No more mock-bookshelves and challenge data from Good Reads for me; when Amazon bought them out, I removed all my reviews but continued to participate in conversations and track my page progression through various volumes in my stack, thinking that was a decent compromise.

But the increased advertising and sales integration (and eliminating some of the sorting and recording mechanics, that were fun and social in nature but not immediately profitable) has made it harder for me to overlook the reality of their business model’s environmental and social impact.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Now it’s me and my spreadsheet, like old times (and I’ve resumed my LibraryThing habit), which reveals that, in 2022, I read 242 books or 55,689 pages. (How do I do it? I am an irregular correspondent, erratic birthday-card and birthday-present rememberer, and my social availability is dismal.)

My shortest books were the picture books that kept me company on many summer mornings, including Tomson Highway’s. And my longest books occupied most of my January reading, the novels of Marlon James (his Dark Star volumes being particularly chunky, 622 and 656 pages so far).

NOTE: THE WIDGETS BELOW ARE DESIGNED TO BE VIEWED ONLINE, NOT IN EMAIL OR A FEED READER, SO PLEASE CLICK THROUGH.

242 Books Read

2021 = 442 books

% Of 2022’s Reading – 14%

POETRY: Eager to feel more comfortable, I sought out new-to-me poets, read, then eread, reread, and reread.

% Of 2022’s Reading – 17%

DRAWINGS: This year I spent a lot more time looking at the pictures, in books both for adult and young readers.

0
# Pages Read

Shortest = 32

Longest = 656

Usually at this point I mention how much my TBR has grown in the past year, as if there’s any hope of my reading the more-than-nine-thousand long list of titles. One of the unexpected joys of reassuming my LibraryThing habit is that my tagging is a mess, so my TBR sits at 15 books. Who knew that technology really WOULD make me a more efficient reader?! (But since I started drafting this post, I’ve already doubled that, so, hmmmm.)

Either figure is a fiction of sorts. Which suits me, because fictional books are almost as much fun as real paper-and-ink books. In 2022, there were a lot of books in my books in my stack. Even one of the most corrupt characters I met, in Jess Walter’s The Cold Millions (2020), had an awesome library:

“Finally, they settled into what Lem Brand called the main library, which, like the landing, was two stories tall, but felt to Rye as cozy as a pair of new socks. The walls were floor-to-twenty-foot-ceiling with books, and books disappeared into the sky, leather-bound volumes climbing and climbing, a sliding ladder to reach them all.”

Anders has a much more modest arrangement in Mohson Hamid’s The Last White Man (2022):

“The place was neat and orderly, everything put away where it belonged, not that Anders had many things except for books, of which he had an unusual quantity, or more than most young men, stacked against the walls on planks of wood and cinder blocks, the simplest possible bookshelves, reminding Oona of how bookish and methodical he had been as a teenager, such an unlikely, earnest reader.”

And Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 (2022) is pretty much a book log with a main character, which is to say that I loved it, inhaled it nightly until it was done, photocopying pages instead of keying in passages. (Susan, I think this was one of your recommendations?)

Quietest months – April and May (2021, January and February)

Busiest months – August and December (2021, October and December)

Translation – 30 (2021=46)

Countries Visited – 32 (2021=55)

Canadian – 116 (2021=81)

Female – 57% (2021=66%)

Literary – 37% (2021=34%)

Non-fiction – 32% (2021=45%)

Writers of colour – 53% (2021=69%)

LAST YEAR’S REFLECTIONS, 2021, are here.

Toggle in each category to reveal titles…

Eric Dupont’s Rosa’s Very Own Personal Revolution (2022)
Tom Gauld’s stuff in general, such a treat
Heidi L. M. Jacobs’ Molly of the Mall (2019)

Marianne Dubuc’s Le chemin et la montagne (2017)
Nichoias Herring’s Some Hellish (2022)
Helen Humphreys’ And a Dog Called Fig (2022)

Patrick McCabe’s Poguemahone (2022 novel)
Margaret Noodin’s What the Chickadee Knows (2020)
Ai Qing’s Selected Poems (2021)

Zora Neale Hurston’s You Don’t Know Us Negroes (2022)
Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Rehearsals for Living (2022)
Alice Walker’s Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: Selected Journals (2022)

This year held many excellent reading experiences. I re-read some favourites—including the last of Alistair MacLeod’s short stories, discovered Katharine Susannah Prichard via her Goldfields trilogy (see Australian Women Writers: The Early Years), read through Sarah Moss from start to finish, and celebrated a fifth November of MARM, Margaret Atwood Reading Month.

This year, I read everything slowly, but these few even more slowly: I did not want them to end. Neither Melissa Barbeau’s The Luminous Sea nor Heidi Jacobs’ Molly of the Mall were new, but stories such as these remind us how rewarding it is to make a space for backlisted—and independently published—books in your stacks (in this case, Naomi recommended both, and Kelsey had an affinity for Molly too). I was disappointed that neither Michael Hingston’s Try Not to Be Strange nor Larissa Lai’s The Lost Century appeared on this year’s Giller list, but was thrilled that Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter did—and she claimed it in the end. And some non-fiction that I savoured? Len & Cub by  Meredith J. Batt and Dusty Green has both photographs and prose (and it’s a love story) and I typed out so many passages from Randall Kenan’s Black Folk Could Fly that I think it was almost as many pages as the finished copy.

And how about you, what did you notice about your reading over the past year? Or, are you still thinking about it?