2023 reading wrap-up / 2024 preview

For me 2023 was a year of ups and downs, both in my reading journey and personally. In the former there were more ups than downs; indeed, some of the ups there helped with the downs in the latter. I don’t wish to dwell on my personal life in this post, so let’s get to the reading.

What went well

I’ve come a long way since the end of 2021, when I realized I’d hardly read anything that year. Was I truly a reader, as I believed myself to be, if I read so infrequently? I resolved to do better in 2022. While 2022 was a reading year of fits and starts, and I fell short of some of my reading goals, the improvement compared to 2021 was undeniable.

As 2023 kicked off, I set the same goal I had set for myself (and not met) in 2022: read 25 books. I realize this is a drop in the bucket compared to some, but it’s still roughly double the American average, which is an average that is declining further still. Also, I am proud to announce that I beat my goal, logging 36 books in 2023!

These books include a mix of genres and eras. I kicked off the year with The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel and finished with A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Other reading highlights include Notes of Native Son by James Baldwin (who needs no introduction), and Adventures in Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher. Although Blecher’s book was published in the 1930s, it’s surprisingly fresh to contemporary readers. More people should know about it.

I also resolved to read more poetry in 2023, which I did, going so far as to read a poetry collection every day in the month of August. This inspired me to take a poetry class, which in turn inspired me to stick to reading and appreciating poetry for the time being.

What can be improved

Falling on my face as a poet is a good transition into some of the things that didn’t go so well for me in reading this year. An obvious one is that my Shakespeare project got derailed. I’ll say more about that in the 2024 preview.

One thing that went OK for a while but eventually fizzled out was taking Ray Bradbury’s suggestion of reading a poem, a short story, and an essay every single day. He suggested doing this for 1000 days. I lasted a little less than five months. While I understand the value of building habits daily, trying to do all that on top of my other reading led to me cutting corners. At that point I figured if I was trying to game the system, I needed a different system. Indeed, I have an idea about how to rekindle at least the spirit of that challenge. Stay tuned.

I also picked up a few classics that I didn’t finish, most prominently, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It wasn’t even because I didn’t enjoy the book! Unfortunately, around the halfway mark, my work schedule turned very erratic for a few months. This is probably what interfered with the Shakespeare project, too.

Work schedule issues aside, what went wrong here? I think a big part of it was a lack of planning and accountability. There isn’t a ton I can do about accountability, since nobody’s making me do this, but planning is definitely something I can fix. Indeed, I have laid out at least the bones of my reading schedule for 2024.

2024 preview

You might guess from the previous section that I have a more solid plan of my 2024 reading here, and you’re right. I won’t reveal it in detail here, in part because I’ve also left room for flexibility. I don’t want to schedule every single thing I read a year in advance. Surely books will come out in the coming year that interest me.

For example, Percival Everett has a new book scheduled to come out in March, called James, which is a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the escaped slave, Jim. You might know Everett as the author of Erasure, the 2001 novel that serves as the basis for the recent film American Fiction, which I also recommend checking out. You’d better believe I’m going to read James once it’s available.

My numeric goal for 2024 is the same as what I achieved in 2023: 36 books. I toyed with the idea of aiming for 52, but I like to savor my reading, and I’m not sure I can do that with a substantially faster pace than what I’m doing now.

Regarding the failed Bradbury experiment, I’m trying my own version: rotate every month between full collections of poetry, short stories, and essays. To that end, I can announce that my collection for January 2024 will be Romanian Stories, a collection of short stories by various Romanian authors.

On a related note, I resolve to complete the challenge I set for myself at the beginning of 2022 in 2024 (better late than never!). I actually have several books in the can for that—I just need to write up my thoughts about them and post them here. Look for at least an update on that in early 2024.

Finally, I am treating this year’s Shakespeare challenge like a course that I have flunked and must therefore repeat from the beginning. And from a selfish standpoint, I want to be able to say I’ve read all of his works! Any posts on previously discussed material will not result in repeated content here—if I feel the need to discuss those works again, I’ll do so from a different angle.

