Around Here | I’m off work today for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which still feels weird to me after never getting extra holidays while working in newspapers. But, I’m not complaining! I’ve got brunch with a friend, a few errands to run, and some writing to do… but I’m still hopeful I can find some time with a good book or two, since it’s really too cold to be outside the house much today.

Reading | It’s been a very slow month of reading. I’m not quite sure about the culprit, probably some growing pains with new routines and extra deadlines for my work over at Book Riot (plus lots of time watching Netflix, if I’m being honest). I’m hoping I can relax this afternoon and finish two books it feels like I’ve been reading for weeks — Duped by Abby Ellin and A Ladder To The Sky by John Boyne. They’re both books about tricksters and con men, which is a not-so-secret fascination of mine.

Watching | There’s been a lot of chatter about Netflix’s new show Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, inspired by her best-selling 2011 book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I’ve watched the first five episodes and found it charming (minus the couple in the first episode). It has the same kind of nice, supportive vibe as The Great British Baking Show, which makes me happy.

Listening | I recently change my morning alarm sequence to end with The Slowdown, a daily poetry podcast hosted by  U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. It feels kind of chill and indulgent to hang out in bed for about five extra minutes every morning listening to a poem — highly recommended!

Blogging | Last week I shared my One Little Word for 2019, which I’m excited about. It’s a different kind of word than I usually choose, but I hope it’s going to lead to an educational year.

Writing | One of my other goals for the year is to write more days than I don’t. I’ve got lots of specific projects in the works — two editions per week of a nonfiction newsletter at Book Riot, reviews of the books I’ve read in 2019 — but I’ve also had some time to do some essays and other more personal writing. I don’t know if that’ll end up anywhere, but it’s nice to feel like I’m stretching a bit.

Loving | Speaking of stretching, I’ve also been doing more regular yoga thanks to a 30 day yoga challenge through Yoga with Adriene. I thought I’d try to do it every morning, but it’s turned out that getting on the mat at night before I got to bed is working better most days. I’m hoping to keep it up after the 30 days of videos wraps up.

Anticipating | My mom and I are taking a little road trip next weekend to visit a family friend in Wisconsin. I’m not really excited about all the driving, but I am excited about the time with family and friends.

Happy Monday, everyone! What are you reading this week? 

For the last five years, I’ve participated in a workshop called One Little Word, which asks participants to pick and live with a word through the year to see what you can learn. The workshop has monthly prompts, which I am hit-and-miss about finishing, but I’ve always enjoyed the process of choosing a word and seeing where it takes me.

My word for 2018 was explore. It was a good word, but one that I felt like I didn’t really live up to as the year went by. Explore is such a big word, and at the end of the year everything about my life felt small. But as I leafed back through my bullet journal, wrote out my facts and feelings, and revisited my original post here on the blog, I remembered that my initial idea of explore was actually pretty narrow:

I want to be a person who feels like the world is a place worth exploring, not person who constantly worries about how the world can crumble underneath her feet. It takes a lot of faith to be an explorer, but I want to try and find that for myself again.

For whatever other ways I didn’t follow through on explore, I know that I did find some of what I was looking for. I have a lot more faith in the world and in myself than I did when 2018 began, which isn’t something to discount or take for granted. Explore was a good word, and I think will continue to echo into the word I’ve chosen for 2019… WHOLE.

Whole is a different kind of word for me. My previous words – curate, nurture, open, persist, explore – have been actions that helped provide a direction or guiding arrow. When faced with a decision, I could look to my word and ask what a person who was living that way – a curated life, an open life, a life of persistence – would choose, and then do my best to go in that direction.

This year my word feels more like a question. I want to think about what a whole life looks like, and what it means to live in a wholehearted way. Whole is an invitation to explore, just in a more focused, grounded way.

As I’ve been trying to think about how to explore this word and let it guide my year, I’ve started to lean into the idea of life as a pie chart. Because it’s a circle, a pie chart is already whole. As choices are made and inputs change, the different slices of that chart start to become more or less prominent to alter the composition of the whole. It’s not entirely about more or less, it’s about consciously choosing less in some places to make space for more in others.

This idea is resonating with me because I think it’s important to acknowledge that, no matter what discomfort I am feeling with my life now, I already have a whole life. There are no gaps or empty chunks in my pie chart, just pieces that don’t feel like they fit together to create the best version of myself and my life. I want to spend the year thinking about what composition of my life helps me feel the most whole and fulfilled. How do I want my life to look different if I am living with intention, goals, and an eye to the future?

In 2019 I want more space, less clutter. More writing, less watching. More moving, less sitting. More time in nature, less time with screens. More reaching, less waiting. More focus, less distraction. More confidence, less discounting.

