This year, my reading goal was 80 books. I decided I would read fewer than 2021 so I would focus more on longer books, rather than optimizing for sheer quantity.
I went past my goal by just a little. By 142, to be exact.
I know some people read more than this, but most people don’t. Just a few years ago, this would have seemed like an insane tally. And it wasn’t like reading took up a larger part of my life than it has in the past: this year, I also visited five countries, summited several mountains, wrote six manuscripts and revised several more. I transitioned from living alone in an apartment with my cat to being a digital nomad with my boyfriend. It’s been a big year!
And it’s been a big year for reading, too.
So how did I do it?
- Explore more genres
Prior to 2022, I’d read exactly one contemporary romance novel (Red White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston). I loved it, but every other contemporary romance I tried to read made me quit with cringe by page ten.
Then, in January, a plot idea for a contemporary rom-com bowled me over and refused to leave me alone. I had no choice but to write it, but I had no idea how.
Well, that’s not quite true. I knew that I needed to read widely in the genre, study how these books went together, and learn. So I turned to Twitter and put together a list of popular contemporary romances that also included things that interest me—neurodivergent characters, queer themes, complex subplots, women in STEM. And I started to read.
A lot of them were pretty cringe, but more of them were loveable. As I binged the genre I began to figure out authors I liked, tropes that worked for me, and warning signs that a book was not going to wrap up in a way I wanted. And I truly had so much fun.
Finding a new genre to deeply explore reignited my love for reading. It felt like a never-ending scavenger hunt, stumbling upon books new and old, watching authors’ work mature over many years and engaging with devoted readers. It was pretty easy to devour 85 romance novels this year, given all that!
This year, I also turned almost fully away from YA, which I’ve read voraciously for about fifteen years. This wasn’t a conscious choice, but looking at my stats on StoryGraph shows that my tastes skewed very much toward adult—especially in science fiction and fantasy. I explored incredible science fiction classics like The Dispossessed (seriously, everyone needs to read this) and newcomers like A Prayer for the Crown Shy (everyone also needs to read this). In short, I started looking for books that made me think deeply, which challenge my assumptions about the world or our standing in it. Adult science fiction really did this for me this year. I’m excited to lean into this more in 2023.
- Rely on the library
I may have a fancy tech job, but even so, buying 222 books full price would be a lot. Luckily, I have access to the Seattle Public Library, which fed me a steady stream of physical, audio, and ebooks all year long.
There were a lot of ancillary benefits, besides saving money. Because I travel all the time, I don’t have much space for physical books—which means I buy hardcovers of my very favorites (preferably directly from the author!) and consume everything else digitally. But I also don’t want to send a certain monopolistic tech giant all of my book money, so avoiding their ebook and audiobook services is great.
Supporting the library is dope. Everyone should do it. Libraries are amazing and revolutionary (literally) and librarians are incredibly cool. As citizens, one of the key things we can do to signal to our local governments that the library is important is to use its services. There are probably even more than you know about! Libraries loan objects sometimes, like projectors or air fryers or musical instruments. They have access to subscription services like Consumer Reports. They have classes and programs and events. It’s basically a utopia.
And if all that weren’t enough, the library hold queue effectively randomizes the order in which I read. I always have the maximum number of books on hold (25, for my library), and I read them as they become available. I choose what goes in that queue from my TBR, but not exactly when to read. This keeps things interesting and exciting, and keeps me reading quickly: if I like a book, I tear through it; if I don’t like it so much, I know that the sooner I finish the sooner I can get the next book off my hold shelf.
- Embrace multiple formats
This was the year I really started exploring audiobooks. I’ve been a podcast girlie for years, and worried that audiobooks would cut into my critical podcast time. But they actually play a slightly different role in my life—since there are never ads to skip or new podcasts to queue up, I can listen to audiobooks for hours without fiddling with my phone, making them perfect for long bike rides or car drives or even hikes.
I also got more comfortable guessing whether I’d want a book to be an audiobook or an ebook. Based on what I knew of the author, would I want to highlight sentences or annotate the margins? Am I familiar with the narrator and do I like their voice and style? For me, I found that romance novels, essay collections, and memoirs all worked better as audiobooks than ebooks, but YMMV.
I also read several books as Google Docs—which, of course, means these books aren’t out yet! I have had the immense privilege of beta reading for my talented author friends all year. So many incredible stories are in progress. I can’t wait for these books to be picked up and for everyone else to read them.
This helped my reading goal because reading a friend’s work is always exciting—and there’s usually a deadline, so I can’t lag too much. It’s also kind of fun to read in a different format, like in a web browser on my computer or phone, and to get to comment on things as I go. It engages a slightly different part of my brain than reading books where I’m not conversing with the author. So much fun!
I’m still counting these unpublished manuscripts toward my 2022 reading goal, even though they’re not logged on Goodreads.
And what did I learn?
Books that I would not have ever expected to be in conversation with each other totally can be. Common themes that I care about in general—like the environment/climate change—or in fiction—like diverse representation—showed up everywhere.
I loved to compare the philosophy of The Dispossessed (dystopian fiction, written almost 50 years ago) to some of the essays in All We Can Save (collection, published in 2020), and the worldview of Blackfish City (dystopian fiction, published in 2018). Environmental catastrophe is something we all confront in our lives, to greater or lesser degrees, and fiction and nonfiction can comment on it in different ways. Some of the essays in All We Can Save were by marginalized people, writing about how climate change is already an apocalypse, and others were about how those who suffer the most are still able to thrive amid everything. Comparing this to classic and modern dystopias is both chilling and empowering.
Romance novels that seem on the surface to be light and lovely often actually engage with complex issues of queerness, disability, and self-esteem (like The Queer Principles of Kit Webb, The Charm Offensive, Glitterland, Delilah Green Doesn’t Care, and Spoiler Alert, among many others), which related to the immense diversity of humanity (and human relationships and cultures) that I learned about in The Dawn of Everything. People are complicated, and nonfiction that discusses the ways in which this is true illuminates how these differences show up in fiction. Romance novels, being so focused on a single relationship, really require detailed, unique characters to work, but also very much take place in a specific society. And anthropological texts make these specific societies feel more like characters and less like invisible backgrounds! I suspect that sometimes authors don’t even know the ways in which their settings shape their characters, especially in contemporary fiction, but reading about drastically different societies makes this very stark (both in stories and in real life).
And reading so many books in quick succession helped me to get more out of each of them, especially when topics were similar—The Dawn of Everything, for example, definitely impacted how I perceived The WEIRDest People in the World, How to Hide an Empire, Who Ate the First Oyster, and Upheaval. History, and how it’s told, is a discipline rife with assumptions about the world, and it’s taught from a specific perspective. All of these books challenged the assumptions and perspectives that are usually ignored, and reading all of them together helped me notice where the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves still showed through in each one.
Finally, trends in publishing are very real. This can be good (a lot of the romance novels I really enjoyed this year are quite recent, because the space for queer, neurodiverse, and disabled protagonists has grown in recent years) and bad (I’ve read a lot of dystopias, and few recent ones are as illuminating, inspiring, and incisive as the ones from the ‘70s). It’s fascinating to see how tastes as a whole shift, and how books respond to and take inspiration from each other. Obviously, I always knew this to be true, but reading so widely and diversely this year really drove it home.
I don’t think I will read 222 books in 2023—probably many fewer. But then, I didn’t think I’d read so many this year, either! Books bring me a lot of joy, but so do many other things. I guess we’ll just have to see how the year goes.