Is it drugs? Did I lose consciousness while reading it? I’m still chasing the absolute narcotic of the Sweet Valley High books.
[…]
Does it vibrate strangely? This is the most ineffable category, but also the most important to me. Is the work so singularly itself that it has transcended in some way?
These are delightful criteria on which to judge a book 😄
(via Robin Sloan)
I’ve been on a depressing read binge. My latest book really affected me and looking at my bookshelf, I only see depressing and bleak stories – genocides, depression, racism, suicide, climate change…
I need recommendations for uplifting books, fiction or nonfiction.
I too find myself reading lots of books on the grim end of the scale, with a TBR chock-full of gloom in a time of scary and depressing politics 😐
These are some books that I recall having a warmer vibe throughout and an uplifting ending:
And a couple uplifting non-fiction:
And these are some books on my TBR that I’m hopeful about:
I could stand for some more on my list too!
My original idea for the analysis of genres for the books was to use the Goodreads data. I collected the listed genres for the 100+ books, where I had the ISBN number and the book existed on the Goodreads. And I was disappointed by the results. There was nothing, that I could gleam from there.
Every year when I put together my reading wrap-up, I’m reminded of how undefined some data are, and that sometimes I just have to enter it myself.* Like Sara calls out, sometimes a book’s genre is hard to pin down. Is Lynda Barry’s What It Is a memoir, or a self-help book, or an artist’s guide? All of the above 🤷♀️ (I went with memoir for my categorization.) I especially waffle between romance and other genres… is it a fantasy romance or a fantasy with romantic elements? I try to go by whether the story followed romance beats or not, but sometimes it comes down to vibes.
I read 167 unique books in 2023, compared with 212 books in 2022.
I chose my twenty favorite reads from 2023: 12 novels and novellas, 5 non-fiction books and 3 graphic works. Presented in no particular order. Links lead to my reviews.
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witchesby Sangu Mandanna
Witch rules mean our heroine isn’t allowed to settle down, but she longs for a home and friendship. Kind of a Bedknobs and Broomsticks – Jane Eyre mashup. Heartwarming. The found family is just as important as the romance.
Read it for a quiet, cozy story about finding your own path, mending bonds and finding new family, and figuring out what to do about rules that don’t work for you.
Chris Aldrich (Boffo Socko)Seeing that you’ve stalled on Braiding Sweetgrass (one of my favorites), if you’ll allow me, I’ll make a recommendation that worked out incredibly well for me when I read it.
I came to it at a time when I was doing a lot of reading on Indigenous ways of knowing and the idea of orality. As a result, in addition to buying a physical copy, I got an audiobook version from the library…
Thank you for the suggestion Chris! From what I’ve read of it so far, it does seem like it would be suited well to reading aloud. I haven’t listened to an audiobook in probably twenty years — we used to do books on tape during family road trips as a teen, and I came to really dislike them 😂 I can still recall several particularly bad ones making the agonizing hours of driving feel even longer. But now that I get to choose my own book, maybe it’s time to give them another try 😉 Because I did enjoy some of what we listened to — I recall His Dark Materials having a full cast.
I finally made the time to read Kimmerer’s essay The Serviceberry on Thanksgiving, and I kept turning to my husband and going, “This essay is amazing.” So it seems like an appropriate time to pull Braiding Sweetgrass back off the shelf 😊 I got on the audiobook list at the library but it’s a 13 week wait so we’ll see there.
And then I don’t read them. I put them in nice piles on the to-be-read shelf and think that perhaps I need to spend a weekend cleaning that shelf off, and soon.
What I am doing is thinking about them. Appreciating them, you might say. Thinking about why I was so excited about Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger and yet it’s still in the middle of the dining table because I don’t want to shelve it but I don’t want to start it either. Thinking about Saint Death’s Daughter and how it’s such a pretty brick of a book and I can’t wait to get lost in it. Just, you know… later.
Anticipating. Valuing their potential before we learn what they are.
And what’s more, I think there’s an often-ignored value in the act of appreciating even the things we’re not reading. What else is a most-anticipated list but a list of books a writer or a publication appreciates, wants to read but—in most cases—hasn’t yet read, or maybe even hasn’t seen in the flesh (in the page?) just yet? Wanting has power. Enthusiasm, curiosity, anticipation, desire—those things matter, too.
Makes me think of the charming tabs article by Ali Jaffe Ramis that describes how our tabs are a collection of our selves, both the selves we are and the selves we want to be: “They are little parts of me — my desires, memories, goals — that I’m scared to forget.” Books can be the same — read and unread.
See also: Books Unread
I made the choice of never actually reading news (or watching videos), but actually going through my RSS feed and « starring » everything that stands out to me based on the title and first 2-3 lines of text.
Every 3 or 4 days, I go into my starred items and unstar everything that just doesn’t interest me as much as I thought it would 3 days ago.
I like Alex’s approach to the news: choose sources, reduce quantity, and be intentional about what to actually read.
This process for selecting what to read overlaps a bit with what I’ve been trying to do, but is better than mine 😉 I open everything I want to read from my feed reader in a new tab, then go through each for an initial “do I actually care/ does this actually matter or is it just preying on my emotions” cull, and anything I’m on the fence about gets saved to Pocket. I also save anything super long or with a cruddy reading layout on page. Periodically, I’ll open up Pocket and star the articles I think I should actually bother reading — but then I never read them. If it’s not open in a tab, I’m not gonna read it — but if I have too many tabs open I get stressed 😥 So mostly Pocket is a comfort blanket to assure me I can find that article again if I really want to 😂 But I like the reading delay built in to Alex’s process.
This is in response to Pablo’s prompt of self-care as a blogging topic for the October 2023 IndieWeb blog carnival.
These days I’m thinking of myself more as part of a bigger whole, where yes, it’s important to take care of my mind and body, but also recognizing that our health is linked with others through our society and communities. It’s empowering both directions: I can help take care of my community by taking care of myself, and I can take care of myself through helping my community.
Pablo Morales (lifeofpablo.com)I’d like to invite a few people to share their thoughts and what they are reading or planning on reading.
I like to have a bunch of books going at once, and keep a rotating sampler of library books that I can dip into for variety. I prefer reading fiction on my Kindle where I can bump the type size up and read in dark mode before bed, but I’ve been gradually switching to hard copy for nonfiction. I’m totally an out of sight out of mind person so I forget about titles I have on my Kindle — having the physical book either by my bed or next to my hangout rocking chair is a visual cue reminding me to read it. I’ve also been buying more physical books so I can underline and take notes in them, and to support authors more directly.
Right now I’m trying to switch my before work reading time from screen to paper. I don’t usually like reading fiction in the morning so my current collection is trying to give myself a range of not too intense nonfiction that I can read in half hour chunks. It’s so easy to default to reading on my phone, but I want to be more intentional about what I’m reading. There’s a place for reading articles and staying in tune with culture, but I want to shift a greater amount of my reading time to long form works and digging deeper into topics.
Here’s which books I own I’m currently reading and why I picked them:
I’m about 20-70 pages in on all of these. Also sitting out is Jimmy Chin’s coffee table book There and Back, which I assumed would just be awesome outdoor and climbing photos, but I’ve also been enjoying his tales of past adventures.