Greetings, book and treat people! It’s been a while. In the weeks since my last newsletter, I’ve left many messages for my senators, read many beautiful picture books, and baked one (1) kind of cookie (this one). I walked 10 miles as part of the 25 Mile March for Palestine and I turned 38. There was a glorious snowstorm. I finished reading Moby-Dick on December 31st and I will be writing many words about it in a future newsletter.
I’ve decided to read through all the unread Mary Oliver books I own this year—one per month until I run out of books. I’m currently reading New and Selected Poems, Volume 2, and this line from the end of ‘What I Have Learned So Far’ has settled on and inside my skin: “Be ignited, or be gone.”
Be ignited or be gone. This is the song I’m singing in my 38th year.
It’s my tradition to start the year with a newsletter about reading goals and intentions (here are my posts about it from 2022 and 2023). Before we get into it, some updates, housekeeping, and announcements:
Reading Tracker Templates & Customization
I always spend the week between Christmas and New Years doing a reading year-in-review, reflecting on what I loved about my reading life and what I want to change. Then I set up my reading tracker for the new year, something that brings me immense joy. As I was doing this, I started sharing about my process on Instagram, and someone asked if I’d build them a custom tracker for money.
Friends, this is my dream job! I would gladly—gleefully, even—spend my days building custom spreadsheets for folks to track their reading. Or, actually, anything: movies, recipes, birds, knitting projects, you name it.
So, I’m doing it. No one can stop me! I’ve already built custom trackers for a few folks and it’s been just as delightful as I dreamed. You can find all the details here. I’m offering tracker templates, which you can then customize to fit your needs, for $25, as well as customization services. I want to build you the reading tracker of your dreams!
This is still very new, but I am ridiculously excited about it. If you have friends, family, or colleagues who might be interested in this kind of service, I’d love it if you’d spread the word. I’m working on getting a simple website set up, but it might be a while.
Newsletter Structure in 2024: Free and Queer
Last fall I experimented with various different newsletter structures. I enjoyed the freedom, so this year, I’m doing what I want. Newsletters will be a mix of longform book reviews, personal essays, booklists, themed issues, mini reviews, and who knows what else—maybe something I haven’t even dreamed up yet!
For now, I’m not going to put anything behind a paywall. I’m just going to write about queer books, and also my doggo and Palestine and baking and trees and what’s keeping me going and what’s breaking my heart. I appreciate paid subscriptions more than I can say, and they are still the best way to support my work, but they won’t get you any bonus content. I’ll let you know if and when that changes.
Queer Your Year Book Club!
Queer Your Year 2024 is off to a rollicking start and it is bringing me endless heaps of joy. I’m running the challenge primarily through Instagram this year. You can check out all the details here. The Queer Your Year discord has also taken off and it’s currently my favorite place on the internet. If you love queer lit, or want to read more queer lit this year, please come join us!
The most exciting part of all of this is that there is now a Queer Your Year Book Club! We’re reading two titles each month that fit different QYY prompts. Usually there will be one fiction and one nonfiction pick. Informal and ongoing discussions take place on discord. In January we’re reading Indigiqueerness by Joshua Whitehead and Haruko/Love Poems by June Jordan. Athabasca University Press offers all their ebooks free; you can download Indigiqueerness here.
Goodbye, Substack!
I’ve been wanting to get off of Substack for almost as long as I’ve had this newsletter. I have quite a few small gripes with the company (I actually think it’s a terrible platform for new and unknown writers), but the dealbreaker is the fact that they platform Nazis. They apparently removed a few of these newsletters after significant public outcry, but this gesture is paltry, and does not absolve them from making money off white nationalists and defending it as “free speech”.
Moving this newsletter requires a lot of work and I haven’t had the bandwidth for it. But it’s time. My goal is to be off Substack by the end of the year. I’ll let you know when it’s happening, of course, and your subscriptions will continue uninterrupted. For now, I just wanted to make it crystal clear where I stand on this and let you all know that I’m working on untangling myself from a company I find abhorrent.
For a different perspective, check out Anne Helen Petersen’s note from a few weeks ago. I don’t agree with everything she says, mostly because I think a lot of it only applies to writers like her, with big followings and a stable income. Substack does very little for writers like me. But I do think it’s important for folks like her to wield their power however they can, and I appreciate that she’s doing so. As I’ve said before, we are all entangled with empire, and we are all complicit. My choice to leave Substack does not make me morally superior to anyone who chooses to stay. I’m just making decisions—little ones and big ones—to help me get through my days feeling whole.
