My Year in Not Reading, 2023

Well of course I did read. “Reader” has been a big part of my identity since I was the kind of kid who read the back of the cereal box at breakfast if nothing better offered. But when I look back at 2023, what stands out in my reading memory is how many books I started but didn’t finish, or returned to the library unopened. Or that I mislaid my reading notebook for a couple of months and hardly missed it because I read so few books in that time.

A big part of my erratic and distracted reading was my big/small move: I only went a few blocks, but I downsized from the family home of 20-some years to a townhouse, which was a huge amount of work and chaos. This year felt like at least two–so much so that I discovered, talking to my mom and sister on my recent birthday, that I had convinced myself I was a year older than I actually am. However, I notice that last year’s post had a very similar title. These ongoing struggles to live out my vocation as a reader are one reason I chose “attention” as my word for 2024 (yes, somehow I have become the kind of person who chooses a word of the year).

Here are some highlights from 2023 and plans for a more attentive 2024:

Poetry

I read a lot of poetry. It’s (usually) short! If a poetry collection is due back at the library tomorrow, you can finish it tonight! I think my favorite of many good ones was Brenda Shaughnessy’s Tanya, a collection focused on the women who have mentored her or been her artistic companions. Here’s a passage from a poem dedicated to her teacher Helene Moglen:

Thirty years ago you taught me that books can become

the beginning of a self–combine with a life in progress

to make a parallel story lived alongside, inside books.

That reading could mix with experience, making life

after life after life inside a solid simultaneous self.

You would lead me to that place books always promised:

where anything could happen but it was a matter of context–

from “Coursework,” by Brenda Shaughnessy

Memoir

Just a few compared to last year, but they were good ones. Ducks, Kate Beaton’s graphic memoir of two years working in the Alberta oil sands, still haunts me. Beaton’s stories and images reveal not just the environmental devastation of this kind of extraction, but the social and personal destruction among an overwhelmingly male workforce living far from home. It’s bleak, but not entirely so–there’s humor and care as well. Beaton is subjected to the kinds of harassment and assault that are all too predicable for a young woman working in this world, but (while never excusing it) she’s able to look back on both her younger self and the men around her with amazing empathy. There is a great One Bright Book podcast episode discussing Ducks. Check it out!

I finished the year with Molly Peacock’s memoir of her decades-long friendship with fellow poet Phillis Levin, A Friend Sails in on a Poem. It’s rather disjointed (or maybe that’s the effect of me reading it in fits and starts), but I appreciated Peacock’s account of how they each make space in their lives for writing. In some cases the space is literal, as in the annual joint writer’s retreat they took for years, eating breakfast together, separating to write, then reuniting over dinner to share the day’s work. They serve each other not as critics but as attentive readers. These themes resonated with me and got me thinking about ways to make space for quiet attention in my own life, and also about how one thing I value in poetry is that poets pay attention and help us to do the same.

Mystery

Others come and go, but this is my forever genre, ever since my early-reader crush on Encyclopedia Brown. I tried some new authors and revisited some old favorites on audio, but few stood out. Early Peter Robinson, it turns out, didn’t hold up for me. The two books I did love weren’t my usual fare: The Plinko Bounce by Martin Clark is a courtroom drama (I’ve seen it described as a thriller, but to me that requires a more breathless pace) about a public defender whose routine plea deal for a repeat client takes an unexpected turn when he discovers a typo that changes everything. Andy Hughes is honest and principled and Clark is a retired judge who knows the law; I really enjoyed this until the final twist, which to me felt out of keeping with the rest of the book, but I loved the rest so much I’ll forgive it. I heard a lot of buzz about this book and thought it was a debut because I’d never heard of Clark before (such solipsism!). But in fact he has a backlist, and I look forward to dipping in.

I listened to some C. J. Box this year, and though I loved the mountain West setting, the books are too violent for my taste. So I was delighted by Peter Heller’s The Last Ranger, which shares a setting and a ranger hero with Box’s Joe Pickett series, but is less action-oriented (and as always, Heller’s descriptions of nature are gorgeous). The story starts fairly small with Yellowstone park ranger Ren’s concerns that someone is poaching in the park, but expands from there to take in right-wing political violence and a larger conspiracy. The slowly growing feeling of menace kept me gripped.

Other Fiction

I think my favorite reading group book this year (but let’s face it, I didn’t finish all of them by a long shot) was Gil Adamson’s The Outlander, about a self-made widow fleeing the law and the vengeance of her brothers-in-law in the turn-of-the-20th-century West. I would not have said this is my kind of thing, but Adamson people’s the widow’s journey with a memorable cast of eccentrics.

The other fiction that stayed with me was Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, which is also a kind of mystery-adventure story–I guess that’s what it took to hold my attention this year–about a guerrilla gardening group tangling with a bunker-building American billionaire on a New Zealand farm. The subject matter is of the moment, but I’d call the novel old-fashioned in the best way: a big book with a cast of characters to match and lots of juicy conflict over values and motivation, betrayals and surprising alliances.

The Work Book Group

My Associate Dean (a good one, not the Twitter parody kind) started a Faculty reading group, and I joined the first one, discussing Learning That Matters by Caralyn Zehnder, Karynne Kleine, Julia Metzker, and Cynthia Alby. This is a course design handbook for “transformative education” that’s full of useful strategies, some of which I plan to try this Winter term. Our group included members from Music (my Faculty includes Performing Arts) as well as various writing-focused disciplines (Communications, English, Creative Writing, and ESL) so we had a range of perspectives and problems to chew on. Teaching can be isolating–you talk a lot to students, but not to your peers–so this time was rejuvenating.

What’s Next?

Every book on this list was new and came from the library. Which is fine, but in general I’m feeling overwhelmed by my library hold habits, i.e. look at the new books in the online catalog every week or so and put holds on everything that looks interesting. They all end up arriving at once, of course, and then I can’t figure out how to prioritize them, or they turn out to be books I wanted to want to read but didn’t really want to read, etc. etc. Right now, piles feel like too much to handle rather than like invitations, so I aim to cool it with the many holds and have just one or two at a time to focus on.

I plan to join Kim and Rebecca’s Kate Briggs project, about which they said, “We want to read slowly and with care, and see what happens when we — all of us — read and think together.” That’s the kind of reading experience I want more of.

Will I blog more? Writing is a key way of paying attention for me, so maybe. But maybe I’ll just be curled up in a corner with a good book.