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!
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.
ReplyDeleteHappy 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).
ReplyDeleteHappy 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.
ReplyDeleteHave never tracked my reading. Read A LOT. No tv. Always LIBRARY! Reading is pleasure and not feeling any need to change that.
ReplyDeleteThank you for showing up here again. Helps. PLEASE KEEP POSTING.