Okay, now that I’ve written a whole newsletter in this introduction, it’s finally time to nerd out on book stats and reading goals!
My Only Actual Goal
I love setting goals, and as you’ll see, I have lots of reading goals this year. Spreadsheets are my love language. But I don’t set goals in order to complete them, and so having a lot of goals doesn’t stress me out. For me, goals are intentions. They’re how I make my reading plans and desires visible. They’re a way of saying, “I care about this thing, so I am going to take the time to make into a list, a tab in my reading tracker, a challenge.” Finishing the challenge or checking every book off the list is never the point. The point is to pay attention.
But I do have one goal that I would actually like to accomplish: write about every book I read as soon as I finish it. Last year, according to the data, I only reviewed 50% of the books I read. I’m not interested in reviewing every book I read, but I do want to write and reflect on every book I read, even if it’s just for me. I’ve been wanting to do this for years, and I’ve never managed it. It’s only January 10, but as of right now, I’m 10 for 10, and I’m feeling optimistic and excited. Here’s why it’s working for me so far:
I only write for 10 minutes. I set a timer, start typing, and just keep on typing until the timer goes off or I run out of things to say. Sometimes I get in a groove and write for longer than 10 minutes, but 10 minutes is the goal. Look, writing reviews sometimes feels daunting, even for me. But 10 minutes isn’t daunting. Setting a time limit makes starting easy, and starting is the hard part. I can’t recommend this strategy enough. It has completely changed my reading life.
The initial reflection is never public. I used to review books on Goodreads as soon as I finished them, but I fell out of the habit. Crafting a review for public consumption takes time and skill; dumping my thoughts onto a page in a jumble of misspellings does not. I do sometimes like to sit with a book for a while before reviewing it, but what I’m doing now allows for this, too. I can revisit my initial thoughts in few days or weeks or months. It’s a game-changer.
I made a reading journal in Notion and it’s so pretty. I love writing in it!
Tracker Updates
Every year I ditch some metrics and add others. Here are a few of the things I’ve changed on my reading spreadsheet in 2024.
Life Stats
I spent a solid two days importing all of my previous data into a new master spreadsheet. This included the spreadsheets I’ve been keeping since 2016, and the life book list I kept before that. It was a ton of work, but it was worth it, because now I have everything in one place, and a tab that generates life reading stats! I got this idea from the reading tracker Traci makes available to members of The Stacks Pack every year. There was a lot of excited screaming.
Now I can tell you that I have read 3,544 books in my life, and that only 37% of them were written by queer authors. I was a different reader in my twenties!
New Metrics
Book Settings by Country & US Regions: I’ve tracked author country of origin for a while, but this year I added two new categories to satisfy my inner geography nerd: book setting by country and US regions. I’m gonna have so much fun digging into the regionality of all my reads!
Books Read by Decade: This is another idea I got from The Stacks Pack! I already have a graph that shows me how many books I’ve read by century, but now I can get even geekier about it! I’m really excited to see how many books published in different decades of the 20th century I read this year.
Actual Time Spent Listening: This is a metric I’ve been dreaming about for years. I listen to a lot of audiobooks, and it’s fun to see how much time I spent listening in a given year. In 2023, it was 60 days, 4 hours, and 58 minutes. Except it wasn’t, because I listen to most books at 1.25, 1.5, or 1.75 speed. So I created a formula that calculates how much time I actually spend listening based on the speed of each individual book. Look, it makes my nerdy heart happy.
Indigenous Nations: This is an idea I got from someone I built a custom tracker for. I want to read widely across Indigenous Nations, both in North America and around the world, so this year I’ve decided to track it. I’m excited to see how it helps me diversify the Indigenous lit I read.
Goodbye, Star Ratings!
I finally got rid of the star ratings column on my tracker, because I just do not care. They are useless as an objective tool because everyone uses them differently, and they’re no longer useful even just for me. Nothing about tracking star ratings brings me joy, and this is all about joy.