It feels so squishy, this word, and yet I’m really excited about it.

Each year, I tried to find a quote or manta to go along with my word and help guide the year ahead. This year, there are two quotes that have stuck with me as I’ve been exploring this word:

“The dedicated life is worth living. You must give your whole heart to whatever you do.” – Annie Dillard

“In every atom, there is a reflection of the whole.” – Jay Woodman

Hello, 2019! Since I love making lists and setting goals, the new year is a fun time in that regard. I’m particularly keen to set some goals for this year because I actually did a pretty good job on the goals I set for 2018 — knocking them off makes me feel more confident I can be a little more ambitious this year.

2018 Goals Revisited

After giving up on goals in both 2016 and 2017, last year was the first time in awhile I really sat down to try and make some plans for my reading and blogging. They were pretty modest, mostly because I didn’t know what the year was going to bring. But, it was nice to set small goals because I actually ended up achieving them:

• Read 84 books (average of 7 per month) – Completed! I actually finished 112 books in 2018, which feels right on the edge of being too many for a single year. Reading is important, but it’s not the only thing in my life. I need to remember balance.
• Listen to 12 audiobooks – Completed! I loved this goal so much. Listening to one audiobook a month was just a bit of a stretch, but still left me time to for listening to music and podcasts.
• Pay attention to diversity and gender in my reading. – Mostly completed! According to my spreadsheet, 29 percent of the books I read were written by people of color. That’s not quite as high as I’d like, but decent. The crazy number, though, is that 86 percent of the books I read were by women. I love that so much.
• Complete Book Riot’s 2018 Read Harder Challenge – Completed! I’m so thrilled to have actually finished this one in 2018. I just made it, finishing my last book on December 30. But done is done!
• Publish 52 blog posts – Completed! This is the goal I’m proudest of for the year. I didn’t quite publish once a week, but I did manage to publish a total of 53 posts in 2018. Doing it was a great exercise because it reminded me what I like about having a blog and what about it I can let go.
• Only buy books from bookstores – Epic fail! I actually did ok with this one for a few months, fell off the wagon in April or May, and then just couldn’t get back on it again. This one is coming back again in 2019.

Goals for 2019

This year’s goals feel like they’re all extensions or modifications of the goals I set in 2018. I found a style of reading goal-setting that I like — one book a month in a particular subject or format — and learned about what matters to me in terms of reading and blogging. This year my goals are:

Read 12 personal/professional development books.

I have a habit of collecting professional development books, then never actually reading them. Because they’re “less fun” to read, I end up letting them languish instead of really diving in. This year, my goal is to read one of them each month.

Read 40 books from my bookshelves (and only buy books from bookstores).  

I have a lot of books. I’m embarrassed to know the number, so I haven’t counted in a long time. It’s too many. In 2018, about half the books I read were books I owned… but a lot of those were books I also bought in 2018. In 2019, my goal is to read 40 of the books that are on my shelves right now. That’s a stretch from what I did this year, but I’m ready for a goal that’s going to be a challenge. And, in keeping with the idea of having few books in the first place, a returning goal – new books I acquire should come from bookstores, not the internet.

Write about every book that I read.

One of the things I realized this year as I focused on blogging weekly was that the posts I look back on the most are the book reviews. They’re the hardest to write and, often, the least engaging in terms of comments… but that’s the content that’s most valuable to me personally. I want to preserve my thoughts on the books I’ve read, so I’m committing to writing about every single one (here, or on another site like Goodreads or Instagram).

Complete Book Riot’s 2019 Read Harder Challenge.

I like the Read Harder challenge. I think it’s fun to explore books/topics outside my comfort zone, so I’m going to try it again. This goal is a lower priority than the first three, but I’m still going to give it a shot.

Finally, I have three smaller goals that are making repeat appearances from 2018. I’m confident I can do them, so they’re not a challenge, but I like having them written down because that means I’ll keep track of them:

• Read 84 books.
• Track diversity in my reading, aiming for 33 percent by authors of color.
• Listen to 12 audiobooks.

These goals all feel like more of a stretch than 2018, but I’m feeling excited about that. My other big yearly goal-setting exercise is my One Little Word for the year, which I’m hoping to share about later in the week too. Bring it on, 2019.

What goals and resolutions and words are on your mind for your bookish life in 2019?

I’m closing out 2018 on the blog with a look back at my favorite fiction of the year. As of writing this post I’m at 112 books finished, which should be a solid number since I won’t have time to complete another book before the clock strikes midnight.

