#i'm also doing storygraph's pages challenge to read at least one page a day and i'm keeping up with that tooooo

[mirrortouchedsea]

Day 7

Niki turned off his alarm and looked at his phone, only to discover that Cinnamon and ES would be closed for the day due to the snow storm. He rubbed his eyes and glanced out the window of the bedroom and sure enough, snow was coming down in full force. Nobody would want to be out in that weather. At least he could get a few extra hours of--

His stomach started growling. Nevermind, he had to get up and make breakfast. Rinne tried to hold Niki hostage but eventually relented and fell back asleep. Rinne’s face was soft in the morning light, easily one of Niki’s favorite sights in the morning. Even if Rinne would inevitably come to ruin his day at work or gamble their money away at the pachinko parlor, he would always come back to him. 

Niki indulged himself a bit and kissed Rinne’s forehead before going to make breakfast. He could do something more complicated today since he didn’t have work, and he’d probably make some of Rinne’s omurice for him. That was another thing that was cute about the older man snoring in the other room; he and his brother loved omurice and if given the chance would eat nothing but that. 

Thirty minutes later and Niki was about ready to finally sit down and eat (not that he hadn’t been sneaking bites since he started) when Rinne finally dragged himself out of their bedroom. Niki greeted him and pointed to the omurice on the counter, which Rinne grabbed and sat opposite him before digging into it. His feet found Niki’s under the table and Rinne locked their ankles together. 

“No work today Rinne-kun?” 

“Nah, seems like ES closed everything down cuz of the storm. I’ll just have to terrorize you all day~” 

Niki rolled his eyes. “Can’t wait.” 

They continued to talk as they ate, the dishes starting to pile up as Rinne took what he could hold to the sink and began washing them. He was humming one of their new songs as he soaped up the sponge and started scrubbing. Niki brought the rest of the dishes to the counter and started rinsing the dishes as Rinne washed them. 

The rest of the day was spent in a comfortable domesticity that Niki wished they could have forever. Without anyone else around, Rinne didn’t put up his persona and was much tolerable to be around, and it was the side of him that Niki loved the most. He loved their lazy afternoons spent on the couch in each other’s arms watching bad reality tv reruns, their silly conversations and shared kisses (not on the lips, that was something Rinne still insisted on, but everywhere else was fair game). 

If only they got snowed in more often. 

[ninja-muse]

2023 Reading Wrap-up

I feel like this year was pretty average in terms of my reading. Some great books, some awful books, a lot of books in the middle. And while I feel as if I kept hitting slumps, I don’t think my stats really reflect that. I kept reading and even though I didn’t hit my goal of 140 books, that’s more because I read more thick and dense books, spent more time writing, and am one year further from the direness of 2020 and 2021.

This also seems to have been the year of T. Kingfisher for me (and also Ursula Vernon). I read several of her horror novels, as well as Digger and a bunch of the ebooks she makes free for patrons, which are really easy go-tos when you want something light and right now. I was kind of surprised when I realized she was my top author because usually that’s Seanan McGuire.

And I read more ebooks in general, because why should I wait for two months for the library to get a physical book in circulation when I can wait two weeks for it to come in on Libby? I’m still trying to reserve Libby use for lighter, faster, less involved books, because I tend to end up skimming a little more and there’s something about physical paper that helps me retain info better when the text is dense.

Now, stats! Yearly total: 128, excluding rereads and picture books Queer books: 44 (34%) Authors of colour: 15 (11.7%) Books by women: 74.5 (58%) Authors outside the binary: 7.5 (5.8%) Canadian authors: 14 (10.9%) Off the TBR shelves: 39 (30.4%) Books hauled: 41 ARCs acquired: 57 ARCs unhauled: 60 DNFs: 9 Rereads: 3 Picture Books: 6

If you look at last year’s stats and the year before’s, I’m pretty much holding steady in terms of my diverse reading—a little more than a third queer, about 60% female and 10% Canadian, around 6% gender-diverse authors. I’m way down on authors of colour though, and I didn’t hit my stretch goal of 20 Canadians, so those are things I’ll have to pay attention to in the year to come. It would be nice if I could manage more queer books too, but that’s not something I’m going to try for quite as much.

