Each December, I look back at my year’s reading.
Here’s the archive of the annual Year in Review.
I read 139 books while everything whirled.
2023 was the year books held me still. The slow conscientiousness of text garners my faith more easily than most things. While we run around this world in faster and more chaotic circles, hankering for progress and production, responding to action with quick and thoughtless reaction, it is books (and often only books) that I trust to be methodical and considered.
2021 was a year in the dark.
I read 200 books, and it felt like slowly spinning in place with a camera. The landscape of the texts passed by quickly enough that it’s hard now to put my finger on the specific details of a lot of what I read. Still, I enjoyed the artful utility of catching a patch of evergreens here, a grainy hill there. I found more overlap than ever. My books talked to each other—and to me, through each other—with a relaxed intensity that burned underneath every day.
2020 was t
he year we learned art is a survival resource.
I read 118 books and cried more than usual. This year was a decade long. I keep trying to decide if it feels better to be able to see our old joys dancing on the horizon or to spin far enough into Now that there’s no horizon to see. There was a beginning. That feels important.
I said I’d read less in 2019.
135 books later, I guess I lied. I read compulsively to stave off so much else. This year I was more aware of my age than I’ve ever been—constantly too old and too young. My mailbox and Instagram feed filled up with wedding invitations and baby announcements. One of my worlds spun dizzyingly with color while another had three friends pregnant and domesticating.
I read some books in 2018.
Specifically, I read 125 books. I made a new year’s resolution to read fiction and like pink. For Christmas, I asked my uncle to teach me how to weld. Our first project would be bookshelves.