This month was bookended with genre fiction, with the middle a delicious mix of fiction in translation as I slowly work through my backlog of such titles. I realize that I started this project out with more ambition than is sustainable in the long term, and so I am scaling back the digging through translated works to about three a month, rather than half a dozen. This leaves more room for nonfiction, poetry and works not specifically from the translated fiction/subscription backlog. And that relieves the pressure on my reading habits and thus makes for a more pleasurable pastime.
And at the last minute I got a jump start on National Poetry Month with Taha Muhammad Ali’s So What, from Copper Canyon Press. Expect to see a lot more poetry show up here in the next reading update.
In short fiction I have fallen significantly behind my original goal. In order to hit an average of one piece of short fiction a day for the year at this point I would need to read four a day for the next month in order to catch up, and in order to free up that time I would need to neglect my girlfriend, our cats, or what little sleep I currently manage.
After about 25 years of trying and failing, I have finally completed reading all 364,000+ words of The Brothers Karamazov. It was magnificent, and difficult, and dense and occasionally fragmented, and absolutely worth the time and effort I put into the seven weeks it took to read the book from the beginning to the end.
With Dostoevsky out of the way for the moment, I turned my attention to the embarrassingly large stack of books in translation I have collected over the past half-dozen years, but not read. Items 7 through 12 on the book list below are the results of that first pass. These shorter, non-Dostoevsky books just seem to fly by.
Because I have been reading so many books, my short fiction reading has sort of fallen by the wayside. Still, a dozen or so in a month is pretty good.
In January 2021 I completed three books and 21 short stories. Not bad for such a chaotic month. I had hoped to average a short story a day, but life and world events intervened and significantly cut short my quiet time. Perhaps February will be better.
In the short stories, Coffin Bell is the online journal which recently published my short story “Occupied Space.” I recommend them highly.
I keep the complete list of books I own over at LibraryThing, and the terribly incomplete list of books I have read over at GoodReads. This list will be updated frequently.
December started slow and distracted, as I abruptly found myself on a new project at work while simultaneously scrambling to wrap up and hand off the suddenly previous project. This made for a lot of long days and late nights, with little time or brain-space in which to read. Fortunately short fiction can with care be fit in the nooks and crannies of a busy schedule while also allowing enough time to actually, you know, read the works, and not simply scan them so that they ricochet off the contours of my brain and exit through my ears.
All of these stories are from two books – The Long List Anthology, vol. 6, and The Apex Book of World SF, vol. 1.
In total, I read 102 short stories in 2020. Not quite the 500 I originally hoped for. Such was 2020.
Starting in 2021 I will break the long-form prose list into monthly installments and combine it with the short prose list. No need to make my reader(s) wait a full year to see what I read in January.
This is the list of all 86 books I read to completion in Calendar Year 2020.
I started the year focusing on short fiction, as detailed in other posts. Then the lockdown hit in March, and I was put on a crazy work project in April which had me working 50+ hour weeks, second and third shift until the end of July. In order to stay sane and balanced I switched to long-form fiction, and specifically fantasy fiction.
This was driven in no small part by a decision to write a fantasy novel. At ConFusion 2020 I spent a lot of time talking to a number of self-published authors, who have found varying degrees of success in their craft. All of them, however, were quite happy with the self-publishing route, and in reading their work I discovered for myself that which many people have known for a long time: Self-published work can be just as good, or even better, than work published through more traditional means.
These authors introduced me to the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off, the winners and runners-up of which are equal (at least!) in quality to the best of traditionally published fantasy.
I have been well aware of this with reference to poetry, but for some reason the blind spot around self-published prose was more difficult to, well, see.
So I read a lot of fantasy, including the first nineteen books in R.A. Salvatore’s Legend of Drizzt sequence set in the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons and Dragons. There are 36 books in the series, but after 19 the boundary between reality and not-reality was beginning to blur.
In October I participated in the Sealey Challenge and read 31 poetry books in 31 days, which did wonderful things for my state of mind.
In November and December I read many of the novellas I have accrued from Subterranean Press. This also did wonderful things for my state of mind.
Anyway, here is the list. Next year I will break the long-form reading list up and combine it with the short fiction lists I have posted at the end of each month.