So how was your reading experience in 2023? What reading goals do you have for 2024? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Book review - Kismet

Housekeeping note - August 21, 2023: I have switched hosting platforms for this website, so some things, particularly previous posts, might be a bit out of sorts for a few days. Everything should be back to normal by the end of the week. If that isn’t the case, let me know.

Content warning: violence, homicide, racism

My 13th book in the 2022+ challenge is Kismet by Amina Akhtar. The book satisfies Category 19, a novel with more than one point of view. With this being the 13th book in the 25-book challenge, we’re officially over the halfway mark! At this rate I might finish the challenge by 2025.

The book

Kismet follows Ronnie Khan, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants who is herself born and raised in Queens, New York. Orphaned in childhood, she is raised by an abusive aunt, but as a young adult Ronnie meets Marley, a self-help guru. Marley helps Ronnie be more assertive, and soon Ronnie has broken free from her aunt and moves with Marley to Sedona, Arizona; i.e., the New Age capital of America.

Marley hopes to grow her brand as a self-help influencer in Sedona, while Ronnie is looking for a clean break from her life in Queens.

What I liked

I mentioned earlier that this novel is told from multiple perspectives. It's mostly told from Ronnie's point of view but not exclusively. There are chapters told from the perspective of some local ravens, who are unhappy with the environmental damage that many of these new arrivals to Sedona are causing. We also get some narration from a person who is killing off some Sedona residents. The different points of view serve as clever ways to convey information that is important for the reader but that Ronnie wouldn’t know.

Another thing I enjoyed was the skewering of the superficiality of many so-called spiritual circles. It's very easy to get sucked into the consumerism and whitewashing of it all.

What I didn't like

This is a bit nit-picky, but there was a plot point involving identical twins that I didn’t entirely believe. I bring it up because this plot point is pretty important to the story. A little reworking could have made that storyline more believable without compromising the overall integrity of the story.

Overall verdict

Minor plot quibbles aside, I really enjoyed Kismet. Is it the deepest thing ever written? Not really. But it has some interesting things to say about spiritual communities, and how people of color and their ideas can be co-opted in unintended ways. The tone isn’t a million miles away from My Sister, the Serial Killer, so if you enjoyed that book, you’ll probably like this one, too.

What's next?

The next book is Adventures in Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher. This satisfies Category 8, a fictionalized memoir. Buckle up, because it’s a doozy.

How important is it for you to incorporate different perspectives into your reading? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Sealey Challenge: Midterm Progress Report

This article will go live on August 14, almost halfway through the Sealey Challenge. If you have no idea what that is, check out my previous post where I explain it.

I took this challenge on as a way of deepening my familiarity with poetry through a sort of immersion. In doing so, I have already gotten better at articulating what I do and don't like about the poems I read.

Highlights

Choosing to read a poetry collection every day on relatively short notice has forced me to put some effort into sourcing them, especially since I can't afford to pay retail prices for 31 different books right now. If I'd planned this further in advance, I could have taken advantage of the deals that several independent publishers offer for this exact occasion. Indeed, I might do so next year. But this year that wasn't an option. Fortunately, between my local library and a couple of online sources, I've more or less gotten into a system that works.

Of the 14 collections I've read so far, I've given 2 of them 5-star ratings. One of them went to Alive at the End of the World by Saeed Jones, who it turns out grew up not too far from my hometown. He's made a name for himself both in poetry and nonfiction. This particular collection discusses being Black and queer in a world that feels like it's falling apart, especially for people with those identities. But it's not all misery all the time. There's a lot of humor in it, too.

The other 5-star rating went to Dor by Alina Stefanescu. I'll talk more in depth about this book later, as it intersects with my Romanian author challenge. While it's not the entire focus of the collection, the theme of longing comes up several times and has a special poignancy for Stefanescu as an immigrant to the US.

Lowlights

I thought I'd be cute and reactivate my Kindle Unlimited membership to find some poetry chapbooks (i.e., shorter books that I can read quickly) that don't require me to go the library. Let's just say I chose... poorly.

