Photos aside, most of my posts to this blog are quotes from what I’m reading at the moment. Reading has always been a pretty big part of my life. In 2021 I continued a few trends in how and what I read; I also added a few new things that I expect to continue.

I continued to use the library extensively this year. I read (at least some of) 71 books for the first time this year, and all of them came from the library. There are a few caveats in that last sentence. I didn’t finish all of the 71 books, and so it isn’t fair to say I read them all… but I did at least start them. And from now on, I’m just going to say “read”, because I did finish most books and also I’m the boss of this retrospective. I also re-read some old favourites that I own, and I’m not including them in the list. All told, though, I think that’s a pretty healthy use of the library.

What I’ve found is that now I’ll hear about a book online or in a magazine and if it sounds interesting or useful I’ll put a hold on it as soon as I can. This has worked out pretty well. Sometimes I’m late to a hot book, and there are hundreds of people ahead of me; when it’s my turn I often have forgotten the context that prompted the hold, and getting the book is a nice surprise. Other times I’m early to a hot book (because I’m reading a review just before or soon after publication) and I have the pleasure of being pretty early in a long list of folks with the same idea.

This year 60% of the books I read were non-fiction. That feels like a lot to me. I generally prefer reading fiction, and think of myself primarily as a reader of fiction rather than anything else. But the numbers don’t lie! One reason this might be the case is that I think a greater share of what I read this year came from newsletter recommendations, and I think these skew non-fiction… but that’s conjecture on top of conjecture. I also think the fiction I read is “harder” than the non-fiction, so it might occupy a larger share of mind.

Here’s my a few of my top picks from the non-fiction I read this year:

And on the fiction side of things:

  • The life of the mind by Christine Smallwood. I had something in my eye all the way through the back quarter of this book. Disorienting, often beautiful, in the end amazingly coherent.
  • The buried giant by Kazuo Ishiguro: finally followed up on a recommendation from my wife, can’t believe I slept on this one for as long as I did. A beautiful, powerful novel wrestling with memory, collective trauma, enchantment and disenchantment and what love means over a lifetime. Also, a significant data point in support of my working theory that myth is returning as a means of sense-making (cf. The Green Knight, also Marvel/DC movies are not part of this theory and in fact are antithetical to it).
  • The transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard: a beautiful, stylish book. I had never heard of Hazzard before this year!
  • Beautiful world, where are you by Sally Rooney: Rooney is counter-cultural and an excellent writer of dialogue. Counter-cultural in this novel: traditional sensibilities throughout, treatments of faith, and more. Not her best… but maybe the most interesting from an evolutionary perspective?

Enough about books; but let’s stick with print. I’ve been a long time subscriber to The New Yorker and Harper’s: I love getting both in the mail, love having copies lying around the house, love doing the crosswords with my wife over coffee, love being able to pack one in my bag every time I’m commuting. I don’t read everything in every issue, but I’d say I generally do read all the pieces I want to read (which is more than I can say for my “read later” bookmarks folder).

This year I’ve added print subscriptions to a few other periodicals: The Point, The Paris Review, The Hedgehog Review, and The London Review of Books. Honestly I think a big reason for this is that as a family we’re feeling a little more comfortable with discretionary spending within reason, especially around the home (“Are we not in saver mode anymore?” I remember my wife asking me earlier this year). Spending money on print publications feels a little selfish (I’m really the only person benefitting from them). But the quarterly journals in particular are such a pleasure to get and read: I really appreciate the attention to detail show in the curation, the artwork, and the typesetting.

Online, 2021 was the year of Substack. I now subscribe to 55 newsletters, very few of which are paid. Gradually it has become my primary time spent reading online, edging out my RSS feed (indeed, some of the newsletters I subscribe to used to be blogs or sites in my RSS).

Lots of ink has been shed on Substack this year, and I don’t really want to add to much to that. Here are two things I think are awesome about it. First, I like being able to follow the work of particular people over time. This isn’t all that new if they used to have a blog, but many didn’t. When I come across a piece in The New Yorker or Harper’s or elsewhere online that I like, usually I’ll look for other stuff that person wrote (If it’s a book, I’ll place a hold!). With Substack, I can subscribe and get everything new. If it turns out to be not that great, it is easy to unsubscribe!

Second, the clean formatting and lack of ads make for a much more pleasant reading experience than elsewhere online. I like how simple it is. I know some digital publications put a lot of work into making their features “native” online with fancy display elements and formatting… but generally I find that stuff to be useless at best and actively damaging at worst (very infrequently, say when the piece relies on data visualization, that rich formatting and content improves the piece and even becomes essential). A Substack newsletter is reliable, familiar, and doesn’t get in the way.

This has made it very easy, in fact, to move a lot of that reading offline. I’ve had a first generation reMarkable for a few years now and over the last year I’ve started reading a lot of my Substack content on it. The workflow is as follows: open the newsletter in a browser, click the Read on reMarkable bookmarklet, and then sync the device. The formatting is almost always perfect, especially if it’s a text heavy edition. I do this with almost everything relatively long, and it works super well.

Finally, something new over the last year was I started using Literal. I don’t actually use it that much, but I do enter the books I’ve read into the platform and occasionally poke around to see what other people are reading. I’m not sure if it’s worth recommending: if you don’t track books online then I don’t think it makes a strong argument yet that you need to, and if you already use something like Goodreads I don’t know if there’s much added value to justify the switching costs. But I thought I’d try it out and so far feel pretty good about it? I don’t know, if I dropped it tomorrow I don’t think I’d notice. But it does have a cool API to GraphQL so at some point, I think it would be great to play with access and then do some analysis on top of my reading data. That, for now, is enough to keep me onboard and willing to add my activity.

So that’s it! Lot’s of library reading, more print subscriptions, a ton of Substack, and then some useful tools IRL (reMarkable) and online (Literal). It’s been a year. On to 2022!