2020.05.05: Salvatore, R.A. – Homeland
2020.05.08: Salvatore, R.A. – Exile
2020.05.10: Salvatore, R.A. – Sojourn
2020.05.12: Rowland, Diana – My Life as a White Trash Zombie
2020.05.23: Wang, M.L. – The Sword of Kaigen
2020.05.26: Eichenlaub, Anthony W. – Justice in an Age of Metal and Men
2020.07.05: Künsken, Derek – The Quantum Magician
2020.07.06: Salvatore, R.A. – The Crystal Shard
2020.07.10: Salvatore, R.A. – Streams of Silver
2020.07.14: Salvatore, R.A. – The Halfling’s Gem
2020.07.15: Hossain, Saad Z. – The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday
2020.07.16: Salvatore, R.A. – The Legacy
2020.07.17: Salvatore, R.A. – Starless Night
2020.07.18: Salvatore, R.A. – Siege of Darkness
2020.07.23: Salvatore, R.A. – Passage to Dawn
2020.07.30: Salvatore, R.A. – The Silent Blade
2020.08.03: Salvatore, R.A. – The Spine of the World
2020.08.06: Salvatore, R.A. – Sea of Swords
2020.08.08: Salvatore, R.A. – The Thousand Orcs
2020.08.10: Salvatore, R.A. – The Lone Drow
2020.08.12: Salvatore, R.A. – The Two Swords
2020.08.18: Salvatore, R.A. – The Orc King
2020.08.22: Salvatore, R.A. – The Pirate King
2020.08.28: Salvatore, R.A. – The Ghost King
Looks like I will be ending the year as I started it, immersed in short fiction. This month was the first time since March that I put any particular effort into reading short fiction despite my plan at the beginning of 2020 to try to read at least 200 short stories. That sounds like a lot, but considering the average short story takes about half an hour to read at a reasonable pace, that number could easily be doubled without taking a lot of time out of any given day.
There are nineteen short stories in this list, from two anthologies – The Book of Dreams, published by Subterranean Press, and Apocalyptic, published by Zombies Need Brains. I am fairly certain I picked up the Subterranean Press book as part of one of their occasional Grab Bags. Apocalyptic was part of a Kickstarter, the third or fourth annual such which ZNB puts on in order to support the publishing each year of a trio of themed anthologies. I submitted a story to one of their previous calls for submission but, as you may have gathered from the lack of cheering and shouting it to the heavens, that story was not accepted.
[NOTE: That story was later accepted by a different publisher, and will be released on January 1, at which time I will cheer and shout it to the heavens.]
I won’t make any predictions about what I may read in December, which starts (egads!) tomorrow. I am writing several short stories against rapidly approaching submission deadlines, and the holidays are always chaotic, although ironically much less so this year, when everything else is so much more so. I may read a lot or not at all.
The List
2020.11.09: Silverberg, Robert – “The Prisoner”, The Book of Dreams
2020.11.10: Shepard, Lucius – “Dream Burgers at the Mouth of Hell”, The Book of Dreams
2020.11.10: Lake, Jay – “Testaments”, The Book of Dreams
2020.11.10: Baker, Kage – “Rex Nemorensis”, The Book of Dreams
2020.11.10: Ford, Jeffrey – “86 Deathdick Road”, The Book of Dreams
2020.11.10: McGuire, Seanan – “Coafields’ Catalog of Available Apocalypse Events”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.10: Picchi, Aimee – “Solo Cooking for the Recently Revived”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.10: Huff, Tanya – “To Dust We Shall Return”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.11: Holzner, Nancy – “End of Eternity”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.11: Blackmoore, Stephen – “Little Armageddons”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.11: Johnson, Zakariah – “Almost Like Snow”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.11: Malan, Violette – “Shadows Behind”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.12: Keramidas, Eleftherios – “A Tale of Two Apocalypses”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.13: Enge, James – “Zodiac Chorus”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.13: Ning, Leah – “Last Letters”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.14: Vaughn, Thomas – “Gut Truck”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.14: King, Marjorie – “Sass and Sacrifice”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.15: Palmatier, Joshua – “The Ballad of Rory McDaniels”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.15: Jessop, Blake – “Trust Fall”, Apocalyptic
Welcome to the Big List of Books for 2020. This is the sixth iteration of the list of books and reading materials acquired by the Library at Winkelman Abbey. The previous five are here:
This list will continue the process started last year – book titles will link to the book publisher or distributor or other place (like Indiebound) where books can be purchased. Only as a last resort (or in the event the book was created using CreateSpace) will the link go to Amazon. Bolded titles are those I have read to completion.