Of the 112 books I finished, exactly half were fiction – a slightly higher percentage than I’ve read in the past, but I’m pretty happy with that split. As I looked through all the titles, the ones that stuck out to me as favorites were books that featured interesting structures, interesting characters, and interesting ways of bringing fantastical elements into real-world settings. Here are my 10 favorites of the year:

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

In 1969, the four Gold adolescent siblings visit a traveling psychic who claims she can tell them the exact day they’ll die. Each of the siblings take this news in a different way, and having an idea of when they might die informs their choices in big and small ways for decades to come. I thought this book was absolutely stunning. The writing is beautiful, the characters are sympathetic and real, and the premise plays out in some really surprising, touching ways. It was really moving.

Jane, Unlimited by Kristin Cashore

I think one of the themes of my fiction reading this year is books with a creative format or fantasy that takes places in the real world. This one had a bit of both, and I totally loved it. After her aunt dies, Jane is feeling lost and, on a whim, accepts an invitation to go to a gala at an island mansion, Tu Reviens. But the mansion is not what it seems, leading Jane to make five different choices that will affect what she can do next. The fantastical elements of this book were so weird, but the grounded parts about grief and loss and life after death were what sold me.

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti

This is another book with an intriguing structure that explores ideas of storytelling and adventure. Samuel Hawley has a checkered past, but has settled in a small town hoping to give his daughter, Loo, a relatively normal life. But Loo has other ideas, including trying to understand the mother she never knew. The book is told in alternating chapters, showing up episodes in Hawley’s past explain present-day threads. The characters were great, and the alternating chapters really worked for the story being told.

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

I love a good YA fantasy series, especially when the first book can surprise me in the ways that this one did. The plot is pretty straightforward, but the characters and West African-inspired locations and imagery take this one to the next level. It has smart political commentary that makes sense in the context of the book, and the ending left me with no real idea of where this series might go next. It was so, so excellent!

Circe by Madeline Miller

This book is a reimagining of the story of Circe, the witch in Greek mythology who is probably best known as one of the reasons Odysseus and his crew took so long to make it home in The Odyssey. This book give her a complicated life, an appealing sense of humor, and dreams of her own that she can make happen through her own hard work and diligence. I loved Greek myths as a kid, and so any chance I get to revisit them in such an interesting way is a treat. Lots of people loved this one, and I did too!

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

This book was like a big, warm hug for my soul. Eleanor Oliphant has a very structured life, centered around her boring job as an accountant and her weekends along drinking vodka and eating frozen pizza. But she’s fine, really, until a chance meeting with an man in her company’s IT department and a run-in with an elderly man on the street changes her course. This one is so smart in the way it reveals all the ways Eleanor is unreliable and dysfunctional, and in building a hopeful story amid a ton of loss.

An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard

There are not enough good standalone fantasy novels, so I always seek them out when I find one. In this one, a magicna outsider finds her way into an epic magical competition that will change the balance of power in New York City’s secret wizarding community. The world of this book was so good, the magicians at the heart of the story were full, curious, interesting people, and the plot moved along in a satisfying way. It was a good read!

Neverworld Wake by Marisha Pessl

This is another book that brings elements of the fantastic into the real world, this time in a “psychological suspense thriller in which fears are physical and memories come alive.” I can’t really sum op the plot, so I’ll just say that it’s one of those books that straddles the line between realistic and genre fiction almost perfectly. The characters were great, the mystery was intriguing, and the fantastical elements were just weird enough to work. I tore through this one in one afternoon while on vacation this summer, which also felt like a great way to read it. 

Warcross / Wildcard by Marie Lu

I read this duology back-to-back on a quiet Saturday, so I don’t think I could pick just one for this list. The premise of the pair is that a virtual reality game, Warcross, has become a way of life. While hacking to make some extra cash, Emika Chen, a teenage bounty hunter, finds herself accidentally into the middle of the international Warcross Championships. Quickly, she find herself befriending the game’s creator, recruited to a Warcross team, and investigating a sinister plot with life-and-death consequences. I had so much fun reading these books, which managed to surprise me in some really cool ways.  

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

And finally, some fantasy to round out the year. I just finished this one a few days ago over my Christmas break and could hardly put it down. The book is a loose retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, featuring three unique young women trying to save themselves and their families. I think the way this book comes together is part of the delight, so I won’t say more than that, other than that, once it got going, I could hardly turn the pages fast enough to finish it. I thought it was so great!  

And that’s a wrap on 2018! And if you missed it, here’s my favorite nonfiction of the year. I’ll be back later in the week with some other bookish stats from 2018 and bookish goals for 2019. Happy reading!