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breathedoutFor the past few years, I've been doing year-end reflections through the lenses of my reading & writing for the year. (See last year's reading post here.) I'll be doing a separate post about 2018 writing, but I want to wait until January because I definitely want to include my Yuletide story.
So for now: reading!
HIGHLIGHTS AND GENERAL REFLECTIONS
2018 was a big year for me:greywash and I moved from LA to the Bay; I started a new and challenging position at my organization; we bought a house and started fixing up the yard. All of this translated to less bookish time overall, and also some big shifts in how I've been reading when I do it (more on this in the Format section). But I did read some great things this year! In particular some wonderful short-story collections, a genre I've historically neglected but also gravitated toward last year. Highlights included Chavisa Woods's Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country, Roxane Gay's Difficult Women, and, of course, Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties. While the Gay is harsher and less whimsical than the other two, all three of these collections share a dry sense of humor, a multiplicity of queerness, and careful attention to the ways in which systems of oppression play out in individual lives.
Those traits are also to be found in three of my favorite longer novels for the year: Rabih Alameddine's The Angel of History (a tragicomic lament for the narrator's friends, lover, culture, and city, lost to the AIDS epidemic and gentrification); Barbara Browning's The Gift (a meditation on fidelity, intimacy, and the ethics of transforming life into art); and Sarah Schulman's Maggie Terry (an ostensible detective novel that is really more about examining the process of recovering from addiction). Other novel highlights include Laura van den Berg's The Third Hotel, a feminist take on the Lynchian plot where a possibly-unreliable narrator pursues someone who they may or may not actually know through a foreign landscape; and Samantha Schweblin's Fever Dream, an intensely claustrophobic and well-rendered novella about parenthood, secrets, and contamination. I haven't finished it yet, but Carol Bensimon's We All Loved Cowboys, a queer female Brazilian roadtrip story, may end up on the highlights list as well.
I also ended up doing something this year that I haven't done a lot of before (or at least, not since college), which is to read multiple works by the same person back-to-back or in close succession. Specifically, this year brought me Soucouyant and Brother by David Chariandy; Maggie Terry and The Gentrification of the Mind by Sarah Schulman; and Crudo and The Lonely City by Olivia Laing. This was a totally unplanned side effect of my transition to using the library app Libby for a lot of my reading: in all three cases, the book I'd originally been interested in was unavailable, so I read another by the same author while waiting for my hold to come in. But ended up being an illuminating exercise. The Chariandy novellas are basically two takes on the same story (a young Black man returns to his old Toronto neighborhood during the last weeks of the life of his mother, who has suffered from dementia since before he left home), but their foci were different enough that I felt like they gained by being read back-to-back, rather than becoming repetitive. In the cases of Schulman and Laing, their nonfiction book spoke very directly to their fiction (in Schulman's case EXTREMELY directly), which made my reading experience of both more multifaceted.
Another thing that set 2018 apart, reading-wise, was my year-long pledge to read zero books by white men. I kept to this pledge, which was an interesting experience though not in quite the way I'd anticipated... which I'll go into more in the Race and Gender section below. In all of the following sections, there are reflections under the cut links.
Format
As I mentioned above, at the end of last year I moved from LA, where I was spending 3ish hours per day commuting, to the Bay, where my commute is 8 minutes. At the same time, I was promoted one-and-a-half times to a higher-stress job, and switched offices to a working environment with no real breakroom or space for reading, which has resulted in just skipping my lunchbreak the vast majority of days. (Yes, I know: this is bad. It is literally my job to discourage my coworkers from doing exactly this, yet still I do it.) Since my commuting and lunchbreaks were my main reading time back in LA, the change means a marked reduction in the number of books I've read this year overall: 34 as compared to last year's 43. The decreased commute time has also meant a drastic shift away from audiobooks. I've found that I no longer have any use for an Audible subscription: only 3% of my reading this year has been in audio form, as compared to 60% in 2017.