And as always, you can find the complete list of book I own over at LibraryThing, and the terribly incomplete list of books I have read over at GoodReads.
The following is a list of all the books I read in calendar year 2019. Despite it being an extremely busy year, I still managed to squeeze in reading time, mostly by avoiding distractions like sleep. I only listed the books I completed.
In this list are 26 fiction titles, 19 poetry collections, and 5 books of nonfiction. On a five point scale, almost all of these were in the 3 to 5 range. I only scored two books lower than 3. I’m not including scores here because I included them in GoodReads and, less consistently, LibraryThing.
What this list doesn’t show is all of the short fiction and individual poems I read in mailing lists, magazines, websites, literary journals and the like. Those together would probably equal around a thousand pages, or say four additional books.
I can say that it was the poetry books that got me to 50 titles for the year. Not that poetry is trite or easier to read than prose; it is simply that poetry books (the works of Evan S. Connell notwithstanding) are in the main shorter than prose works.
Though each of these books was in some way remarkable, I want to specifically call out five of them for sticking with me well after reading:
Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin (fiction)
Here: Poems for the Planet, edited by Elizabeth Coleman (poetry)
Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang (nonfiction)
The Language of Saxophones by Kamau Daaood (poetry)
Becoming Superman by J. Michael Straczynski (memoir)
For 2020 I will track my reading a little differently: I will keep two lists, one for books and the other for short prose. As I ramp up my writing practice I will be reading A LOT of short stories as study for my own work. Keeping an account of this reading will help me figure out my own skills and shortcomings in the art.
Date
Author
Title
2019.01.17
Palmer, Ada
Too Like the Lightning
2019.01.25
Steinmetz, Ferret
Fix
2019.02.12
Greylock, TL
The Blood-Tainted Winter
2019.02.14
Tucker, Phil
Death March
2019.02.18
Clark, P. Djeli
The Black God’s Drums
2019.02.25
Hernandez, Catherine
Scarborough
2019.02.27
Link, Kelly
Origin Stories
2019.03.13
Adams, John Joseph and LaValle, Victor (eds.)
A People’s Future of the United States
2019.03.27
Oliver, Mary
Why I Wake Early
2019.03.29
Huey, Amorak
Ha Ha Ha Thump
2019.03.31
Dickinson, Seth
The Monster Baru Cormorant
2019.04.02
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence
A Coney Island of the Mind (50th anniversary edition)
2019.04.03
Ridl, Jack
Saint Peter and the Goldfinch
2019.04.04
sax, sam
madness
2019.04.11
Kocher, Ruth Ellen
When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering
2019.04.13
Montes, Lara Mimosa
The Somnambulist
2019.04.21
Cooper, Wyn
Postcards from the Interior
2019.04.24
Evans, CJ
A Penance
2019.04.25
Vodolazkin, Eugene
Laurus
2019.04.30
Ostups, Artis
Gestures
2019.05.10
Palmer, D. Thourson
Ours is the Storm
2019.05.20
Comola, Jessica
everything we met changed form & followed the rest
And here we are all of a sudden in calendar year 2019. This is the fifth iteration of my reading material acquisition list, and I plan to keep doing it much the same way as I have in previous years. For my complete catalog of books which I own, please visit LibraryThing. For the list of books I have read, with the occasional rating and review (I know, I know. I need to be better about reviewing things I read), please visit GoodReads.
One change from previous years – instead of linking to their pages on GoodReads, I will from now on be linking book titles directly to the appropriate pages on the websites of their publishers or, where publishers do not sell directly to customers, I will link to resources such as IndieBound and the like. Keep the money in the hands of the writers and publishers.
Looks like I will be ending the year as I started it, immersed in short fiction. This month was the first time since March that I put any particular effort into reading short fiction despite my plan at the beginning of 2020 to try to read at least 200 short stories. That sounds like a lot, but considering the average short story takes about half an hour to read at a reasonable pace, that number could easily be doubled without taking a lot of time out of any given day.