Volume 3, No. 2: A Love Letter to Spreadsheets and Slowness

Greetings, book and treat people!

In her latest newsletter, artist Anna Brones wrote about January as an in-between month. My birthday is in early January, and as a winter lover, January is one of my favorite months. I love the sharp sunlight and the way the air smells, the dark mornings and the golden afternoons. It’s always felt, to me, like a month for reflection, a time to slow down and dig in to grounding routines and practices. It’s also always felt like a time to leap off a cliff into the fresh bracing air—a time to try new things and shake off old patterns.

I love this idea of January as an in-between month because it makes space for both of these truths. Yes, I make new spreads in my planner, and get excited about my shiny new reading spreadsheet, and feel a sense of wonder and possibility. But I’m also still me, still muddling through, not sure yet which new routines will stick and which ones are just fluff. It is still deep winter, and my body is in hibernation mode. I’m craving slowness.

It is in this spirit of in-betweenness that I bring you these reflections on my reading in 2022 and my hopes and dreams for my reading in 2023. It’s all jumbled together—what I loved about last year’s reading, what I learned, what’s already working for me this year. Goals and projects and musings, metrics and unquantifiable realizations. I hope these messy reflections will bring you some inspiration, or excitement, or comfort as you move through this strange and beautiful in-between month.

My Commonplace Book

In 2022, I started a commonplace book. This was, without a doubt, the best new practice I wove into my reading life last year. I’d been thinking about starting one for a long time, and when I finally did—well, I love it more than I even imagined I would.

I love the idea of a book journal, and maybe one day I’ll start one. A place to write down thoughts about books, make pretty collages, record quotes, etc.—it sounds wonderful. But the truth is that I am a spreadsheet person. I’ve tried various other ways of tracking my reading over the years and nothing sticks. I always thought a commonplace book would be the same, that I wouldn’t be able to keep it up. How wonderful to be wrong!

I transcribed hundreds and hundred of quotes into my commonplace book last year. I love the practice of it, sitting down with a stack of books, revisiting passages I loved, choosing images to go with each quote. I also love the way it has made me slow down and pay closer to attention to what I read. I can’t wait to see what my commonplace book looks like in another year, or five, or twenty—a living record of the words that have moved and changed me.

Indie Presses: My Favorite Metric from 2022

In my January newsletter about my reading goals and reflections from last year, I wrote about how I had started tracking publishers more carefully. I was right about how much I would love it: it is my favorite metric from last year. This is partly because it’s a stat that proves something I know about my reading life: it is so much better because of indie presses. I read books from 90 different independent presses last year, including books from 12 different university presses. These books were rich and varied, surprising and unusual, challenging and full of joy. They included Lote (one of my favorite books of all time), Another Appalachia (a brilliant memoir that hasn’t gotten the kind of marketing that big press memoirs get), When the Whales Leave (a surprise favorite), and so many more.

Indie presses are the heartbeat and lifeblood of publishing, especially when it comes to queer lit. Want to read better books? Read more books from indie presses. I will never stop singing their praises as long as I live.

New Metrics!

As I was looking over my 2022 and 2023 reading spreadsheets in preparation for writing this newsletter, I realized that, for the first time in a few years, I didn’t ditch any metrics. I’m tracking everything I tracked in 2022 again this year. I’ve been tweaking my reading spreadsheet since 2016, and it’s exciting to realize that I’m starting to settle into something that really works for me, a tool that’s both a guide and an inspiration. But because I am a spreadsheet monster full of an insatiable hunger, I did add some new metrics this year.

Star Rating by Reason for Reading

This is perhaps the most absurd thing I’ve ever done, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’ve been tracking the reason I read books for a few years now, and even though the data is never especially useful to me, I haven’t been able to give it up. This year I finally figured out how to make a chart that measures two stats at the same time: reason for reading, and star ratings.

I want to know if there’s any correlation between why I decide to read a book and how much I like it. I know this is very detailed, and very nerdy, and so far, the chart is a useless jumble, so I might not learn anything. When I think about all the different reasons I read books, I don’t have a gut instinct about which ones usually lead to five-star reads. But I am so curious about it, so here we are. I will report back in December.

World Regions

This is entirely thanks to a wonderful conversation I had in December with my bookstagram friend Charlott. We traded links to our reading spreadsheets as we were building them, and spent several days chatting back and forth across time zones (she’s in Germany) about what and why we track. It was inspiring and invigorating and reminded me that sometimes the internet gives truly spectacular gifts.

She did the work of separating all the countries in the world into regions, so I am indebted to her for this graph. I’ve always tracked individual countries, but, as Charlott pointed out, publishing, especially when it comes to books in translation, is extremely skewed. I read a fair amount of African lit, but how many of those books are by Nigerian authors? I’ve never bothered to pay attention to how many books I read by European authors, because it’s a lot, but how many of those authors are from Eastern Europe? I’m excited to pay closer attention this year, and expand my reading into world regions that I’ve neglected in the past.

The Year of the Reread

I wrote about embracing rereads last year, and I did! I reread over 30 books last year: The Town of Babylon and Yerba Buena, Circe (an annual event), The Broken Earth trilogy, Hari Conner’s incredible Finding Home comic, and a whole lot of beloved romance, including most of KJ Charles’s catalog. I plan to do it again, because the more I reread, the more I realize just how much I love it—it might be my favorite kind of reading.