The other big change from 2017 is that I've started doing a lot of my reading on my phone, via the library app Libby and my five library memberships from up and down the West Coast. You can see that a full 76% of my 2018 reading was done on my phone, as opposed to only 2% in 2017. I have really mixed feelings about this. Using Libby to the exclusion of paper books has also had pretty severe consequences for the amount of nonfiction I've been able to read, since mainstream fiction releases tend to be much more readily available as loanable e-books than someone's reworked Queer Studies dissertation published by, say, the University of California Press. And honestly, I still vastly prefer the experience of reading and annotating a paper book; reading on my phone feels like much less of a separation from all the distractions of email, Instagram, DW, etc. It feels less quiet, less self-contained: both of which qualities are things I really value about my reading practice. I hate being the person who only has time in their "on-the-go lifestyle" or whatever to read for 5 minutes here and there.
On the other hand, it may be that I... kind of am that person. Or at least, I am sometimes that person. Reading on my phone is undeniably convenient! And I like the ability to highlight and screenshot in Libby, which is obviously verboten with paper library books. I'd just like to get to a place where I have a little more balance, in 2019.
Genre
One of my goals for 2018 was to get away from such a preponderance of novels, and in that goal I failed spectacularly: this year was even more novel-heavy, at 70%, than last year at 67%. As I said above, this was due in large part to switching the bulk of my reading to my phone, via Libby: I heard about so much great-sounding nonfiction this year that I'd have loved to dive into, but ebooks of (e.g.) Yetta Howard's Ugly Differences: Queer Female Sexuality in the Underground, or Anjali Arondekar's For the Record: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India do not tend to show up in libraries' e-catalogs. This is something to fix on the habit side, I think, in 2019: I need to carve out some time specifically for reading paper books, not only because I overall prefer it but because there are types of books I really want to be reading, that are more readily available in paper form. Luckily I think this might be pretty doable, becausegreywash's workday at her new job goes an hour later than mine; I'm thinking that hour could mark a logical place for sitting down and reading, not-on-my-phone.
Race and Gender
I want to talk about race and gender in the same section because of what I mentioned above about my pledge to read zero white men in 2018. Sticking to this wasn't particularly difficult; I don't read all that many white men as a general rule. Although making a pledge about it definitely made me notice whenever I did come across a white-male-authored book that I wanted to read, since I had to put them on a list for later! (Most notably, I'm really looking forward to Stephan Talty's Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day, Shane McCorristine's The Spectral Arctic: A History of Ghosts and Dreams in Polar Exploration, and Peter Boag's Re-dressing America's Frontier Past.)
But another thing this pledge really pointed out to me, was where the "give" is in my reading stats. With white men removed, my gender balance skewed radically female: 85% female in 2018 as opposed to 52% in 2017, a shift of 33%. But the percentage of white authors remained close to the same, even increasing slightly: 52% for 2018 as opposed to 50% for 2017. It seems I have PLENTY of books by white women sitting around on my shelves (or which I'm alerted to through my bookish channels—on which, more in a bit) but fewer books by women of color or even men of color waiting in the wings. This result isn't exactly surprising, but it has made me think about how I could tinker with my literary alert mechanisms so that I hear about more fiction & nonfiction by people of color, and from places outside the US. The literary-alert system has worked pretty well for me in other areas, specifically new queer fiction. Speaking of:
Queerness in the Text, and Author Nationality
I've read a LOT of queer shit this year! Which is awesome! (Note: whereas most of the stats in this pertain to the author, the Queerness one is about the presence of queerness in the work itself, irrespective of the author's identification. Obviously, "Central" versus "Tangential" can be a tough call, but I generally use the first for things like novels with queer main characters and nonfiction specifically about the queer experience; and the second for things like novels with queer secondary characters and nonfiction that addresses queerness as a concern peripheral to the main subject at hand. It remains, however, pretty subjective.) Compared to 2017, books with "Central" queerness are up 13%, and the combined Central + Tangential number is up to 66% from 57%.
A HUGE reason why this is the case, is that I subscribe to Lambda Literary's newsletter, which in addition to alerting you about activities and interviews specific to the organization, does a monthly roundup of new queer fiction, nonfiction, poetry, etc., with further breakdowns by genre category, and links to either a Lambda review, or the publisher's page for more information. I just did a quick scan of the books I read in 2018, and a full 47% of them I originally heard about through Lambda Literary. (... I do support them financially, but seeing that number I'm considering upping my contribution.) I think they're great and I 100% support their mission. That said, being based in LA and New York, they are also extremely US-centric. That US-centrism really shows up in my Author Nationality stats, with that giant grey 55% wedge (up from 38% in 2017) hanging over the rest of the pie, and nowhere near the kind of geographical diversity I had in 2017.
