2020 reading

[white_hart]

I read much, much less this year than I have done in recent years; only 43 books, compared to 70-odd for the last couple of years. Maybe it's the pandemic; I know lots of people have commented that they've been struggling to focus on reading, and that's definitely affected what I read (much more fluff and lots of romance). I do wonder, though, if it's at least partly due to being back on antidepressants. I went through a long period a few years ago where I hardly read at all, and rediscovered reading once I came off ADs. And it's noticeable that the real drop-off was in the latter part of the year, after I'd gone back on them in July. I read 36 books up to the end of July, and only seven after than, and have only finished two books since the middle of September. (I'm currently reading Ursula Le Guin's No Time to Spare and the Silk and Steel anthology in very small chunks, and am nowhere near finished with either.)

The ADs have done me a lot of good, but I do miss reading.

Of the 43 books I read, only 6 were by men (and one other was co-authored by a man and a woman). Only 5 were by people of colour (I meant to do better, and have been deliberately buying books by POC, but a lot of that buying happened after the slowdown in reading so I haven't got to them yet). 11 (as far as I can tell) are by LGBTQ+ authors.

Full list:

The Found and the Lost - Ursula K Le Guin
In the Vanishers’ Palace - Aliette de Bodard
The Duchess War - Courtney Milan
The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man - Dave Hutchinson
This Golden Fleece - Esther Rutter
Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide - Kate Charlesworth
Madam, Will You Talk? - Mary Stewart
Bloodlust and Bonnets - Emily McGovern
Alice Payne Rides - Kate Heartfield
Widow’s Welcome - DK Fields
Silver in the Wood - Emily Tesh
Wintering - Katherine May
Nimona - Noelle Stevenson
Tombland - C.J. Sansom
Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
The Case of the Drowned Pearl - Robin Stevens
Favours Exchanged - L.A. Hall
The Salt Path - Raynor Winn
Rivers of London: Action at a Distance - Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel
False Value - Ben Aaronovitch
Empire of Sand - Tasha Suri
Deep Secret - Diana Wynne Jones
Rain - Melissa Harrison
Spellswept - Stephanie Burgis
Hav - Jan Morris
Jeremy Hardy Speaks Volumes - Jeremy Hardy
Network Effect - Martha Wells
To Say Nothing Of The Dog - Connie Willis
Witchmark - C.L. Polk
Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race - Reni Eddo-Lodge
Once and Future - Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy
Wild Dress - Kate Fletcher
Fine Deceptions - Stephanie Burgis
Boyfriend Material - Alexis Hall
The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water - Zen Cho
A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking - T. Kingfisher
Consolation Songs - ed. Iona Datt Sharma
Harrow the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Thornbound - Stephanie Burgis
Tea and Sympathetic Magic - Tansy Rayner Roberts
Death Sets Sail - Robin Stevens
Spoiler Alert - Olivia Dade
Walking Home - Clare Balding

Comments

[maia]

That's interesting about antidepressants and reading. I've been on antidepressants my entire adult life. I read voraciously as a child and teenager - often several hundred pages per day - I don't read nearly as much in adulthood - I wonder if it's connected?

[white_hart]

I don't know for sure that it is the ADs - correlation is not causation, after all, and this has definitely been a year when lots of people struggled to read. And I think that adulthood comes with lots more responsibilities which mean you can't necessarily have the uninterrupted reading time you did as a child. (One thing I struggle with is background noise - I find it impossible to read with music on, and difficult with dialogue, and my partner usually has the TV or radio on, and if I sit in the garden in summer then there's always music coming from somewhere because this is suburbia. And now I finally have a comfy chair upstairs it's winter and I'm tired all the time.) But it could be that the ADs are contributing.

[maia]

correlation is not causation

Yes, indeed!


this has definitely been a year when lots of people struggled to read

Yes, indeed!


adulthood comes with lots more responsibilities which mean you can't necessarily have the uninterrupted reading time you did as a child

Yes, indeed!

(Have you ever read The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia by Laura Miller? Miller loved Narnia as a child, then felt betrayed when she recognized the Christian symbolism as a teenager (she grew up Catholic and hated it), avoided Narnia for many years, then re-read as an adult. The Magician's Book is - among many other things - a meditation on reading as a child vs. reading as an adult. It's a fascinating book; I highly recommend it.)


now I finally have a comfy chair upstairs it's winter and I'm tired all the time

Fatigue definitely has a big impact, for me. So often I'm just too tired to read.

[perennialanna]

I have 12 years worth of reading lists, years split fairly evenly between anti-depressants and not, to show that I read far more when on anti-depressants.

The issue for me is time. The year I was on maternity leave with my first child and this year (in which my workplace was closed for several months) were the years in which I read almost as much as I did before having children. This year (213 finished books) almost approached teenage summer holidays in numbers of pages read, and in my ferocity of concentration and blanking of the outside world.

The other thing this year has in common with adolescence is a sense of isolation, of closed doors. In other years I've been able to go out, to cherish friendships and even pursue romance. None of this has been possible this year. It's been a good year for books (and I've enjoyed every single one I've finished), but I think, heretically, that I'd rather have read fewer books and been able to do more.

[white_hart]

I have, of course, lost my commuting time, and I do think that even though it's not much (maybe 20 minutes each way, maybe a bit longer on the way home if I don't walk) that does help me keep up reading momentum. I've been trying to read in my working-from-home lunch breaks instead, but it's all too easy for the time to get eaten up by bits of domestic admin and discussions of what we might have for dinner.

And, of course, work has been utterly exhausting, and my brain has often just been a seething mass of stress and anxiety which has made it hard to escape into words. (And when I was on ADs before, I was just depressed!)

[perennialanna]

I am still in work, of course, and commuting by bike means that isn't a reading time - but since we abandoned the staffroom (too small for distancing) and started eating in odd corners of the building I've consciously read rather than looked at my phone at lunchtime, because the staffroom is officially a Phone Zone, but other bits of the building are less so - we can't use our personal phones anywhere the children are allowed, for obvious reasons, and the office is very much a debatable land, especially at lunchtime.

Having very anxious children in April and May meant I frequently went to bed at the same time as them, to be a reassuring presence. So I read books because anything involving a screen attracted their attention when I wanted them to be settling down.

One of the breakthroughs this year was discovering Romance* as a genre. After spending years only picking up my Kindle once or twice a year, when it became unresponsive at the start of the month getting a new one with my Christmas money was an immediate decision. This time last year I might well have just let the old one die in a corner.

*Well, smut, tbh.

[white_hart]

When I was going into the office I was eating at my desk (which invariably ended up meaning I was also reading email, rather than reading a book as I would have done in the staffroom) and then going for a walk to get some time away from the desk. And I am far too inclined to end up looking at my phone rather than my book/kindle when I go to bed at night. (I'd leave it downstairs but I like to listen to podcasts while I'm dropping off.)

Romance is my big discovery of the year too, though I tend to skip the smutty bits ;-)