Undine: "Welcome to 2025! New year, new me! This is going to be the year when I get so much writing ---"
Covid enters the chat, with a positive test line so reddish-purple that it looks like a murder scene.
Oh, well, eventually I will feel better.
In the meantime:
- The fires and the political scene are terrible, but you already knew that.
- Reading actual books instead of doomscrolling through the now-canceled WaPo & NYTimes is better for mental health.
- Columnists like Jennifer Rubin have quit and have now gone to our old friend Substack. While I admire that in principle, it's the whole cable & streaming services thing all over again: you pay for cable, and then you pay extra for Hulu, Apple+, Netflix, etc.
- Teaching is going well, and if Covid 1.0 taught us anything, it's that we can hop on Zoom for a class or two if we are not too sick to teach but too sick to risk infecting others.
- Everyone on my social media counts the number of books that they read in a year and then posts it at the end of the year. I've never done this & don't remember seeing this before. Questions: Does everyone keep track like this? Should I start doing this?
Hope your new year is going well!
3 comments:
We have an unwritten rant in drafts about why we're not counting books or setting book reading goals or doing anything to make reading more like a job and less like a fun hobby. Plus competitive people are jerks about the number of books we read already. Like, reading is for fun, it's not a race. And when #2 did a reading steam punk books challenge for the blog many years back it took the joy out of reading the books for her.
Happy 2025! I am really sorry you are sick. 😢 I read a lot on Kindle (actually on the Kindle app on my phone and the desktop Kindle app) so it automatically tracks books. I don't care about challenges and stuff, but I do occasionally check how many I've read (albeit those will be only ebooks). I usually hit 200 in a year, mostly because I no longer watch TV shows or movies at home. I find I cannot concentrate to video entertainment, so I read pretty much always read when I have downtime (unless I waste time on stupid social media, but that's a self-directed rant for another day).
Happy New Year and sorry you are starting it with Covid. I do track what I read, in a notebook rather than on an app, but not to be competitive. Reading for me is very related to mood: I read 100 books in 2024, without that ever being a goal. It's more than I've read in all the time I've been tracking (70-80 is more usual). For me it's significant because this last year was a better one for me in many ways, and I think the amount of reading I did is evidence of that. So I guess I'm tracking myself as much as the reading. It does also help me keep tab of am I reading diverse enough authors. I haven't done a reading challenge in years because that does turn things into a chore, but I have sometimes taken suggestions from them when I've realised there's a genre or type of author I haven't engaged with.
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