Obviously it's amazing to have a monthly round-up of new queer books coming out, and obviously having that resource really works in terms of changing what I read. With that in mind, I'm wondering if there are other organizations doing similar round-ups on, for example, new English-language translations coming out in the American market, or new [Algerian, Colombian, Icelandic, etc.] books hitting shelves.
Original Pub Date as a function of Date Started
As compared to 2017 or basically any year for the past two decades, 2018 was skewed dramatically to new releases. This is, again, largely because of the one-two punch of the Lambda Literary subscription and switching to doing most of my reading via Libby on my phone (because I dislike hardbacks, when I'm buying paper books I generally wait for the paperback to come out). I have mixed feelings about this change: as you can see, the longest-ago original release date on the 2018 roster came out in 1930, and only five books over the entire course of the year were originally released prior to 2000. Which is a little odd for someone with a particular interest in modernism; going through my Tumblr archives has made me miss Lytton, Virginia and the gang, and I might revisit some of their letters and diaries in 2019 for "Station after Station," a Strachey/Keynes/Grant story in the Unreal Cities universe. On the other hand, it's been fun to feel like I have a pretty good handle on the landscape of contemporary queer literary fiction, at least in the States. I guess, overall, I don't feel a huge need to push this one way or the other, but it's an interesting thing to continue keeping track of.
Gathered from the above, reading goals for 2019 include:
So for now: reading!
HIGHLIGHTS AND GENERAL REFLECTIONS
2018 was a big year for me:
greywash and I moved from LA to the Bay; I started a new and challenging position at my organization; we bought a house and started fixing up the yard. All of this translated to less bookish time overall, and also some big shifts in how I've been reading when I do it (more on this in the Format section). But I did read some great things this year! In particular some wonderful short-story collections, a genre I've historically neglected but also gravitated toward last year. Highlights included Chavisa Woods's Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country, Roxane Gay's Difficult Women, and, of course, Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties. While the Gay is harsher and less whimsical than the other two, all three of these collections share a dry sense of humor, a multiplicity of queerness, and careful attention to the ways in which systems of oppression play out in individual lives.Those traits are also to be found in three of my favorite longer novels for the year: Rabih Alameddine's The Angel of History (a tragicomic lament for the narrator's friends, lover, culture, and city, lost to the AIDS epidemic and gentrification); Barbara Browning's The Gift (a meditation on fidelity, intimacy, and the ethics of transforming life into art); and Sarah Schulman's Maggie Terry (an ostensible detective novel that is really more about examining the process of recovering from addiction). Other novel highlights include Laura van den Berg's The Third Hotel, a feminist take on the Lynchian plot where a possibly-unreliable narrator pursues someone who they may or may not actually know through a foreign landscape; and Samantha Schweblin's Fever Dream, an intensely claustrophobic and well-rendered novella about parenthood, secrets, and contamination. I haven't finished it yet, but Carol Bensimon's We All Loved Cowboys, a queer female Brazilian roadtrip story, may end up on the highlights list as well.
I also ended up doing something this year that I haven't done a lot of before (or at least, not since college), which is to read multiple works by the same person back-to-back or in close succession. Specifically, this year brought me Soucouyant and Brother by David Chariandy; Maggie Terry and The Gentrification of the Mind by Sarah Schulman; and Crudo and The Lonely City by Olivia Laing. This was a totally unplanned side effect of my transition to using the library app Libby for a lot of my reading: in all three cases, the book I'd originally been interested in was unavailable, so I read another by the same author while waiting for my hold to come in. But ended up being an illuminating exercise. The Chariandy novellas are basically two takes on the same story (a young Black man returns to his old Toronto neighborhood during the last weeks of the life of his mother, who has suffered from dementia since before he left home), but their foci were different enough that I felt like they gained by being read back-to-back, rather than becoming repetitive. In the cases of Schulman and Laing, their nonfiction book spoke very directly to their fiction (in Schulman's case EXTREMELY directly), which made my reading experience of both more multifaceted.
