Happy new year, everyone! The whole holiday season is fun, Halloween through Thanksgiving, Hannukah, and Christmas. But my favorite is actually New Year’s Day. Not even New Year’s Eve, which can also be very fun, but the first day of the new year. So crisp! So clean! I don’t make resolutions; I don’t even start a new Bullet Journal on that day unless I need to anyway (I use two or three BuJos a year.) I just like the start of a new year.

So let’s take a minute to look at my reading habits this year. If you’re not using The StoryGraph to track your reading habits, I cannot recommend it enough. As you can see, it has very pretty graphs. And the personalized book recommendation algorithm has greatly improved over the past year or so. And it’s run by nice people, not corporate overlords. I don’t set reading goals for myself, but I do like seeing what I’ve read.

You can see at the very top of this image, which is the first on the Stats page of my StoryGraph account, that I read 42 books in 2022. That’s pretty normal for me. I might have read or listened to a book or two that that didn’t get entered, but that’s fine.

The users and librarians (a team of behind-the-scenes volunteers) tag the moods of books, and they get displayed in this pretty graph. Not surprisingly, I like books that are reflective, informative, and challenging.

Here we have the user- and librarian-tagged genres of the books I read, with Literary at the top. I’m surprised at how many memoirs I read; I think I got most of them through the library. Otherwise, these all track with what I feel like I read this year.

Do people still argue about whether ebooks and audiobooks are books? I hope not. The digital books in this chart, both audio and ebook, are all library loans. I only borrowed a couple of physical books this year. The library is a five-minute round-trip walk from my house. I can see it from the front porch. And yet, what if I can get the book now without leaving the couch? I don’t even have to disturb the cat.

The StoryGraph has more charts, plus customizable tags for your own use. You can mark titles as To Be Read, Reading, Read, or the newly added and all-important Did Not Finish (DNF, for you racing fans). You can give star ratings, you can join reading challenges, you can create buddy reads — I really can’t recommend The StoryGraph enough.

As you’ve all realized by reading this newsletter, I don’t only read books. I use Feedly as an RSS reader and Pocket to store things I want to read later (sometimes years later. It’s fine). Here’s the email Pocket sent me this week:

And since this is a post about my reading habits, I thought you might like to know the outlets I read regularly or have paid subscriptions for. Some of these I read online, some are paper copies I get in the mail, and some are apps on my phone:

• The New York Times
• Le Monde
• The London Review of Books
• The Times Literary Supplement
• The Paris Review
• Literary Hub
• Electric Literature
• The New Yorker
• Longreads
• The Wall Street Journal
• The New York Review of Books
• Astra (RIP)
• Bookforum (also RIP)

A Look Ahead

Not only do I not set reading goals, but I don’t plan my reading. I pick up whatever book on the TBR pile seems right at the moment, or I read whatever hold comes through from the library when it arrives.

But I have another semester of grad school coming up, and I know there’s going to be a lot of poetry and more Old English. And I splurged about bought all twelve Gallimard Blanche editions of Annie Ernaux’s books as a set from the good people at French Books Online. They have arrived and are waiting for me to finish Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant before I start those.

I’m also going to take a month or so to work on revising the French translation I drafted over the summer, so look for translation notes in the next couple of newsletters. And I know there are essays on a poem by Robert Frost and Leopold Bloom’s love of his cat in Ulysses scheduled for Useful & Strange this winter.

I had mentioned in the newsletter that we might start a read-along, and some people were interested, but not enough for anyone to say what kind of book they might want to read. So we’ll shelve that for now.

And finally, I’ll be enabling payments for this newsletter in 2023. For now, all the posts will still be available for free, and any monthly contributions will help me set aside more time to create more useful and strange literary things for you. No paywalled content yet, just kicking in a little cash to help support the newsletter.

Happy new year! And seriously, start using The StoryGraph.

A Toy at Rest

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