I read 52 books in 2025, just barely making my goal. This is what my reading pattern looked like this year (chart from The Storygraph, my recommended book-tracking site): nothing 3 months into each school term – March and October. (Though it may not have been actually nothing – I…
Read MoreWell, I had hoped my reading would have improved in volume by now, but I’m still crawling out of a hole in my ability to concentrate. Last year (2022) I did just barely manage to make 52 books, but this past year (2023) I didn’t – I could have if…
Read MoreJust Kids and M Train by Patti Smith After having it on my list for years, I finally got to Patti Smith’s memoir about her long friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. One of the most striking things about the story is the confluence: both Smith and Mapplethorpe became iconic cultural…
Read MoreJane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë Okay, yes, I have read this book umpteen times, starting when I was about 13 or 14, I think, when I stayed up all night to finish it. I even wrote a substantial poem about it in my second book, where I imagined Jane in…
Read MoreJeesh, January will be over soon, so I better get on my annual blog post! After a miserably light reading year in 2020, I was determined to make 95 books in 2021, but I could see right away that it would be an issue given how exhausted I was between…
Read MoreAt the top of my notes for this, my annual blog post, I wrote “memorable 2019 reading,” which is maybe just your average new year’s date error, but sure feels like an attempt to block something out. It was a year when, buoyed by my success in meeting the 95-books…
Read MoreIt’s time for my annual blog post about what I read in the past year! Buoyed up by having read 67 books in 2018—more, in fact, because I realized later there were a few that I had forgotten to count--in 2019, I joined the #95books challenge. I was way ahead…
Read MoreFor my "favourite" books of 2018, I can’t just pick one thing from each genre – that seems a bit too artificial for how haphazard my reading was last year. Instead, I’ve just highlighted the books that I’m still thinking about the most, even months after reading them. Call them…
Read MoreMy method of choosing books to read in 2018 looked systematic (I like systems) but had a whole lot of serendipity embedded in it. When I heard about, or remembered, or researched, or otherwise discovered, a book I wanted to read, I looked it up in the public library, and…
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