Reading Challenge 2023

 Since 2015, I've participated in the Goodreads reading challenge where one sets a goal for how many books they will read in a year. Your reading results are tabulated as you complete a book. In previous years, my totals have been:

2015  Goal: 25  Read: 68 (to be fair, I read a lot of graphic novels that year)

2016  Goal: 15  Read: 31

2017  Goal: 17  Read: 27

2018  Goal: 18  Read: 32

2019  Goal: 19  Read: 40 (starting to sense a pattern here . . .)

2020  Goal: 21  Read: 37

2021  Goal: 25  Read: 36

2022  Goal: 24  Read: 25

So my average goal was 20.5, average read was 37.

For 2023, I have set my goal at . . . 

10.

Yes, 10 measly books. "You must be getting old," I hear you say. While true, that's not the reason. "You must be busy with other things". That's . . . not true. Not really. I had a lot more going on in previous years, to be honest. 

So why only 10 books? 2 reasons.

1. I want to be writing more. I'm currently working on a novella, and, frankly, it feels good. I love the rush of writing. And while I've never fully stopped writing for an appreciable amount of time (three or four months, but that was before I started keeping track of reading goals), I don't write as quickly as I used to. At one point, I was cranking out a significant short story every couple of weeks. Now I tend to write longer stories (the novella is my favorite length to both read and write), so I need more time to write more material. Besides, I'm more careful about editing and crafting than I was, say, 20 years ago, and that editing and crafting takes, you guessed it, more time. 

2. I have some challenging works ahead of me. As I write this, I am in the middle of Heidegger's Being and Time. This is not a minor work. I also have, staring at me from the shelf, Joyce's Finnegans Wake. I've read excerpts from this before, but never the full work. And given how Ulysses was, I'm expecting this to be an uphill climb. Proust's Swann's Way is also on my shelf and, well, you likely know the reputation of that one. Meditations on the Tarot is another thick one squatting on my book pile. That brick is going to take a while to get through. Now, I'm not guaranteeing that I will read all (or any) of these books, but they are physically present on my shelf and I've been wanting and meaning to read some of them for a long time.

3. Most importantly: I am hoping to do some thematic readings this year, which means re-reading many works I've already gone through, as well as some I have not. For example, I have Kenneth Gross's Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life on my shelf, as yet unread. I am very excited to read this one alongside a re-read of Victoria Nelson's outstanding The Secret Life of Puppets, as well as a re-listening to an episode of my favorite podcast, Weird Studies, in which the hosts interview Nelson. With these two pieces, I will re-read The Quay Brothers' Universum, The Quay Brothers The Black Drawings, The Journal of the London School of Pataphysics, #21, and Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets, and I will be sure to re-watch Phantom Museums: The Short Films of the Quay Brothers. I anticipate that I will revisit two RPG posts I've made here, as well: What's in the Quay's Wunderkamer? and Experimental RPGing: Help, Opinions, and Insights Needed! Part I and Part II. All of this work, then, will "count" as only 1 read book for the year. And you can see that this is a months' long endeavor, in all likelihood. I have another, similar deep-delve planned for Gaston Bachelard's On Poetic Imagination and Reverie (thanks go to my oldest son for gifting this one to me for Christmas), which is new to me, and Gary Lachman's Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, a re-read, with a potential sidestep into Fiddler's Green Our Bogeys, Our Shelves. Yet another set will center around Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie and David Peak's The Spectacle of the Void, both of which I've read, though I've never reviewed Fisher's book fully, though I did riff off of it in one of my more . . . morbid posts. In any case, you can see the dilemma here: For every "new" book that "counts" toward my goal, there will be anywhere from one to five books (plus a podcast episode, a Blu-ray, and a lot of thinking and writing on things TTRPG) that I will need to complete.

Mind you, I'm not complaining. Not at all. But I suspect my book reviews and blogposts will be more spread out over the year than usual. On the other hand, I'm hoping they'll be more thorough, well-thought out, compelling, and useful to readers. This also means I probably won't be on social media nearly as much (that is also part of my goal here), so if you have a google account, follow me so you can be apprised of those times when I am posting something. I don't want to hide, and I love the interaction, so please, post comments and I'll be sure to respond!

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