{"id":15235,"date":"2018-12-31T16:12:37","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T20:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=15235"},"modified":"2018-12-31T16:16:30","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T20:16:30","slug":"reading-in-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=15235","title":{"rendered":"Reading in 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Back in September, I decided on some <a href=\"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=14897\">reading goals for the rest of the year<\/a>. I was supposed to finish the Harry Potter series, finish reading all of Barbara Michaels&#8217;s books, read some Kindle books, and read the bookshop-themed books that I&#8217;d borrowed from the library. I did none of those things, but because I had <a href=\"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=13551\">started the year with no goals other than to read as I pleased<\/a>, it seems perfectly fitting.<\/p>\n<p>I also had, as always, a goal of reading 52 books for the year. <a href=\"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=15090\">I realized in November I wasn&#8217;t going to make it<\/a>. At that time, I was at 39, and I doubted I&#8217;d get much past 40. Ultimately, I finished 43 books, and I feel good about that number.<\/p>\n<p>I always think I ought to read books by a more diverse group of authors. I also vaguely aim to read more non-fiction. I didn&#8217;t do so well on diversity, but there are some good things I can say about my reading choices this year.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>29\/43 were written by women.<\/li>\n<li>2\/43 were translated from other languages (<em>The Wild Book<\/em> by Juan Villoro from Spanish, and <em>Comedy in a Minor Key<\/em> by Hans Keilson from German).<\/li>\n<li>13\/43 were non-fiction.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I gave A+ grades to only two books: <em>Frogkisser<\/em> by Garth Nix and <em>The Wild Book<\/em> by Juan Villoro, both of which were gifts from my best friend. Clearly she knows how to pick good books. The biggest surprise for the year was <a href=\"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=14075\"><em>The Story of My Life <\/em>by Helen Keller<\/a>. I went into it with no expectations, and it turned out to be remarkably engaging.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know if I&#8217;ve ever bothered to ask myself this question before, but did I learn anything from my reading this year? The answer is that yes, I learned a lot. Much of it has been covered in previous blog posts. But I also learned&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>That finally someone has realized and written about the discomfort and impracticality of travel by magic carpet (<em>Frogkisser<\/em> by Garth Nix).<\/li>\n<li>That Life has given some of the same bits of half-formed wisdom to others as it has to me, only certain people have the audacity to turn it into half-formed self-help books, such as <em>The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck<\/em> by Mark Manson. I am not an audacious person. I ought to work on that, because audacity pays.<\/li>\n<li>That, as A.J. Jacobs wrote in <em>The Know-It-All, <\/em>&#8220;the opposite of deja vu is called jamais vu (a false unfamiliarity with a situation, as when you walk into your apartment and feel like you&#8217;ve never been there before).&#8221; This book also taught me how much I adore books whose contents are arranged in alphabetical order, and it reminded me of how handy indexes are (because that quote about jamais vu was neither under D for &#8220;deja&#8221; nor J for &#8220;jamais,&#8221; but rather M for &#8220;memory&#8221;).<\/li>\n<li>That in the world of poetry there is such a thing as an &#8220;American Sentence,&#8221; which is a sentence of 17 syllables, basically haiku but without the line breaks (<em>Ordinary Genius<\/em> by Kim Addonizio, which is not on my list of books read in 2018, because I haven&#8217;t finished it yet).<\/li>\n<li>That Stephen Fry writes poetry (<em>The Ode Less Travelled<\/em> by Stephen Fry).<\/li>\n<li>And many other things, but I can&#8217;t list them all, and you wouldn&#8217;t want me to anyway.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Aside from my usual annual reading goals, I have no expectations from the year ahead. I&#8217;ll be happy if I find a few new books to love and maybe learn a thing or two.<\/p>\n<p>Wishing everyone a wonderful year of reading in 2019,<\/p>\n<p>Chick<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back in September, I decided on some reading goals for the rest of the year. I was supposed to finish the Harry Potter series, finish reading all of Barbara Michaels&#8217;s books, read some Kindle books, and read the bookshop-themed books &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=15235\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15235"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15235"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15244,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15235\/revisions\/15244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}