Because anyone can publish to Amazon, especially in ebook format, that means there isn't a ton of quality control in the space. I've come across one or two gems here, but I've also come across the lone 1-star review I've given (for the record, most of the reviews are for my own records and not posted publicly, including this one).

While it's true that art is subjective, I think to have a successful poem, you have to have at least one of two things: something interesting to say, or a really good grasp of the rhythm of language. If you can have both, great. But if you have neither, you're in trouble. A lot of the Amazon stuff kind of felt like diary entries with line breaks, which didn't do much for me.

Going Forward

No more chapbooks from Kindle Unlimited, that's for sure. But at least I can say why something doesn't work for me, so the experience isn't a complete waste.

I'm lucky to live in a city with one of the best library systems in the world, so this should motivate me to get up and take more advantage of it. I'll post a round-up of my challenge experience after the month is over.

Are you doing the Sealey Challenge? If so, what's your favorite read so far? Let's talk about it in the comments!

Book #12 - The Department of Historical Corrections

https://www.amazon.com/Office-Historical-Corrections-Novella-Stories/dp/1594487332/

Danielle Evans, 2020

Content warning: violence, homicide, racism

My twelfth book in the 2022+ challenge is The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans. The book satisfies Category 15, a short story collection.

The book

This is a short story collection with a novella at the end, which shares its title with the book. The stories look at race and how we reckon with our past from various angles.

The novella concerns a woman who works for a fictitious government agency, sarcastically dubbed "The Office of Historical Corrections" by its detractors. The purpose of this agency is to correct historically inaccurate information in public places. For instance, early in the story, the protagonist issues a correction to a bakery that conflates Juneteenth with the Emancipation Proclamation.

The premise starts off humorously enough, but things turn darker when a rogue former employee of the agency travels to a small Wisconsin town to confront a violent racist incident of the past, where some descendants of the perpetrators are now prominent members of the community.

What I liked

The stories covered a wide range of experiences, which I almost always appreciate. More specifically, the characters didn't all come from the same economic and educational backgrounds. We need more stories about working-class people and Evans gives us some good ones.

Several of Evans’s stories concern the overeducated and underemployed, and I didn’t only find them compelling because I very much identify with that situation. There’s a tendency in fiction to gloss over economic realities (spoiler alert: your favorite TV characters probably couldn't have afforded their fancy apartments on the likely earnings for their professions, especially in a city as expensive as New York), and I appreciate how Evans addresses them without feeling like you’re being hit over the head about it.

What I didn't like

A couple of the stories felt more like slices of life than stories per se. It feels like such “stories” have become more common in short stories published in the last few years, and I’d be curious to know if anybody has any insight on that. Maybe it’s a move away from structure in the same way that poetry no longer requires fixed meter and music has explored different relationships to melody and harmony. Slice-of-life stories often leave me frustrated because I don’t know what to think of them, but then maybe that’s the point.

Overall verdict

This is one of my favorite books that I’ve read for this challenge, as I liked most of the stories very much, more than enough to outweigh the one or two I wasn't as excited about. I'd love to see a movie adaptation of the novella. I can totally see Issa Rae in the lead role.

What's next?

The next book I’m going to discuss in this challenge is Kismet by Amina Akhtar. This satisfies Category 19, a novel with more than one point of view.

How important is it for you to incorporate different perspectives into your reading? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Shakespeare in a Year: March

In March I have read the following Shakespeare works:

• Richard III

• The Comedy of Errors

• Venus and Adonis

Going forward, I'm tweaking my commitment a bit. At the beginning I said I intended to read all of Shakespeare's works this year. However, especially when it comes to the plays, I don't think reading is necessarily the best course of action. Shakespeare wrote his plays for performance, not for publication. If possible, I'll have a copy of the text handy as I'm watching the play, but if all I can do is watch a performance of a play, I'm counting it. That said, I did read everything listed above in this post.

Richard III

This is the first of the "hits" that I've read as part of this project. And as I mentioned in last month's summary, Henry VI, Part 3 sets up both this play and its protagonist. Indeed, some adaptations have included scenes from the previous play or at least some representation of its events, as we can't assume that modern audiences already know this information.

