2016: The Year in Reading

Five Two. Fifty-two. LII. For each week of the year, I read a book. This has been a goal of mine for the past few years and I finally achieved it.

Of course, this is an arbitrary number. Does it mean I read more than in previous years? What about the average length of books? Consider Saramago and the works of poetry I read. Do I need to count pages? Number of words? But this isn't about nit-picking. It's about setting a goal and reaching it.

I like this reading goal in that it forces me to read wildly and without precision. I can read a wider range of works when I force myself to read 52 books. Having this goal in mind means I read more short poetry works and more works of flash fiction and short story collections. I read more non-fiction this year than I've ever read before. I found that sometimes books had to resonate with how I was feeling at the time. Like Lewis's It Can't Happen Here after Trump won the election or finally reading in the Spring Tender Is the Night, which I had purchased at a book fair over five years ago. Some books I couldn't wait to start as soon as I bought them like Known and Strange Things or Speedboat (although I couldn't get into it at first, it really grew on me).

The White Album, complete with front cover falling off, I found at the Logan Square Arts Fest, the same warm day I listened to Ryley Walker and Bill MacKay and found a reissue of the Beastie Boys first EP on on vinyl. Open Books, where I volunteer, provided many serendipitous findings as well, including Road-Side Dog and Written on the Body. Some books I special ordered, like the poetry collection by Danez Smith after I read a poem of his on Buzzfeed of all places.

Year in Reading 2015

End of year lists. A bit played out and commenting on them being played out is too. But I think it's important to look back on what this year meant for me, literaturely. Along with starting to volunteer at Open Books as well as working on an event with Asymptote (stay tuned!), I've been writing more, sometimes for money, sometimes creatively, sometimes not at all (more often than I should). But the bones of a novel came out of it. If you're reading this blog and are interested in reading a surrealist tale about language, identity, memory, and perception, with indulgent experiments in form and more namedrops to philosophers, writers, musicians, and other pop culture references than I probably should have made, I will absolutely let you read it while I figure out where to go with it next.

But enough about what I wrote, here is what I read: