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What I’ve been reading lately, trying to keep up edition

There are more – even though I have been slowed down – I just can’t think of any right now. I’ve been too busy, but also, despite the fact that I enjoyed all three of these (esp. She Who Became the Sun), I’m in a bit of a reading slump. I was surprised to stumble across the suggestion (in this post) that reading slumps are a product of the social internet! This is definitely not my experience (and I know it because I’ve experienced reading slumps before I experienced the internet, and I participate in the social internet only minimally anyway – this blog is about it, and it’s not very social), and I was initially a little offended by the suggestion.

But in thinking about it, I came to what feels like an important realization about my reading: I’m a reader, not a fan. And this makes my situation different than that of those who are both fans AND readers. Clearly, the author of the post is both. I’d argue that the kind of slump that’s produced by the internet is more properly termed a fandom slump, since (as the post author argues) it has more to do with participation in reading communities than with reading itself.

What about what *I* term a reading slump – the inability to find a book that I want to read despite longing for something new? I think that’s a separate phenomenon. So does the author of the post, in fact. For this type of slump, she suggests, “Set aside a book you haven’t read yet by an author you love.” I suspect this is a suggestion that works for fans, but it doesn’t work for me. For me each book – not each author, each *book* – is a passage into another world. It stands alone. Even books set in the same world show different slices, different moods, of that world. There are few authors whose books I will always read – I can probably count them on one hand – and I can think of no examples of authors who’ve never written a book that I’ve found problematic, no matter how much I normally love their work (see, for example, Winterkeep).

(There are authors who, having tried a few of their books, I will not read again. But that doesn’t solve the reading slump issue!)

There are a lot of readers/fans out there, and those readers do to some extent drive what’s being written and published. I don’t know if my reading slumps correspond with the abundance of books that appeal to me in their concept, but that are associated strongly with reading fandom, at any particular time, or not. Something to consider.

Into the new: reflecting on reading and writing in 2019

Lemon blossom, close up: a sign of December

December is, for me, the season of reflection. For the past week or two, as things have wound down at work, in the garden, everywhere, I’ve been thinking about reading and writing – what I’ve been doing over the past year, and what I’d like to change.

I didn’t get as much writing done in 2019 as I had hoped I would; there’s nothing new in that (does anyone ever get as much writing done as they had hoped?). I *did* have breakthroughs with a couple of different projects that were stalled at this point last year, and I know how I want to proceed with them now. The trouble is that I have too many concurrent projects going, and it’s not yet clear to me which of these I will pursue first and which will wait. This decision is at the forefront of my reflections right now. I will decide this, sometime over the next few weeks, and we will see.

On the positive progress side of things, I was able to return to reading in 2019. I read lots, and I wrote about reading, too (here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). I’m happy about this – both the reading and the writing about it. My reflective reading brain is slowly creaking to life again, it seems. I am so glad to have it back.

And yet, despite this, I’ve been frustrated by my reading lately. This has happened before (and it’s a not-uncommon experience), but, this year (and maybe in previous years also, I don’t know) and for me, I think my frustration isn’t a purely internal phenomenon. I think it has to do with what’s being published, at least in part (this and this and this contain some previous related reflections).

When I’ve felt this in previous reading slumps, I’ve pushed back against my instincts, telling myself it’s all internal. And maybe I was right; I did manage to get out of those previous reading slumps. But this time, I’m going to try something new to address this. Following up on some recent thoughts on self-publishing/small presses, I’m going to try to devote a majority percentage of my 2020 reading to works published by small and independent publishers, rather than by the big 5.

I’m still working out how I will actualize this, but I’ll write about it here as I figure it out.

What I’ve been reading, long-delayed edition

In no particular order. There are some notable exceptions on this list, but mostly I’ve been feeling meh about what I’ve been reading lately…another reading slump maybe?

And with my 4-year-old niece: