My Reading Year 2023

Some notes on my reading year 2023. I read 47 books. I overwhelmingly read romance, much more than any other genre. I have no regrets about that. There wasn’t a single book this year that stood out as more of a favorite than the rest.

We Could Be So Good is the one that grabbed me from the first sentence.

Mr. & Mrs. Witch is the one that set me on my path of reading mostly romance.

Dept. of Speculation is probably the one I read fastest.

I don’t finish books I wouldn’t recommend, so try whatever on this list looks good to you!

For Never & Always How to Excavate a Heart Kiss Her Once for Me You're a Mean One, Matthew Prince In the Event of Love Eight Kisses Written in the Stars Her Body and Other Parties Future Tense The Blazing World The Hacienda The Haunting of Hill House The Turn of the Screw The Fall of the House of Usher We Could Be So Good An Island Princess Starts a Scandal From Bad to Cursed Payback's a Witch Chef's Kiss Solomon's Crown The Enchanted Hacienda The House in the Cerulean Sea The Neighbor Favor Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries Red, White & Royal Blue Nimona Ana María and The Fox The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches Hana Khan Carries On You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty Ayesha at Last The Widow of Rose House Wyngraf Demon in the Wood Graphic Novel Flowers from the Storm Mr. & Mrs. Witch Guards! Guards! A Spindle Splintered Dept. of Speculation Never Say You Can't Survive Bloodmarked Amsterdam The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet Piranesi The Hate U Give Hell Bent The Mysterious Affair at Styles Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb Trilogy Book 1)

How I talk about books online 📚

In today’s issue of Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders writes about how to fix GoodReads to avoid people review-bombing books to lower their ratings.

I haven’t used GoodReads in a long time but Anders brings up a point that has me wanting to share how I write about books online. Anders shares an anecdote about losing a bunch of star ratings on songs in iTunes and then switching to a simple love/don’t love system, then says:

And I feel like with books, it’s pretty similar. Did you like this book or not? Would you recommend it to your friends? Would you look out for more books by this author in future? The important questions are all yes or no.

And this is how I tend to share books when I’m writing about them quickly.

If I loved a book, I’ll end my short post with “Highly recommend.” If I like it, I’ll just share that I finished it and maybe a brief description. If I don’t like it, I probably didn’t finish it, and I probably won’t post about it at all.

When I write a full review, I share a summary, what I loved, what I wanted more of, what I need to warn you about, and who should read the book. I only write this kind of review about books I would recommend.

Since 2007 I’ve had a policy of only publishing positive reviews on my website and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

📝 Planning Writing Goals with Kate McKean

Kate McKean’s Agents and Books newsletter yesterday includes a flowchart to help you plan writing goals for next year.

I’m in the “I need a new idea” bubble, or rather, I have lots of ideas fragments but I’m not psyched enough to write any of them yet so I want to hoard even more ideas. So my goals are to:

  1. Read more. Sure, I’ve read 41 books this year but I know I can read more. Let’s have a loose, gentle goal of 50, counting audiobooks, comics, kids’ books, everything.

  2. Journal and blog. I’m going to do at least some of Esmé Weijun Wang’s Rawness of Remembering: Restorative Journaling Through Difficult Times. I’ve also got Austin Kleon’s The Steal Like an Artist Journal and Leigh Bardugo’s The Severed Moon. So I’ll look to those for help, and of course I’ll blog, too. I’m not setting a specific blogging goal but let’s say I’m shooting for some form of long-form journaling at least once a week.

  3. Have fun. If I’m doing 1 & 2 and it’s not fun, I’ll figure out how to make it fun.

❤️ The loss of a loved one 🦋

CW: Parental Death

My husband, W., has been blessed to have two mothers: the one who gave birth to him and the one who has been a constant presence since his birth as a friend of his parents and who married his dad after his dad and mom divorced. This bonus mom, as I call her, is named Cindy, and she died last Wednesday after a lengthy and unidentified illness.

Her sister wrote a beautiful obituary for her that does a great job capturing her beautiful spirit. It’s especially hard to lose Cindy right around the holidays, as so much of their magic has been fueled by her beautiful energy and hard work.

I know that I’m in the midst of grieving my dead when they come to me in dreams. I had a dream on Thursday night that my little household was traveling with Cindy (a thing we actually did sometimes, whether in Scotland or South Carolina). It was a super normal travel experience and a super normal dream and I woke happy to have had such a boring dream about her.

I’ve been thinking through little moments that make Cindy who she is (and as she lives on in our hearts it’ll be a while before I use past tense to talk about her), and I might write about it later.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking through all the little holiday things I can learn from her to make this time special.