Soon: I’m not there yet.
Over the break, I finished the last two books lingering on the stack from 2023: two rereads, Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman and Eugene Zamyatin’s We. With fewer than 50 pages in each, they belong to 2023, and alongside, I looked back to what was missed in that difficult year.
Most glaringly absent? The seasonal short story quarterly posts. So, they’ll appear this week. Get ready for a barrage of short-fiction chatter. And I’d intended a second post about novellas in November, but that’ll wait until I finish reading a couple more.
Writing up the short stories required scrolling through my log. It required a fresh sheet in the workbook, required transferring several titles from the old year into the new. Tidying up my workspace required recognising a few things that’ve been neglected and overlooked. But I haven’t done any sorting or tabulating. Later this month, that’ll happen.
Later in 2023, I’d decided that I was going to begin again with Middlemarch this year, to simply readopt the goals that suddenly felt irrelevant just a few weeks into 2023, while I grieved and reordered. The few chapters of Eliot that I’d reread last January were very enjoyable: I wanted to return to that goal.
Photo by Pixabay
And, the more I thought about this, I realised how heavy it had weighed, this sense of plans unfulfilled, and I wondered if other unrealised reading goals added to that weight. Maya Angelou says: “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.” Not only can I change this, but I can change my thinking about it too.
I made a short list of the other year-long reading projects from the past, some of them stretching back two decades. They weren’t burdensome in the same way—because although I hadn’t read those books, I’d read many others—but, why not test the theory?
Then, I made a stack. And I started over with them in the first week of the year, just a few pages of each but enough to see how it felt. More about this in my 2024 Plans post soon.
And I nodded at the magazines: we’re friends now. After realising that I would have to read fewer books if I wanted to read more magazines—doesn’t it sound obvious when you put it that way?—I gathered up the magazines that have accumulated unread and I made a stack.
Okay, three stacks. Since I started to include mags in my reading stack, I’ve been regularly reading them alongside the books, and this is helping establish the habit. But what’s securing the habit is how much I’m enjoying them. I’ll say more about that another time.
This is an update year for my websites, too, so in a few weeks I’ll update both. BIP will be a mess for a few days (but, if you follow in a reader you won’t likely notice). The new template is at hand and I’ve started tidying on the back-end, so if you land here and see content that doesn’t look familiar, grab another book and, by the time you finish, it’ll feel like home here again.
In the meantime, it’s fun to catch up with all of you and see what 2023 was like on-the-page for you and what’s exciting you about your reading plans for this new year.
It doesn’t seem fair that fun and exciting things can also feel burdensome. It’s something I’m always trying to balance. Or make peace with, or both.
Here’s to another great year of reading! 🙂
Oh, dear, I didn’t mean for it to sound that way. I was just thinking about how, over a lifetime, the gaps between what you’d intended to do and what you actually do can widen, but when it comes to the small stuff, like reading projects, one doesn’t need to think of them with that kind of gravitas because you can resume reading! That gives me a contented feeling rather than a stressful feeling.
Hi. I like the updating of your site … I’m still meandering around it and checking things out. It’s been awhile. Good luck with your bookish projects in 2024. Happy reading.
Thanks! Nice to see you here, somehow your site dropped out of my feed, and I found my way back via a comment I saw on someone else’s site. I’ve not done the update yet, but I’m glad you like the current layout (I do too!).
A tough year. I’m glad to see you’re feeling up to blogging some more.
Off to catch up on your other posts. Looking forward to the new look!
Thanks, Reese: I’m looking forward to the work for the new look being complete! 🙂
So cool that you’ve had year-long reading projects that have stretched through decades, that’s the kind of energy I want to bring to my reading! It’s interesting to me too that you’re spotlighting short stories and novellas; I feel like I stray away from those (unless they’re full short story collections) because I feel like I want something meatier. Great to see you getting out all these updates in the new year.
Thanks, Thomas. It’s been helpful to remind myself that I can choose to continue to pursue a project (just like I can choose to abandon or drop projects, which is what happened with those older projects, even though it didn’t feel like I was choosing); I was the one who didn’t do it the first time, but I am also the person who can do it the second time. That used to be my feeling about stories too!