The play begins with Richard alone on stage uttering the famous lines, "Now is the winter of our discontent / made glorious summer by this son of York," referring to his brother, King Edward IV, having defeated the rival Lancaster family, at least for the time being. He goes on to announce that he is there to cause chaos and chew gum, and he's all out of gum.

Throughout the play he schemes to have his rivals picked off one by one until he becomes king himself. But as king, he becomes increasingly paranoid and mistreats even some who have been consistently loyal to him. Eventually Richard is defeated at the Battle of Bosworth Field by the forces of the Earl of Richmond, who becomes King Henry VII, later grandfather to Queen Elizabeth I. This marks the end of the Plantagenet dynasty and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty.

I know I mentioned the possibility of a deep dive on this play, but it didn't come together. Although I found a lot of interesting material in the play and its characters, I also found pretty much anything I would have had to say has been said better by other people. And that's not me being hard on myself. I'm capable of finding angles on a story that haven't been done to death; that just didn't happen here.

I'm not going to get into the details of how Shakespeare's Richard differed from the historical king, but if you're interested, there's a docudrama playing in some theatres called The Lost King about scholars' search for Richard III's remains, which debunked some commonly held beliefs about both Richard's physical condition when he was alive and what happened to his body after his death.

The Comedy of Errors

Some scholars believe that this was Shakespeare's first play. It was definitely the play that convinced me to prioritize performance over reading. While I had a copy of the play handy during my viewing, if that had been all I'd had, I would have missed a lot of what this play has to offer.

For one thing, it's difficult to convey physical comedy on the page. This is even more true with Shakespeare, who tended to limit his stage directions to the bare minimum information needed so his actors understood what to do. Fortunately, it's pretty easy to find performances of this play.

Venus and Adonis

Venus and Adonis is one of the two narrative poems Shakespeare wrote when the theaters were closed due to a plague outbreak. The other one will be discussed in next month's roundup. The poem is loosely inspired by Roman mythology and follows the love goddess Venus's attempts to seduce the famed hunter Adonis.

A good modern title for this poem might be He's Just Not That Into You. Venus frankly acts kind of desperate in her increasingly brazen attempts to gain Adonis's affections, and he simply isn't having it. He's all about the hunt. But Venus is persistent, and finally Adonis gives in to her momentarily in the hopes that she'll be satisfied and go away. But things turn tragic when Adonis insists on going on another hunt the following morning.

It struck me as a gender-flipped version of a common occurrence in Greco-Roman mythology, where a deity takes interest in a human and things end badly for said human. For example, you have the stories of Pan and Syrinx or Apollo and Daphne, just to name a couple. Some of the lines in the poem are really beautiful, but it felt a bit like Fatal Attraction: Roman Edition, which I'm not sure Shakespeare was going for.

April preview

Now that I'm not attaching myself to the written text as closely, I hope to pick up the pace a bit. In April I plan to get through at least the following works:

• Titus Andronicus

• The Taming of the Shrew

• The Rape of Lucrece

• The Two Gentlemen of Verona

We have another narrative poem in The Rape of Lucrece (content warning, etc.). The same patron who commissioned Venus and Adonis also commissioned this one. We also have another "hit" in The Taming of the Shrew and possibly Shakespeare's worst play in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Then again, I saw one ranker put it above both The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet, so it pays to remember that this stuff is always subjective.

What is your least favorite Shakespeare play? Let's talk about it in the comments!

Shakespeare in a Year: February

In February I have read the following Shakespeare works:

• Henry VI, Part 1

• Henry VI, Part 2

• Henry VI, Part 3

• Sonnets 1 - 2

I'm going to hold off on discussing the sonnets for now, as their publication comes toward the end of Shakespeare's career. But since the sonnets were probably written over a long period of time, I'm going to sprinkle them in with my reading of longer works.

Some context

Since these are not among Shakespeare's most popular plays, I think adding a bit of context, both historical and literary, might help here.

