Brows, Raised and Lowered
This is a post about reading books in 2022 and 2023.
Somewhere in middle- or high-school, I received the following advice on developing a good lifelong reading habit:
A newspaper a day,
a magazine a week,
a book a month.
(To say nothing of an atlas a fortnight, a TV guide a trimester, and blueprints once in a blue moon…)
At the time, I was a voracious reader who thought this a pitiful amount of reading. Newspapers every day! Parts of them anyway, the comics at least. Magazines, cover to cover whenever I could get my hands on one, and then over and over again until I could get another! I loved magazines. Probably a topic for another day. A book all the time! Between every class and during class whenever possible.
I have not followed this formula precisely over the years.
A reading roundup for 2022:
I read very few newspapers but quite a lot of “news.”
I read not-that many-magazines, but hundreds of comic books. Almost every Spider-Man-related issue published between 1997 and 2007, and a wider swath of Marvel books between 2004’s Secret War and 2007’s Civil War, including the acclaimed Planet Hulk and the boring Annihilation. The whole run of Paper Girls. Not too much DC.
I’ve considered trying to ‘catch up’ on comics before and always stumbled. What made this year different was finally breaking free of DeMatteis’ dreary slog of memorializing the Spider-books of his own youth. Straczynski’s take was a breath of fresh air, and I enjoyed Mr. Parker the science teacher, and Spider-Man the New Avenger.I read about 15 books and started a half dozen more. The Kindle makes me want to flit between items in my library. I think middle-school-me probably enjoyed carrying around his enormous hardback of The Stand, but would have loved to have had a device like this instead.
The new year is a time when people tell themselves they’re going to read more. Making resolutions is long out of fashion, but I think people will let you do “challenges” now. So here is my 2023 reading challenge: I’m going to close up a couple gaps in my reading of the classics.
Firstly, there are 361 chapters of War and Peace. That’s almost a chapter a day. I know that there are groups that read the book together as an annual project because I fell off of one a couple of years ago. I think that I will do better this year because I am going to ignore those groups. This will save me hundreds of hours spent reading about other people reading War and Peace.
Secondly, there are 54 chapters– or I suppose you could say, books— to the Animorphs franchise. That’s almost a book a week. I know that a lot of people around my age loved this series growing up, but I managed to totally skip it. I don’t know whether there is an online community that reads the entire series annually, but I do know that the original author has shared ebooks of the entire out-of-print run in this dropbox folder.
I don’t have an idea for something 11-13 chapters long to read on a monthly basis. Maybe that’s just for regular books?
I invite you to join my book club. As you may recall, we’re already in a book club together in which we read separately and don’t have to discuss the books.
Maybe I’ll chart my progress online (until I become busy, or embarrassed, or quit). I feel like there’s a little groundswell of people moving back to personal blogging now that twitter and the whole web2 decade is over, and I’ve been enjoying new blood in my RSS feeds lately.
Just remember our new club’s credo:
A chapter of War and Peace a day,
An Animorphs novel a week,
A Star Wars film novelization a month.Panama.