Another thing that set 2018 apart, reading-wise, was my year-long pledge to read zero books by white men. I kept to this pledge, which was an interesting experience though not in quite the way I'd anticipated... which I'll go into more in the Race and Gender section below. In all of the following sections, there are reflections under the cut links.
Format
As I mentioned above, at the end of last year I moved from LA, where I was spending 3ish hours per day commuting, to the Bay, where my commute is 8 minutes. At the same time, I was promoted one-and-a-half times to a higher-stress job, and switched offices to a working environment with no real breakroom or space for reading, which has resulted in just skipping my lunchbreak the vast majority of days. (Yes, I know: this is bad. It is literally my job to discourage my coworkers from doing exactly this, yet still I do it.) Since my commuting and lunchbreaks were my main reading time back in LA, the change means a marked reduction in the number of books I've read this year overall: 34 as compared to last year's 43. The decreased commute time has also meant a drastic shift away from audiobooks. I've found that I no longer have any use for an Audible subscription: only 3% of my reading this year has been in audio form, as compared to 60% in 2017.
The other big change from 2017 is that I've started doing a lot of my reading on my phone, via the library app Libby and my five library memberships from up and down the West Coast. You can see that a full 76% of my 2018 reading was done on my phone, as opposed to only 2% in 2017. I have really mixed feelings about this. Using Libby to the exclusion of paper books has also had pretty severe consequences for the amount of nonfiction I've been able to read, since mainstream fiction releases tend to be much more readily available as loanable e-books than someone's reworked Queer Studies dissertation published by, say, the University of California Press. And honestly, I still vastly prefer the experience of reading and annotating a paper book; reading on my phone feels like much less of a separation from all the distractions of email, Instagram, DW, etc. It feels less quiet, less self-contained: both of which qualities are things I really value about my reading practice. I hate being the person who only has time in their "on-the-go lifestyle" or whatever to read for 5 minutes here and there.
On the other hand, it may be that I... kind of am that person. Or at least, I am sometimes that person. Reading on my phone is undeniably convenient! And I like the ability to highlight and screenshot in Libby, which is obviously verboten with paper library books. I'd just like to get to a place where I have a little more balance, in 2019.
Genre
One of my goals for 2018 was to get away from such a preponderance of novels, and in that goal I failed spectacularly: this year was even more novel-heavy, at 70%, than last year at 67%. As I said above, this was due in large part to switching the bulk of my reading to my phone, via Libby: I heard about so much great-sounding nonfiction this year that I'd have loved to dive into, but ebooks of (e.g.) Yetta Howard's Ugly Differences: Queer Female Sexuality in the Underground, or Anjali Arondekar's For the Record: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India do not tend to show up in libraries' e-catalogs. This is something to fix on the habit side, I think, in 2019: I need to carve out some time specifically for reading paper books, not only because I overall prefer it but because there are types of books I really want to be reading, that are more readily available in paper form. Luckily I think this might be pretty doable, because
greywash's workday at her new job goes an hour later than mine; I'm thinking that hour could mark a logical place for sitting down and reading, not-on-my-phone.
Race and Gender
I want to talk about race and gender in the same section because of what I mentioned above about my pledge to read zero white men in 2018. Sticking to this wasn't particularly difficult; I don't read all that many white men as a general rule. Although making a pledge about it definitely made me notice whenever I did come across a white-male-authored book that I wanted to read, since I had to put them on a list for later! (Most notably, I'm really looking forward to Stephan Talty's Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day, Shane McCorristine's The Spectral Arctic: A History of Ghosts and Dreams in Polar Exploration, and Peter Boag's Re-dressing America's Frontier Past.)