Two of my reading goals for the year were to read more books from my TBR than I acquired, and to keep my ARC levels about even. Seems like I pretty much hit them! I expect that 2024 will see fewer book acquisitions because a lot of my 2023 haul was bookstore visits with my dad and we’ve now hit pretty much every store in the city. I was honestly kind of surprised that my ARC problem stands where it does. I was so sure that I was going to have at least 10 more incoming books than outgoing. Go me! My spring ARC purge really, really helped.

I did all right on the rest of my reading goals. All but one book read (The Great Cat Massacre), which was the real point of the list! I only managed to finish one StoryGraph challenge, if you don’t count my pages goal, and as always I failed to read as many classics as I wanted. I’m starting to suspect I’m not a classics person, despite my interest in history and historical fiction. If anyone has classics recs for me, let me know?

To be completely honest, though, I'm not sure I'm going to continue posting to Tumblr. I pretty much stopped updating my feed in the summer and I've felt more relaxed, both in terms of Things To Do Each Day but also in terms of my reading. When I was more active on here, I felt pressured to read diversely at all times and though I try to have a healthy spread of perspectives, I know that I generally don't and am therefore a bad person by Tumblr standards. I am curious what my mutuals have been getting up to this year so please, sound off! And let me know if you do want to see reviews and wrap-ups continue here.

(Friendly reminder that I'm ninjamuse on Storygraph and LibraryThing, if you'd like to follow me there.)

And if anyone’s interested, here are the rest of my year’s highlights:

Top Five Fiction (not ranked)

The Hollow Places - T. Kingfisher

Menewood - Nicola Griffith

Bookshops and Bonedust - Travis Baldree

A Half-Built Garden - Ruthanna Emrys

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi - Shannon Chakraborty

Top Five Non-Fiction (not ranked)

Magisteria - Nicholas Spencer

Diary of a Misfit - Casey Parks

Evidence of Things Seen - Sarah Weinman, editor

Lay Them to Rest - Laurah Norton

Like Every Form of Love - Padma Viswanathan

Most Impressed By:

Shubeik Lubeik - Deena Mohamed

Diary of a Misfit - Casey Parks

The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard

A Half-Built Garden - Ruthanna Emrys

Most Disappointing:

Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck

British Columbiana - Josie Teed

A Killing in Costumes - Zac Bissonette

Tauhou - Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall

Longest Book: The Hands of the Emperor - Victoria Goddard

Best queer book: Diary of a Misfit - Casey Parks

Did I beat 2022? No. Did I beat my Best Year Ever? No. That would be 2021. Did I read more classics? Not even close. Did I read more Canadians? No. I held about steady. Did I whittle my TBR shelves down any? No. Was it a good reading year? Probably about average?

Breakdowns by month:

January February March April May June July August September October November December

[jakeperalta]

Hi, I Just saw the post about the books you’ve read! I wanted some advice on how to read more, I am an avid reader but this year I haven’t had the energy to pick up a book (basically this year has been awful) and also do you have a book recommendation that is hopeful that would be amazing thank you!

I get that!! my most productive reading time has been going on a two week holiday which obviously isn't a long term practical option (sadly haha)

I find audiobooks are a good way to get some reading in without having to dedicate the same time and energy levels — I got into them a few years ago whilst working on my masters because I was too busy and mentally drained to be reading in my spare time, but I did have chunks of time that I was walking to and from campus so audiobooks made a change from just listening to music and were also quite a good way to sort of switch my brain to a different channel for a bit. I found that the best type to get into it were non fiction or books I'd already read because with both I don't have to focus so much to follow a story.

also I think trying to make reading a habit helps a lot — I always do the january challenge on the storygraph app where you have to log at least one page every day and that tends to massively boost the amount I'm reading. sometimes I do just read a couple of pages, but other times just making the decision to pick up a book instead of scrolling or whatever can lead to me making a lot of progress on it.

also just book choice, sometimes I'd much rather read a lighter easier book than try to struggle through something I don't have the mental energy/emotional capacity for. and on that note one of my go to book recs is the humans by matt haig, which is very hopeful and an easy read!

[wildereader]

2024 reading goals

For the past few years, I've been very into the goodreads/storygraph reading challenges, where I decide how many books and pages I want to read over the course of the year and then race myself to the finish line.

I had fun the first few times I did it, especially since it was how I got myself back into reading - throughout most of high school and college, I stopped reading a lot for fun because of the pressures of school and extracurriculars.

