Year of reading, year of worry
Yet 2018 was marked by hope and joy
2018 comes to a close and it’s time to take stock of the year that was.
I have no grand plan for this space. Each week I sit down and assess what’s on my mind regarding the world of books and reading (broadly defined) and then do my best to flesh out that notion for the benefit and entertainment of the reading audience.
I think of each column as the start of a conversation, so reflecting on the past 12 months reveals preoccupations I may not have been entirely aware of at the time. What have I been up to?
I kicked 2018 off with a column in which I vowed to read more books, because 2017 had knocked me off my stride and I recognized the loss in my life when I wasn’t reading as much. I made sure to set aside at least 30 minutes every day for reading not related to anything for work, just reading to read. I marked in my online calendar each day I was successful.
Mission accomplished. I finished 27 more books in 2018 than in 2017.
One of my preoccupations of the year was arguing that we must protect important parts of the book ecosystem, like university presses whose funding is under threat, or independent bookstores trying to survive as real estate gets pricier.
I also argued that readers must be protected from a different kind of threat: Sean Penn’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad “novel,” “Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff.”
I put my cheerleader hat on for bookstores with titles stocked to the sky (like the Lake Forest Book Store), for kids being allowed to read freely (even if something seems like a stretch) and for teachers to be given the autonomy necessary to work with students as the individual humans we know them to be.
I strongly advocated for the practice of tsundoku, acquiring more books than you will ever have time to read, while also strongly cautioning against the design trend of displaying one’s books spine-in to give a monochromatic color effect.
This is an abomination on par with Penn’s “novel.”
In May, in the span of a week, we said farewell to two giants with complicated legacies: Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth.
I also took the time to remember two of my all-time favorites, whose voices I thought we could use today, Molly Ivins and Erma Bombeck.
I feel as though I spend a lot of my day worried, about the present, about the future, about the world at large and about my community closer to home. These past couple of years, so much feels so scarce, so precarious, even as we’re told that we’re living in times of abundance.
But looking at what I wanted to talk about with you folks, I see some measure of worry, but also equal parts of hope and joy. The mere act of having a chance to spend some portion of my week thinking about books and reading, bookstores and readers, too, seems to have decidedly positive effects on my overall worldview.
It’s even better when I declared that in another life I want to return as a bookstore cat, and a handful of people wrote to me to say, “Me too!”
So let me finish this reflection with a thank you to the readers who are always there and a vital part of the conversation. I’m going to keep going as long as they let me.
I hope your 2018 finishes strong and your 2019 starts even better.