to track it all; with Storygraph and my weekly updates here, it forms a whole little ecosystem of thinking about what I have been reading, what I want to read, and how I liked it. It’s nicely self reinforcing, and now the time has come to do the annual reflections! Since I did this last year, I can also reflect on how my reading in 2023 differed from 2022.

Year End Reading Meme for 2023.

How many books did you read this year? Any trends in genre/length/themes/etc?
I read 130 books! There were some definite themes – I read a lot of fantasy and almost as much scifi (a sharp rise over last year that I attribute to my stint reading Star Wars fic). I also got better at logging fic into Storygraph, so there is less of a gap between my Reading Journal’s final number and Storygraph’s.

But, some numbers: I read 58 Fantasy books, 48 SciFi, which are the two largest categories. In 2022, I read 50 Fantasy books and 26 SciFi, so the was a real change there!
Also, I increased the number of nonfiction books I read from 2 to 6, so I am pleased with that development as well.

What are your Top 3 books that you read this year?
I’ll try to avoid a recency bias here.
-I loved Terry Pratchett, a Life with Footnotes by Rob Wilkins. It was a sad look at the life of an author I loved and respected, from the viewpoint of someone who knew him extraordinarily well. I felt like the book shifted in tone over the read – the first parts felt like Terry’s words, and the later sections felt like Rob gradually stepping into provide Terry with his help.
- This is How You Lose the Time War -Amaa El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. This felt like poetry. I bought this book when it came out and never opened it, so when it got popular and my book club decided to read it, I was shocked and delighted to discover that it is epistolary enemies to lovers and reads like poetry.
- Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle – just a great book, really good a horror and I loved the main character.

What's a book you enjoyed more than you expected?
The Haunting of Hill House – I had never read Shirley Jackson before this year (discounting a short story or two in high school English class) and this book absolutely knocked me back. It’s so intentionally internal and Elenor is such a fantastic anxious little creature.

Which books most disappointed you this year?
Fourth Wing – nearly unreadable. I had to finish it for a book club, but our chat became a support group of people dealing with the absurdly awful text. I realize that this is a romance novel with a veneer of fantasy, and while I deeply respect the Romance genre, this book did not work for me on either angle. I will not be reading further.

Did you reread any old faves? If so, which one was your favorite?
Once again, I have re-read the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, which makes this the third year running that I have done so. The whole series is great, but the second book, Artificial Condition, is my personal favorite – it really digs into Muderbot’s past, and introduces a great supporting character.

What's the oldest book you read?
If I’m counting The Fall of the House of Usher, then that’ the oldest at 1839. This followed the Hugo award nominee that I read, What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher.

What's the newest book you read?
In terms of absolutely newness, Astolat’s The Pack Survives was finished on 12/31/23, which was a baller move.
But honorable mention to the two traditionally published books I adored, System Collapse by Martha Wells (Murderbot #7) and All the Hidden Paths by Foz Meadows both of which came out in the last two months and which I received with absolutely pleaure.

Did you DNF (= did not finish) any books?
According to Storygraph, 43, which is more than I realized!
Some dishonorable mentions:
-Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Collection of Musings by Wil Wheaton. Incomprehensible unless you go in with a lot of prior knowledge of Wheaton’s life. The annotations distracted and contradicted the text, he seemed to be embarrassed and apologetic about the essay he wrote back in 2004 – my brother in Trek, why are you publishing them again if you don’t like them? Why should I read these if you think they are bad?
-A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas – This book is very shallow and I think that it probably is appealing to people who haven’t read Robin McKinley. I will not be going back to it!
-S. by Doug Dorst. This looks cool! It honestly might be an interesting art book, but I ran out of time and would probably need to buy it to finish it.

Did you read any books outside of your usual preferred genre(s)?
James McBride’ Good Lord Bird, which I adored and I am very happy I read it.

What was your predominant format this year?
Digital, baby!

What's the longest book you read this year?
Welp, Iridan’s Simple Thing made it onto this year bc it was finished in the summer, and it’s 4000+ pages. But the largest single work that was actually read inside this year was Astolat’s The Pack Survives.

What books from your TBR did you not get to this year, but are excited to read in 2022?
I want to finish The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, and I want to read more nonfiction, and I was to read some of the books I bought this year.

Did you reach your reading goal for this year (if you had one)?
I had a goal of 100 books, which I surpassed! I do openly admit to that some of my books were graphic novels or novellas, but since this isn’t the Olympics, I am happy with my choices.

(Adding this question myself) What author did you read the most?
Brian K Vaughn, bc I caught up with all of Saga this year, and otherwise it’s Martha Wells – since I read 7 of her books, and actually read several of them more than once…. It’s Martha Wells.

Journalling Reflections
What worked:
-Physical reading journal! I have finished the physical book that started this all, encompassing 2022 and 2023, and I have set up another one for the next couple of years!
- Logging pre-orders in a book all in one place.
- Storygraph’s streak function made me form the habit of logging my reading daily.
-Love the Wednesday Reading Meme
- Reading lists remain a great thing! Hugo Awards Deathrace, where I try to read all the Hugo Awards nominated works, was a great inspiration.
I mentioned a friend’s innovation of making multiple lists as different ‘streams’ of reading input, so that if you’re flailing around thinking of what to read next, you have a ready-made list of suggestions in place to pick from. That had been working really well!
To that end, I want to make up a list of all the books mentioned in the Be The Serpent podcast and read them thru slowly. 
- Book Clubs – man, these really work for me. I do end up sometimes with three separate book club each deciding to read The Murderbot Diaries (oh, no, oh how very awful, I will simply explode into a ball of dust if I am once more forced, FORCED I say, to re-read these books I own in several formats and can’t shut up about)

What has not worked:
-Logging all the books I start and don’t finish in my notebook. If Storygraph fails, I will go back to it, but I don’t really look at that section often enough to make good use of it.