However, 2023 was the year that I really went hard with my reading. By the end of last night - New Year's Eve - I had read a whopping 149 books in one year.

Granted, a very good percentage of those were volumes 12-52 of One Piece - I watched the live action with a friend who loves the series, and I had so much fun watching it that I needed to continue the story immediately. 40 volumes is a lot of reading for sure, but since manga doesn't take me long to read, it didn't feel like a lot until I saw how it absolutely swept all of my stats!

I was also unemployed for the first half of 2023, so I had all the time in the world at that point in between job searching and applying (and crying and questioning everything) to read. Those months were hard for a lot of reasons, but I am grateful and I know I'm lucky to have had so much time to do something I love.

But if 2023 was my year of quantity when it came to my reading, 2024 is going to be my year of quality.

And I don't just mean the quality of the books I read - I would say almost everything I read in 2023 was of good quality. I mostly mean quality time with the books. I don't just want to speed through a book because I've arbitrarily decided I need to finish it in a certain number of days, or I need to read a certain number of books by the end of a month, or I need to outdo my 2023 self... absolutely not. I want to rediscover my passion for reading. I want to find new favorites, or spend time reading old ones and falling in love with them all over again. I want to read with intention, I want to think about the books I read, I want to be able to give good critique and analysis and in-depth thoughts on them.

And for me, I know that doing all that to the best of my ability means that I will need to spend time with them.

So often, I get overwhelmed at the amount of books I want to read, the amount of books that are coming out in a year, the amount of books I've never heard of but I will surely find interesting, if only I did know about them. I guess you could think of it as a kind of FOMO for books. That's definitely the driving force for me behind my desire to get through as many books as quickly as I can - because there are still so many that I want to read next! So many that I own, so many that my friends recommend, so many that I see talked about online, so many I see on the shelves at the library that I can just take home and dive into for free!

But I cannot keep up the pace at which I was reading in 2023. As I got further into the year, as I racked up more and more books on my Goodreads, as the serotonin neurons were firing in my brain at watching the colorful Storygraph graphs morph and grow over the year... I found my joy for reading slowly siphoning away. As I read more than I ever had in the course of a year, I just felt more and more indifferent toward everything I was reading. I was too focused on my plans for what to read next, I wasn't paying attention to what I was reading in the moment (sorry for the kitschiness of the sentiment). It's definitely some kind of burnout - and I love reading too much to allow it to progress any further.

I certainly have books that I'm aiming to read this year - probably a couple dozen at least. But I'm not going to push myself to read them all. I'll be more forgiving with myself for taking a long time to read a book. It will take time to break these reading habits I've gotten myself into, but I know it will be worth it. I know I'll thank myself in the long run.

[residentbunburyist]

Actually yes! I've been asked this question by multiple people now, and so I think I've streamlined my thoughts on a few good steps to start out with--

So I fell off of reading for like a decade. And then it took some work to get back into it. because like. you think about reading as something you just -do-, rather than a skill that you develop, but reading and understanding a narrative is a practiced skill like anything else. So if you want to get back into reading, don't pick up that literary classic that's been sitting on your shelf for years that you told yourself in college you'd read, or that really dense theory text. You don't get up off the couch and run a marathon. if you try to read some 19th century brick, you're going to get caught up by the linguistic and narrative conventions, the pacing differences, the cultural shorthands that take time to interpret, and you're going to be like 'wow fuck this'.

So my first tip-- find a popcorn pageturner. Something easy, fun, and gripping, rather than something dense or challenging. Genre fiction is good for this. All the better if it's a series, because the second thing that sucks is when you finally get the gumption to read a single book, and then you finish it, and then get frozen in that post-game/post-book/post-tv series ennui where you don't know what to do next.

alternately: you do in fact want to read something older, but are still overwhelmed or easily distracted? i personally got a lot of use out of an app on my phone called Serial Reader. It has a pretty decent catalogue of classic lit across multiple genres, time periods, and cultures. You pick a book, and the app gives you only a single chapter of it per day (or however it decides to break up a 'chapter'). It pings you at the same time every day, and you get about 15 minutes' worth of reading opened up to you. The app itself is actually kind of a scam in that you can in fact read more immediately if you pay for a subscription, on a catalogue that is entirely made up of literature that's out of copyright. Some freemium bullshit. BUT because i just kept the free version, it was actually a really good way of being fed easy, bite-sized pieces of books, in such small portions that it was really easy to just knock it out. I read a series of essays on anarchism by Emma Goldman, some really interesting autobiographies by Geronimo and Fredrick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, the original Arsene Lupin serials by Gaston Leroux, multiple Mark Twain books, Dracula, and the entirety of Moby Dick