Areas of Focus
For the past few years, I’ve created challenges for myself within my reading spreadsheet: to read 50 books by disabled authors and 50 books by Indigenous authors, for example. This year I’m doing it differently. I’ve come up with six areas of focus representing some of the themes, stories, geographies, and identities I’m most excited about exploring through literature this year. Each area of focus has a page in Notion with TBR and possibility lists, links to resources and recommendations, and space to write reflections on what I read. It thrills me.
I’ve created Storygraph challenges for most of these, because Storygraph challenges bring me more joy than spreadsheet tabs. I’ll link to them below; you’re welcome to join if you’d like! I don’t plan on “completing” most of them, but I love the community aspect of seeing what other people are reading.
Palestinian Lit
Reading about Palestine is not enough, and it won’t stop a genocide. But I fell in love with Palestinian lit last fall, and I am so, so excited to spend this year (and the rest of my life) tangling with it. My goal is to read three Palestinain books per month: poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. My January TBR includes Enter Ghost (fiction), A Land With a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism (nonfiction), and You Can Be the Last Leaf (poetry).
Disability Lit
Though I read some amazing disability lit last year, and own quite a lot of it, my 2023 stats were pretty dismal (only 3% of the books I read were by disabled authors). I’m determined to be more intentional about reading disability lit and disabled authors this year. Right now I’m reading Golem Girl by Riva Lehrer and really enjoying it.
Trans Lit
Last year I read 84 books by trans authors, so we’re going for 100, baby! I’m off to a great start with Faltas (amazing, review to come), and The Fifth Wound (so weird, so maximalist, review to come).
Indigenous Lit
I own a ton of Indigenous lit I haven’t read, and I’m hoping to big a big beautiful dent in it this year. At the top of the list: the Trickster trilogy by Eden Robinson and Fresh Banana Leaves by Jessica Hernandez.
Read the World
I have a lifelong goal to read a book from every country in the world. I expect it will take me 20 years or more. In the meantime, my friend Charlott has inspired me to think about what world regions I’m reading from. She sorted every country into 19 regions, which she graciously shared with me last year. When I started tracking my reads by region, I saw how skewed it was: lots of books from West Africa, but none from Central Africa; lots from Western Europe but none from Eastern Europe; plenty from East and South and Southeast Asia but none from Central Asia. So this year I want to read one book from each region in the world. As of this writing, I’ve finished or started books from 8 different regions!
Challenges
Look, I love them! They are so fun! They are a blend of so many things I adore: lists, checkboxes, reading in community, creativity. They provide structure and get me reading books I might not otherwise. If you want, they can involve stickers and prizes. Queer Your Year literally changed the internet for me (as in, it sparked friendships that I deeply value). Basically, they are a way for adults to play. I like playing. Count me in.
Queer Your Year
Obviously.
Queering Region
My friend Surabhi and I did a queer and nerdy thing. You can read all about it here. I’m absurdly excited. Are you tired of hearing how excited I am about my reading plans? Planning out my reading is its own hobby, related to but distinct from reading itself. Anyway, it’s going to be a year of thinking about queerness and how it intersects with place and ecology and landscape and geography and I COULD NOT BE MORE EXCITED.
24 Women in Translation
Juliana hosts this challenge every year and I had a blast with it last year. I did not finish it. I did read a whole lot of amazing books by women in translation. Win!
10 Books 10 Decades
This challenge, hosted by Reggie of @reggiereads, revolutionized the way I think about queer lit last year. I fell hard and fast and deep in love with 20th century queer lit. This year, I’ll be reading at least one queer book from every decade of the 20th century, in chronological order, starting with the 1900s. Some possibilities for this month include The Garden God by Forrest Reid (1905) and Claudine at School by Colette (1900).
The Stacks Mega Challenge
Traci made this super fun and ridiculously over-the-top reading challenge for members of The Stacks Pack and I’m so into it. I don’t even listen to podcasts! I just really love the vibrant community of readers that Traci has created. If you’re looking for a bookish place to hang out on the internet, I can’t recommend it enough.
I am going to have so much fun reading this year. I am going to learn so much. I am going to make so many dazzling connections. My brain and heart are going to fill right up. I can’t wait! Please come talk to me about all your reading plans!
All of these lists and graphs are incredibly satisfying to read about. I think I might start tracking my reading on notion it looks so great! I’m so over Goodreads as the only place I track. Congratulations on the custom tracker gig! It’s wonderful to be paid to do something you love so much. And a late Happy Birthday Laura! I hope you had a lovely day 💙🩵