This year, I’m going to keep rereading for comfort (I’m currently listening to a Cat Sebastian novel as my bedtime romance read) and as a way to dig deeper. I’ve already set aside a stack of books I’m excited to revisit, most of them novels I read for the first time last year. One thing my 2022 rereading taught me is that it’s never too soon to reread. I reread The Town of Babylon only a few months after I read it for the first time, and it was such a joy to revisit something that still felt new.

I’m currently rereading How to Write An Autobiographical Novel. So far I’ve only read one essay. I’m pausing between each essay to write and reflect on it. The first essay is stunning. I wrote a few pages after reading it, not just about the work itself, but about memory, and being fifteen, and what it feels like to write stories. This is the best decision I’ve made about reading this year. I plan to do the same thing with Tomboyland.

Read the World (and Other Lifelong Reading Goals)

In 2021 I set a few challenges for myself and made tabs for them in my reading spreadsheet: to read 50 books each by disabled, Indigenous, and trans writers. I did it again in 2022, adding another goal: to read books written by authors from 50 countries. I have never completed any of these challenges, but they have been a fantastic way to focus my attention on particular books and authors.

I’m doing it again this year, with one important tweak and a few additions. I’ve decided to turn these lists into lifelong goals. This is in line with my desire to slow down, to read joyfully and deeply and carefully, with abandon and intention. Reading goals have never stressed me out—when I set myself all those reading challenges I knew it was aspirational. But when I realized I could make pretty spreadsheets and lists for reading projects that would take me years and years to complete—well, the world opened up.

So now I have a very exciting and fancy tab in my reading spreadsheet with a list of every country in the world. So far I’ve read books by authors from 67 countries. One day I will have read books by authors from every country.

I also made myself a tab for author catalogs, and it might be the thing that’s bringing me the most joy this year. I am not going to read all of Morrison and Baldwin this year, but one day I will, and having a place to track it keeps it at the forefront of my mind. That’s all my reading spreadsheet is, really: a tool that makes visible what’s important to me.

A Yearlong Read: In Season: A Natural History of the New England Year by Nona Bell Estrin and Charles W. Johnson

My mother gave me this book years ago. I found it when I cataloged my books last fall. It was hiding on a shelf I never looked at. I reshelved it on my unread nonfiction shelf, and, last weekend, picked it up on a whim.

It’s a collection of essays about the nature, ecology, wildlife, and weather of New England, written by Johnson (who used to be the Vermont State Naturalist). It also includesNona Bell Estrin’s beautiful field notes. These notes are small, daily observations about the Vermont landscape around Estrin’s home as it changes: the birds and tracks she sees, the daylight and weather, the quality of the snow.

I read the entries for half of January last weekend. It immediately grounded me and calmed me. After reading a few pages, I got up and watched the chickadees and downy woodpeckers at my feeder. On my walk later that day, I paid closer attention. So I’ve decided that this book will be my companion through the year. I’ll read about winter storms and spring thaws, the peepers and the changing leaves, as these things happen in the world around me. This is slowing down, for real: it will take me a whole year to read this book.

No More Favorites

Last year, as I’ve done for the past two years, I made two Best of Lists: Fiction (40 books) and Nonfiction (40 books). 80 favorites from one year sounds like a lot, but, my friends, it is not enough. I left books I loved off those lists. Then, scrolling through wrap-up post after wrap-up post on Bookstagram, I started to get genuinely agitated. I felt like I was suffocating in My Top 3 Favorites Reads of the Year and The 10 best books of 2022 and 10 Runners-Up and 20 Honorable Mentions and A List of all The Books I Read This Year, Ranked.

Look, you do you. If you want to pick favorites, go for it! If you want to make a distinction between your 10 favorite books and your 10 honorable mentions because…you can’t have 20 favorites, I guess?—well, if it brings you joy, go for it!

I am done with favorites. I loathe the very idea. Why am I comparing books to each other? Why I am trying to determine which of two books I adored I should leave off the list because the list can only have 40 books? There is no rule that says we have to love all the books we read the same way. I don’t know why I ever let myself get caught up in the favorites lie. It makes no sense. It is madness. I am done.

There will be no monthly favorites, no Best Of 2023, no list of 5 star reads. I’m thinking, at the end of this year, I’ll make a list of every book I read and loved. It might haver 42 books, or 193, or 211 and 97. I am here on this earth to embrace abundance.

Queer Your Year: Slowing Down & Taking Risks

In 2022, 56% of the books I read were written by queer authors, and 78% of the fiction I read had queer main characters. Yes, there were many reasons why 2022 was such a good year of reading for me, but this is the heart of it. Queer lit has been at the center of my reading life for the past three years. It is why I am so excited about books. It is why I am, again and again, challenged and moved and delighted by what I read. It is why the books I read are so creative and smart and funny and so full of love and ferocity. Queer lit is my reading home, and there’s no metric, no chart, no graph that could ever capture how much it means to me.

The Queer Your Year Challenge is really just a reflection of that. I’m using the challenge as a way to delve even deeper into queer lit, which is, let’s be honest, all I ever want to do anyway. It’s a joy to have all of you with me on the journey!

I’ve been considering making a blank version of my reading spreadsheet available to paying subscribers. It is extremely detailed, so I’m not sure how useful it will be for anyone not as data-obsessed as me. But, if you’re curious, I’m more than happy to share it, with all its bells and whistles. Just email me!

Here’s to a year beautiful year of reading for all of us! And, as always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I’ve been tacking tech sabbaths on Sundays this year, and even though I go on walks every day, there’s been something especially magical about my tech sabbath Sunday walks. Last weekend the golden light was breathtaking.

Catch you next week, bookish friends!