I often do a Favorite Things I Read list and Best of Books Published This Year list, but this year it ended up making more sense to do just combine the two, because there was so much overlap. I was going to up it to a Top 12, but it turns out that PicStitch only goes up to 9 in the free version 😂 But this proved to be a good thing, because while choosing 12 seemed very difficult, with lots of tough calls between things I really loved, choosing 9 was easy. It’s funny how that works. Anyways, I figured I’d pair it with a little reflection on my reading over the last 365 days, but, as with so many other things in 2023, I didn’t get to it when I meant to, and now it’s going to be hastily thrown together. Hopefully 2024 will feature better time management!
It’s been a somewhat anxious and grim year, and I wondered sometimes whether I was making it worse by reading some fairly dark books, even if they were incredible, and beautiful in their own ways. School for Good Mothers is an absolutely devastating dystopian tale, and Ferit Edgü is writing about histories of violence. Doppelganger isn’t exactly joyful either, though there is something kind of comforting in its very bracing and direct diagnosis of our present day catastrophes. I wouldn’t describe Seventeen Stories as depressing, necessarily, but many of the stories are set in internment camps, and they are frequently tinged with melancholy. And more generally, without my having intended it to be, my graphic novels class in the Fall was unexpectedly tough, starting with Watchmen, Palestine, and Maus, and then moving into ‘lighter’ fare centered around death — Chicken with Plums and The Undertaking of Lily Chen — and drawing to a close with Thunder & Lightning, which is all about climate. There were a lot of heavy topics this year. Luckily, I also read Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy in the Spring, and it was a balm, and an inspiration.
An unexpected twist in this Best Of is that I listed two books — This Little Art and Doppelganger — that I haven’t actually finished yet (I’m halfway through like 8 books right now). I make the rules! And even unfinished, they really are some of the best books I’ve read this year. So too is Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries, which I started reading in August, inspired by someone’s suggestion, on Twitter (one of the last good things Twitter has given me, I bet), to read along with it day by day, because this year the weekdays line up with those in the book. It’s an excellent way to experience the book (I did Clarissa this way a few years ago, and it was fantastic: if you want to try it, the first letter is January 10!), which is really incredible — it’ll be on my Best Of list next year, no doubt. Meanwhile, I just noticed that Simple Passion was on my Best of list last year — a late addition; I first read it in December 2022, but then I reread it this fall, and what can I say, it wowed me just as much the second time.
A really lovely thing this year was that my son and I started reading chapter books together — something he hasn’t really had the patience for in the past — and he started to genuinely get into them. I think it was Mr Popper’s Penguins that really turned the corner, and then he really liked The Night Fairy, and just like that, he’d bought into the idea of bedtime chapter books. Currently we are working out way through two different series, the JoJo Makoons books by Dawn Quigley, and the Mindy Kim books by Lyla Lee, and he’s really enjoying both. I asked my parents to bring us back some of the Moomintroll books in Polish from Warsaw — I’m really looking forward to rereading them.
Last January I set myself a goal of reading 6 books in Polish this year, and unfortunately, I failed. In July I realized that I hadn’t even started, so I read RuRu, by Joanna Rudniańska, which I loved, and then I read Babcocha to my kiddo as a bedtime story, and also really enjoyed it, and then an obscure 19th century novel called Ulana, and then I started a collection of poems called Mondo Cane, which I finished… yesterday, in a kind of desperate attempt to at least get closer to my goal. I’m also most of the way through a Polish translation of collection of letters that Gramsci wrote to his children, but I don’t know if that really counts. I did also read Tokarczuk’s Drive your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead in English translation, for a conversation at Buffalo Street Books, and liked it even more than I had remembered, but that also doesn’t count. Anyways, I’ve set myself the same goal for next year, and hopefully will do a better job.
I don’t set any other kinds of book goals, but it’s notable that I read, by my count, about 80 books this year, far less than usual (it’s generally between 100-120), and Goodreads (which I’m still looking for a replacement for…) says it was just over 18,000 pages, also less than usual (it’s usually in the mid to upper 20,000s). No wonder I was constantly feeling like I didn’t get to read enough! Something I noticed this year was also that many of the things I read, I did out of some sense of obligation — often arbitrarily self-imposed, but still. It was rare that I just looked at the shelf and grabbed something that called to me. And there were quite a few books that I wanted to read but for whatever reason, wouldn’t allow myself to start on — fearing, I think, that I didn’t have the time to really give it the proper attention. So that’s my goal for next year, I guess: better time management, in the sense of devoting my limited energy to the things I care about, and to stop holding back from reading the things I really want to read. To make time for what makes me happy.
Kasia Reads 