Reading

2023 Reading Round-Up 📚

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Every year, I set myself a goal of reading at least 52 books over the course of the year — an average of one a week. This year I made it to 74 books. Here’s a quick (?) overview…

2023 Reading Goal of 52 books met! 142% (74 books) Fantastic! You've exceeded yoru reading goal by 22 books.

The trend of the last few years holds true, with another year almost entirely dedicated to escapist fluff. Surprised? I’m not.

Non-fiction: Just two books, counting for 3% of my reading. One was a nice behind-the-scenes look at The Wrath of Khan, the other was an excellent memoir by Deafblind author Elsa Sjunneson. I highly recommend Being Seen, especially if you have any interest in recognizing and combatting ableism.

Non-genre-fiction (where “genre” is shorthand — though, not very short, if you include this parenthetical — for science-fiction, fantasy, and horror): Absolutely nothing this year. Everything that wasn’t non-fiction was “genre” fiction.

Quality genre fiction: About the same as last year; primarily the Philip K. Dick nominees and my Hugo project, with a few others added here and there.

As usual, I read all of the books nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick awards. However, I’m no longer posting my thoughts or review on the nominees, as starting this year I am the coordinator for the Philip K. Dick award ceremony at Norwescon. While I have no input into selecting any of the nominees or the eventual winner, I don’t want to give any appearance of impropriety. So, I’ll just read and enjoy each year’s nominees, and you all will have to make your own judgements as to your favorites.

I added nine books to my Hugo reading project, bringing me up to 65% of the way through. This year’s selections were all good, without any I didn’t enjoy, but the surprises were Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Vor Game and Barrayar (and the other books in that series I read to make sure I got the whole story); I’d never read them before, and likely wouldn’t have picked them up based on the cover artwork and blurbs, but have ended up really enjoying the series and am looking forward to reading more.

Fluff genre fiction: Unsurprisingly, this once again ended up being the strong majority of this year’s reading. Lots of Star Trek novels, with a few detours here and there. And given everything that was going on in 2020 2021 2022 2023, it was very nice to have a bookshelf full of options that wouldn’t take a whole lot of brain power for me to disappear into.

One change this year is that I read a lot more digitally than I usually do. While I generally prefer physical books, there are times when digital books come in handy, or where they’re the only real option. In the first case, when we went on vacation this year, it was easy to bring along a small library on my iPad; in the second case, I’ve started actually reading the two SF/F magazines I subscribe to (Uncanny and Clarkesworld), both of which are distributed digitally.

Finally, Storygraph’s stats on my year’s reading tell me:

A graph of my reading over the year tracking number of books and number of pages. January, August, and September are the busiest months; March, April, and June are the slowest.

On to 2024!

2022 Reading Round-Up 📚

by

Every year, I set myself a goal of reading at least 52 books over the course of the year — an average of one a week. This year I made it to 68. Here’s a quick (?) overview…

2022 Reading Goal of 52 books met! 131%, 68 books. Fantastic! You've exceeded your reading goal by 16 books.

Continuing a trend from the last few years, this year was almost entirely dedicated to escapist fluff. Surprised? I’m not.

Non-fiction: A few this year, though for the most part, they were very much in line with my usual science fiction choices. The two best were Frederik Pohl’s memoir The Way the Future Was, encompassing the early decades of SF fandom, and Randall Munroe’s delightful What If? 2, where he once again takes answering silly scientific questions to absolutely ridiculous extremes. Also in this category was a series of books looking at the design work for various Star Trek ships across several series.

Non-genre-fiction (where “genre” is shorthand — though, not very short, if you include this parenthetical — for science-fiction, fantasy, and horror): Only one this year, but that one — Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove — was excellent.

Quality genre fiction: About the same as last year; primarily the Philip K. Dick nominees and my Hugo project, with a few others added here and there.

As usual, I read all of the books nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick awards, and once again, I failed to pick the winner. My personal favorite of this year’s slate was Tade Thompson’s Far From the Light of Heaven. This is the second time Tade has been nominated for a PKD award, and the fourth novel of his that I’ve read (after The Wormwood Trilogy, the last book of which was a 2020 PKD nominee), and I very much enjoy his work.

I added eight books to my Hugo reading project, bringing me up to 54% of the way through. My two favorites from this year’s set were Vonda N. McIntyre’s Dreamsnake and William Gibson’s Neruomancer.

Fluff genre fiction: Unsurprisingly, this once again ended up being the strong majority of this year’s reading. Almost entirely Star Trek novels, with a few detours here and there. And given everything that was going on in 2020 2021 2022, it was very nice to have a bookshelf full of options that wouldn’t take a whole lot of brain power for me to disappear into.

Finally Storygraph’s stats on my year’s reading tell me:

A graph of my reading over the year tracking number of books and number of pages. January, November, and December are the busiest months; April, August, and October are the slowest.
On to 2023!