Themes
We’ll see what themes emerge with this year’s reading. I have a good backlog of physical and electronic books to work through, so I plan on pulling primarily from that, with supplementary efforts to make sure I’m continuing to read across various axis of diversity.
Currently reading
- Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022, edited by Rebecca Roanhorse
- Source: Gift
- The Great Railway Bazaar, by Paul Theroux
- Source: Amazon Prime Reading
Completed
- Literary Journalism, edited by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer
- Completed: Jan. 4, 2023
- Source: Purchased for college literary journalism seminar, 1998
- Black Paper, by Teju Cole
- Completed: Jan. 15, 2023
- Source: Purchase
- Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, by Mason Currey
- Completed: Jan 28, 2023
- Source: Gift
- Bicycling with Butterflies, by Sara Dykman
- Completed: Feb. 13, 2023
- Source: Around the hill neighbor’s free pile
- The High Sierra, by Kim Stanley Robinson
- Completed: March 27, 2023
- Source: Gift
- An absolute joy of a read, reminding me of a couple of summers I spent in the Sierra as a camp counselor
- The area I worked wasn’t in the book’s coverage area, but there are areas near to where I’ve passed through on other vacation trips with my folks
- 530 some-odd pages!
- Digital Minimalism, by Cal Newport
- Completed: April 8, 2023
- Source: Library
- Interesting, but, since being away from Twitter since late Dec. 2022, a lot of what Newport describes and advocates for have already just fallen in
- If and when there’s a reconsideration of the 2010s and what social media meant, I believe a key conclusion will be a deleterious effect on attention spans and nuance
- I also believe a key finding will be, when it worked well, a serendipitous joy, shaded by the fact that the signal to noise declined over time
- Run River, by Joan Didion
- Completed: April 18, 2023
- Source: Library
- The narrative was very enjoyable on its own, but I really valued the place setting of the Sacramento Valley in the 1940s and 50s. So much recognition from my time there much later
- One of the events mentioned in passing in the book is the Wheatland Hop Riot, which, I did not know was a thing going to high school not that far over the Feather River from Wheatland.
- Diane Arbus: A Biography, by Patricia Bosworth
- Completed: May 14, 2023
- Source: Library
- I really struggled reading this until the last quarter of the book
- I suspect some is that the material itself, the life of Diane Arbus, is challenging, but also the biography is relentlessly and exhaustingly linear