My read-o-lutions for 2019 are much as they were for the past year: keep on reading on. (2018 was a great reading year!)

Except more non-fiction, more poetry, more letters, more graphic novels and comics. More storybooks, writers’ biographies and histories.

The underlying theme? More. But not necessarily more books. More kinds of books. With 36% of last year’s reading literary novels, I’d like to shake things up!

Series

With 25% of my reading in 2018 devoted to serial stories, I can’t help but be pleased with this.

Particularly as that includes finishing 13 series. The longest being Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna.

But I love returning to familiar characters. I still have series in my stacks for 2019!

Short Stories

Through the year, I read 14 collections of short stories (compared to 18 in 2017) along with some memorable singles in magazines and journals:

Spring 2018,
Summer 2018,
Autumn 2018,
Winter 2018.

Along with my Mavis Gallant reading, another three of her collections, I hope to read even more stories in 2019.

MustReadEverything Authors

With 20 struck from these lists over the past year, and only 12 the year before, I have a guess as to why I read fewer short story collections.

Nonetheless, there are authors on this list whose works I haven’t read for more than five years, so I hope to pull some of those from the shelf soon.

In 2018, I finished David Mitchell’s books and now I am reading through China Miéville, whose list of publications is even longer.

Adding MRE authors to the list when I haven’t finished reading everything from the previous lists of everythings? Foolishness.

20-Somethings and Stucks

Both longtime projects – books neglected on my shelves for more than twenty years and books which I’ve begun to read more than once but faltered with completing – saw a bit of progress (20 books in total).

My favourite read of the year was a 20-something shelf-sitter, Elizabeth Arthur’s Antarctic Navigation. It was also nearly my longest read (Paul Auster’s 4321 nudged past.)

The longest one I’m aiming for this year, in this category, is Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber. (1944)

Better

Last year, I noted there was one thing I needed to do better with. A stack of books that was being shuffled from room to room.

There has been some progress. In that they no longer reside on the floor. They’ve made their collective way onto a bookshelf.

But they remain unattended and unappreciated. I will try again.

What excites you about 2019?