Excited to see your new template, very cool development!!! Glad to hear you and magazines are friends again, although I can’t say the same for me. My books are still bullies so I don’t have time for magazine reading LOL
Hahaha And, with that, I’m specifically thinking of the business book you read recently, but I won’t call it out just now. Hee hee (I’m kidding)
I tend not to set myself goals these days but I undestand those who do. Good luck with overhauling your blog, Marcie. My partner – very much more tech savvy then me – occupied himself with refreshing mine during lockdown and I was delighted by the result. He was rewarded with some very nice meals out once comparative normality resumed!
You’ve got a good groove going with your new releases; I can see where that engine doesn’t require any sort of tweaking.
Ohhh, that’s a good idea. Why didn’t I think of that? More reading time! Good plan, Susan.
It’s good to have an update from you, and I look forward to hearing more about your short fiction reading and novellas in November! Zamyatin’s We is a classic, IIRC? A forerunner to 1984 in certain respects?
I’ll be interested to see if any of them catch your eye. I think one of them might. Yes, exactly; Wewas written in 1920, I think? When I first read it, I read it with Brave New World and really fell hard for the story. This time I was more interested in how the narrator structured his “records” (notebooks) which are not the kind of thing people are supposed to be spending time with at all, let alone filling them with the things he’s writing about.
Magazines can be very distracting… which is why I barely read them any more! Look forward to the updates!
I’m pretty sure the magazines think that it’s the books that are distracting!
Ah yes, the trouble with reading magazines is that you can’t read as many books, and if the magazines are about books and make you want to read even more books, then things can get to feeling rather desperate. But I hope you find a nice balance. It sounds like you may have.
Some of them ARE about books so, yes, you’ve guessed it: deadly for the TBR list! But even the ones that aren’t seem to open other avenues of interest. So far it feels like a satisfying balance, but whether it’s sustainable remains to be seen.
Someone donated a huge pile of Slightly Foxed issues to the Little Free Library, so I brought them home to see if I’d be tempted to pick them up. So far, no — but then again, I’m not in the magazine habit. Audiobooks and Substack reading have been my latest media additions. I’ll be interested to hear more about your stacks and get your short story recommendations.
I love Slightly Foxed; I wish I could find them in LFLs over here. (There’s only one Toronto library that subscribes, out of 100!) Turns out it’s a habit like any other, there to be developed, or…not. Heheh In contrast, I’ve temporarily lost the habit of audiobooks.
I know what you mean about reading goals weighing heavy. I try and find a way towards feeling encouraged to get to books languishing in the TBR without feeling like I’m failing the whole time – not always easy!
The reread had been so enjoyable, had felt so right, that I found myself regularly returning to the idea of it remaining undone as months passed. Were it not for that, I might have simply chosen another set of goals for this year, but it turns out that a backward glance has its silver lining!
So nice to hear a bit about your plans this year Marcie even though this post tells us to wait for other posts. Love it. (Intetested in the short fiction of course as I upped my activity a bit there last year and hope to keep up with it.
Also love your stacks. I find stacks and order can help me too and I could do with a bit of rejogging of mine.
I’m also interested to see what you mean about updating your site, but this made me laugh “so if you land here and see content that doesn’t look familiar, grab another book and, by the time you finish, it’ll feel like home here again.” I’d love it if my interacting, as in commenting on it, were easier, but I’m guessing that’s unlikely. I have to enter all my details for every comment I make.
Thanks, Ms Gums. It’s a bit of a tease, isn’t it, but now that I’ve caught up with everyone else, elsewhere, I felt as though I should say SOMEthing! 🙂
I no longer have to reenter my details on most people’s blogs (that only lasted about a month), but there remains a invitation to subscribe screen, which pops up after every comment and, if I don’t return to close that, my comment never appears.
The changes I’m making are aesthetic; the engine will remain the same, so that’s unlikely to help (or hinder) your ongoing tech frustrations. Have you ever tried logging on to another computer (say, at a friend’s house, or at the public library) to see how/if the process differs? In some situations, I’ve found that a fresh start on a different device can reveal unexpected details.