A Year in Reading
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Half an hour ago, I finished reading a book, Sarah MacLean's Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover. It was very good, and made me very grateful to have started reading romance this year. If a year ever needed happy endings (for women, esp.), 2017 was it.
I started reading romance because my job called for it. I don't have that job anymore, but romance is one of the beautiful things I'm left with still. (Also... more editing experience, I guess.) I'm very okay with not having that job. For the first time in my life, now, people ask me what I do and I say, without hesitation, "I'm a writer."
But back to the books.
My 2017 was very cleanly cleft in two uneven halves—before July 28th and after. That was my last day at work. My reading was cleft that way, too—when I had my job, I was reading for it, trying to drink sips of the ocean of forthcoming books. (It's impossible to drink an ocean, and also the water is poisonous—I don't fully intend that metaphor, but okay.) Then, my job ended, and I didn't read anything for six weeks, and when I started again it was old books, not old but not-new. Then, for a while, it was just romance and epic fantasy, because that was all I could handle. It was all I wanted.
My Goodreads goal was shot to hell, first by the six-week dry spell and then by the thousand-page fantasy novels, but I regained my balance. I read some more books that I loved. (Almost none of it, since August, has been literary fiction. I'm still figuring out what my new balance is.) Since I don't have a job anymore that lets me write their best-of lists, here's mine:
Novels You Can Read Like Candy Even Though They're Much More: The Impossible Fortress, Goodbye Vitamin, Public Relations
Novels About Women, Womanhood, Mothers and Daughters, Love, Sex, and the Internet: Woman No. 17, Grace and the Fever
Dang Astonishing Nonfiction: A Colony In a Nation, Priestdaddy, The Recovering, And Now We Have Everything (sorry, those last two don't come out until next year) (also if you're looking for astonishing nonfiction for next year: Tango Lessons)
A Beautiful Novel That Doesn't Fit Into Any of These Categories: Exit West
3500 Pages of Extremely Good Epic Fantasy: The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, Oathbringer
Romance Novels Turn Out to Be Fucking Amazing, How About That?: The Rogue Not Taken, A Scot in the Dark, Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover (yes these are all by one author, I'm working on branching out), Seduction on the Slopes (I copyedited this and it comes out next year and it's amazing)
Also I reread A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which I had never quite been able to grasp as a kid. Something about the pending nuclear war always felt slippery to me, and I could never tell when the main timeline shifted. It was wonderful, this time around. (I mean, it had always been wonderful.) This was the year, also, when I got a tattoo of Mrs. Whatsit's ant-on-a-hem tesseract demonstration on the inside of my arm. I got it in the summer, as a walk-in, when my job was getting really bad and I needed to remind myself who I am.
You get there, eventually.