But another thing this pledge really pointed out to me, was where the "give" is in my reading stats. With white men removed, my gender balance skewed radically female: 85% female in 2018 as opposed to 52% in 2017, a shift of 33%. But the percentage of white authors remained close to the same, even increasing slightly: 52% for 2018 as opposed to 50% for 2017. It seems I have PLENTY of books by white women sitting around on my shelves (or which I'm alerted to through my bookish channels—on which, more in a bit) but fewer books by women of color or even men of color waiting in the wings. This result isn't exactly surprising, but it has made me think about how I could tinker with my literary alert mechanisms so that I hear about more fiction & nonfiction by people of color, and from places outside the US. The literary-alert system has worked pretty well for me in other areas, specifically new queer fiction. Speaking of:
Queerness in the Text, and Author Nationality
I've read a LOT of queer shit this year! Which is awesome! (Note: whereas most of the stats in this pertain to the author, the Queerness one is about the presence of queerness in the work itself, irrespective of the author's identification. Obviously, "Central" versus "Tangential" can be a tough call, but I generally use the first for things like novels with queer main characters and nonfiction specifically about the queer experience; and the second for things like novels with queer secondary characters and nonfiction that addresses queerness as a concern peripheral to the main subject at hand. It remains, however, pretty subjective.) Compared to 2017, books with "Central" queerness are up 13%, and the combined Central + Tangential number is up to 66% from 57%.
A HUGE reason why this is the case, is that I subscribe to Lambda Literary's newsletter, which in addition to alerting you about activities and interviews specific to the organization, does a monthly roundup of new queer fiction, nonfiction, poetry, etc., with further breakdowns by genre category, and links to either a Lambda review, or the publisher's page for more information. I just did a quick scan of the books I read in 2018, and a full 47% of them I originally heard about through Lambda Literary. (... I do support them financially, but seeing that number I'm considering upping my contribution.) I think they're great and I 100% support their mission. That said, being based in LA and New York, they are also extremely US-centric. That US-centrism really shows up in my Author Nationality stats, with that giant grey 55% wedge (up from 38% in 2017) hanging over the rest of the pie, and nowhere near the kind of geographical diversity I had in 2017.
Obviously it's amazing to have a monthly round-up of new queer books coming out, and obviously having that resource really works in terms of changing what I read. With that in mind, I'm wondering if there are other organizations doing similar round-ups on, for example, new English-language translations coming out in the American market, or new [Algerian, Colombian, Icelandic, etc.] books hitting shelves.
Original Pub Date as a function of Date Started
As compared to 2017 or basically any year for the past two decades, 2018 was skewed dramatically to new releases. This is, again, largely because of the one-two punch of the Lambda Literary subscription and switching to doing most of my reading via Libby on my phone (because I dislike hardbacks, when I'm buying paper books I generally wait for the paperback to come out). I have mixed feelings about this change: as you can see, the longest-ago original release date on the 2018 roster came out in 1930, and only five books over the entire course of the year were originally released prior to 2000. Which is a little odd for someone with a particular interest in modernism; going through my Tumblr archives has made me miss Lytton, Virginia and the gang, and I might revisit some of their letters and diaries in 2019 for "Station after Station," a Strachey/Keynes/Grant story in the Unreal Cities universe. On the other hand, it's been fun to feel like I have a pretty good handle on the landscape of contemporary queer literary fiction, at least in the States. I guess, overall, I don't feel a huge need to push this one way or the other, but it's an interesting thing to continue keeping track of.
Gathered from the above, reading goals for 2019 include:
- Dedicate time in the evenings for reading books not on my phone
- Research newsletters or other news sources on new literary translations from non-US countries [edit: Asymptote, which is run out of London, has a fortnightly newsletter on world literature in translation. Three Percent has a few podcasts but seemingly no newsletter (sadly I'm just... not gonna get around to podcasts). They do have a book review category and a Best Translated Book Awards category.]
- Research newsletters or other news sources on country- or region-specific new releases
- Read a larger percentage of books from countries other than the US
- Read a larger percentage of books by people of color
- Also, I've made this goal for the past few years and haven't delivered, but: read a novel in French! I have a whole shelf to choose from.
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Date: 2018-12-30 05:30 am (UTC)And FWIW when I did a similar no-white-men challenge I also found myself falling into "therefore, a lot of white women" habits. The year after that I did a 50% of books by authors of color goal, and that I found significantly more productive in actually diversifying my reading. I don't regret either experiment; both were productive and informative.
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Date: 2018-12-31 05:46 pm (UTC)Is the widening of your focus having an effect on your own writing, do you think?
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Date: 2018-12-31 06:19 pm (UTC)That's a really interesting question about whether the shift toward contemporary lit is influencing my writing... not consciously, but there probably have been points of influence. I have written a lot more present-day and American characters this year than during the long A hundred hours period. Maybe I'll incorporate some reflection on this into my writing-related roundup post.
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