Historical context

The Henry VI plays concern the events leading up to the Wars of the Roses and the wars themselves. Even if you aren't into medieval English history, you might recognize this period as the one that inspired George R. R. Martin in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, also known as Game of Thrones.

The stories are centered around the Houses of York and Lancaster, two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty, and their struggles for the English (and French) crown. There's court intrigue, epic battles, beheadings, people uttering their dying words in Latin, questionable religious interference, and more. We even get an appearance from Joan of Arc in Part 1.

Literary context

Most scholars believe that Parts 2 and 3 of this series were written first, with Part 1 appearing later as a prequel. Part 3 sets up Richard III, which I'll discuss in March, as it comes right after Part 1 in the Chambers chronology.

All of these plays fall under the history category, but what does that mean? The First Folio, the first publication of Shakespeare's plays after his death and the most authoritative source for the texts of many of his plays, divides the plays into 3 genres: comedies, histories, and tragedies.

Shakespeare's tragedies feature a protagonist, usually of high status, who is brought down by a character flaw or a bad choice, ultimately leading to their death by the end of the play. Comedies, by contrast, typically start with a misunderstanding or unusual situation but ultimately end happily. History plays, as the name suggests, dramatize historical events and might not fit into the genres of comedy or tragedy.

These classifications are not universally agreed upon but make a good starting point. And of course, many of the plays contain elements of different genres. For instance, Richard III has enough markers of a tragedy that some scholars classify it as such. But more on that in March.

My observations

In this section I'll talk about the story, the characters, and the language of these plays, including what did or didn't work for me.

The story

These plays are among Shakespeare's least performed, and it's not difficult to see why. They have kind of an inside baseball vibe, and if you're not already interested in this part of English history, I don't know if these plays will help much. George R. R. Martin had the sense to sprinkle in dragons and magic. And since his work is fiction, he didn't have to stick to real events.

That said, I can see why these plays would have been popular to audiences in Shakespeare's day. The events shown would have been relatively recent history, not so different from Hamilton or 1776 in the US. And while the plays seem a little "rah-rah English patriotism" now, they were considered pretty nuanced for their time.

The characters

Previous tellings of these stories tended to have all the subtlety of a Bible camp skit (if you know, you know) and heavily favored one side over the other, a tendency Shakespeare avoids. Nobody is completely virtuous or completely terrible, which is a strength of Shakespeare in general with his characters. It's nice to see that come through in the earliest plays. Even characters who Shakespeare clearly intended to portray as villains often have their highlight moments, at least from a dramatic perspective.

In fact, for these particular plays, the villains tend to be the most interesting characters. Henry VI is kind of a passenger in the story. True, the plays are to some degree about how he isn't capable of standing on his own and how others manipulate him. But that leaves a bit of a hole in the center, and not a tasty donut hole.

The language

I also want to note a couple of things about the language. First, it's surprisingly clunky in places, especially in Part 1. In Act 1, Scene 4, Line 39 of Part 1, we get "In open market-place produced they me" (i.e., "they brought me to an open marketplace"), which I have to imagine raised even a few Elizabethan eyebrows.

In fact, some scholars cite the differences in linguistic style between Part 1 and other plays to argue that Shakespeare did not write Part 1 by himself but in collaboration. We'll probably never know for sure.

The second thing I want to note about the language is there are more Chaucerian-sounding bits (words like yclad and malapert) than I remember seeing in any of the Shakespeare plays I've previously studied. This isn't a bad thing—just something that surprised me. I'm curious to see if things sound less Chaucerian over time or if I'm misremembering my earlier reading experiences.

March preview

The list for March will be more eclectic. I am confident that I can get through at least the following works:

• Richard III

• The Comedy of Errors

• Venus and Adonis

Richard III might get its own in-depth writeup, while Venus and Adonis might be unfamiliar even to many readers who have consumed their fair share of Shakespeare's work. It's a narrative poem, one of two that Shakespeare wrote for a wealthy patron while the theaters in London were temporarily closed due to a plague outbreak. Even Shakespeare had to find different ways to pay the bills during a pandemic.

Have you read any of these plays or seen them performed? Let's talk about it in the comments!