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!
The things most likely to derail a poem: Sealey Challenge 2023 wrap-up
I’m pleased to announce that I successfully completed the challenge of reading a poetry collection every day during the month of August. My gold seal should be on its way to me shortly.
One of my main goals in taking up this challenge was to develop a better understanding of what I do and don’t enjoy in poetry, and this challenge definitely helped me do that. I made it a point to read widely, both in terms of poets and styles. So the collections I read ranged from self-published works to literary award winners. Some collections leaned more toward a “writerly” style, while others sang more when read out loud.
On average, I tended to enjoy the collections that were traditionally published by established poets. However, this wasn’t true for all of them. There were a few award-winning poets, including one collection that had won a literary award, that I didn’t care for. However, I could usually see the skill and craft that went into them.
On the other hand, a lot of the self-published stuff came across as amateurish, sometimes to the point of making me angry. That said, I also found a couple of hidden gems. So what are the marks of an amateur in poetry? I’m sure there are many, but I noticed two recurring issues in my reading that significantly decreased my enjoyment of a poet’s work.
Problem 1: lack of rhythm
The first is awkward rhythm. This mostly came up in poems that kind of tried to stick to a particular meter but didn’t quite achieve it. This isn’t a bad thing in itself, but if you’re going to play with meter, it needs to feel intentional. Shakespeare did this all the time, but he usually had a purpose for doing so. Let’s look at one of his most famous lines from Hamlet:
To be, or not to be, that is the question.
This line has an extra syllable beyond the iambic pentameter that Shakespeare is known for, but it serves a larger purpose of both conveying the uncertainty Hamlet feels and unsettling the reader a bit.
In contrast, The Tay Bridge Disaster by William McGonagall, dubbed “the worst poem ever written” by Mental Floss, has an inconsistent meter and rhyme scheme that don’t feel mindful, just lazy. The poem opens:
Beautiful railway bridge of the silv'ry Tay
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last sabbath day of 1879
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.
Can you tell me what meter McGonagall is using here? I don’t have a clue.
A website called KeyToPoetry attempts to analyze this poem and many others in a quantitative fashion, attempting to infer meter, rhyme schemes, and more from the text. Even the data bears out the structural confusion. If we look at their analysis of Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats (chosen as a poem of comparable length), we can see that even quantitatively, Keats’s work was much tighter than McGonagall’s.
Problem 2: not doing enough with the material
The rhythm issue tends to come up, as I previously mentioned, with poets trying to write in a particular meter. But of course, much of the poetry being published today is free verse, i.e., it has no fixed meter. Free verse poems still have their own rhythm, but readers are likely to tolerate wider variations in that area. If there was a free verse poem I disliked in my reading, it was usually because I felt like the poet didn’t do enough with the material.
What do I mean when I say that? In my notes for one collection, I wrote that it read like “diary entries with line breaks.” And that’s fine as a starting point. I listened to an interview with a recently-published poet who said that a lot of poems in the collection started out as blog posts that she reviewed and added line breaks to them. The key is, she didn’t stop there. There was a lot more editing, getting feedback from her fellow poets, etc. that happened before the collection was ready for publication. A few of the collections I read felt like they just added the line breaks to their diary entries and stopped there.
Editing seems to get a bad rap in creative circles these days, but it has its purpose. The trick is not to write and edit at the same time. And if publication is your goal, eventually you’ll want to get feedback on your work, ideally from someone more knowledgeable and experienced than you. One of the best pieces I’ve ever written online was substantially improved by an editor’s work.
Conclusion
I learned a lot doing this challenge, and I hope to do it again next year. But if I do that, I’m going to start my planning much earlier than I did this year. There will be no dipping into self-published collections on Amazon next year.
Book review - Kismet
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.
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
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.
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
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!
A whole poetry book every day for a month?
As wild as this might sound, it's an annual tradition known as The Sealey Challenge, named after Nicole Sealey, the poet who came up with the idea. It involves reading one book of poetry every single day during the month of August. The idea scares me a bit, which is how I know I have to do it.
Why take on this challenge?
You might think I'm taking on this challenge because I'm a poetry expert or superfan, but that's not the case. I actually have kind of a contentious relationship with contemporary poetry in particular. I struggle to identify what makes some poems more than diary entries with line breaks.
Yet, at its best, poetry has a certain spark that I don't feel any other form of literature has. It's often one of the highest compliments to a prose writer to say that passages of their writing are poetic. Improving my understanding of poetry can only help me as a writer, even if I never publish any poems myself. And what better way to improve my understanding of something than to immerse myself in it?
How will I make this challenge work?
The first thing to point out is that even regular book-length poetry collections by single authors are generally much quicker to read than a novel or short story collection with a similar page count. And if that feels like too much, many poets have published what's known as chapbooks (sometimes called pamphlets in the UK), which are even shorter. So the time commitment isn't as large as you might think.
Sidenote: I'm using a Google spreadsheet to track my reading, and it asked me to write a few words describing what I'm doing so it could create a template for me. What it created wasn't groundbreaking, but it did save me a fair amount of typing and formatting, so props to Google.
Working in my favor are a Scribd account and access to an excellent library system. If I'd had more time and money, I'd have loved to plan this out better and support indie authors and publishers more, but I work with what I have.
I'm not going to act like I have the whole month planned out, but I can at least announce the first collection I intend to read, which is Dor by Alina Stefanescu (a Romanian author!). She gave a fabulous presentation last year through The Writer's Center and is one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter, as long as that's still a thing.
Posting daily probably isn't feasible, but I'll include some highlights once or twice a week. Who knows? Maybe you'll notice a more poetic flair to my writing by September.
Who are some of your favorite living poets? Let's talk about it in the comments!