Second, and more importantly really-- find a consistent time for it. I finally got back into the habit by reading before bed. Not every night, but enough that it finally got drilled into my head that reading was an Option as a before-bed activity rather than just... Phone scrolling. Otherwise, you're not going to block out time in your day. You're just not. That time's already filled. Read a few pages before you fall asleep! I liked having physical books as well for this, because it stopped me from giving into temptation on my phone and pulling up something else. Plus you get to see the progress you're making. Which for me at least makes my brain go brr and makes me really pleased to keep reading. Love those progress markers. (OH! which also reminds me-- are you a person who likes Lists? get yourself an account on Goodreads or Storygraph or anything like that. Update it every time you finish a book, or start a book, or are working on a book. Being able to update my List is a reward in itself for me. And since we're on the autisms georg website, I'm certain I'm not the only one. lol.)

sorry, that was really long. but yeah-- 1-- start with something low stakes and easy, whatever that means for you. 2-- read before bed. or on the toilet. or while you're drinking your coffee in the morning. just so long as it's a specific and easily repeatable time. not a time of day! 3pm will come and go without fanfare. you won't redirect what you're already doing in order to pick up your book for ten minutes. but you won't skip pooping. start associating pooping with reading time. 3-- profit!

Genuine question: anyone have any strategies or advice or what-have-you on how to get back into making a habit of reading when you've fallen out of it for a long time due to mental health/burnout reasons? I miss books.

[nedlittle]

hello! toomanyassassins here! i've been enjoying your monthly book overviews and it's inspiring me to try and get back into reading and to try using storygraph. do you have an tips for reading as much as you do? i struggle to even get past the first page of most books, much less focus on them long enough to finish them 😅

i'm glad someone is reading my reading wrap-ups!

to be completely transparent, the reason why i've been able to read so much is because i spent the first half of the year unemployed and passively suicidal, so i had the free time living at home to read, and i had the incentive to read because it's one of the few things that can actually distract from the fact that my brain is eating itself alive. and i read a lot now because i have a relaxed job which can have long stretches of time where i have nothing to do but sit at a desk and mop/try not to freeze to death/wonder why nobody is coming to hear my wonderful whale facts, so there's ample time for me to read on the clock, and my boss doesn't mind.

some actual advice is to carve out a dedicated time each day when you want to read. 9/10 nights i read in bed before i fall asleep, desperately trying to take in as much as i can before melatonin sends me to the shadow realm. it gets you into a routine and helps you feel cozy. i can get an hour or two in each night depending on the circumstances. and then my kindle sleeps on my pillow next to me so if the insomnia keeps me awake at 4 am i can at least pass the time.

do you have a commute? read on that! in 2020, i read moby-dick and the brothers karamazov and the worst journey in the world because i lived and worked in the suburbs of shanghai and everytime i wanted to see a friend or a museum or get basically anywhere not in my district, i had a minimum 40 minute metro ride each way. on my (mercifully shorter) commute to work, i could still get in a chapter or two! if you have to drive, try audiobooks! they aren't generally for me, but i imagine they'd be good if you're like. stuck on a highway somewhere waiting in bottlenecked traffic. regardless, i have a physical book or my kindle (or both) in my bag nearly every time i leave the house just in case i want to sit in a park for a bit or have to wait for an appointment etc.

sometimes you gotta shop around and try a few books before you're actually engaged in one. at least once a month i will think okay, i'm going to read (x) only to open it up on my kindle, read the first couple pages, and be like nah, not right now. so i open another book and sometimes that also isn't the right one, so i open another until i find something that clicks with how i'm feeling. if you're not immediately gripped by something it's totally fine to put it down for a bit or for forever!

lastly, reading shouldn't be a competition and i think goodreads and our collective obsession with categorizing, aestheticizing, and presenting very specific versions of ourselves has done detriment to the way people read because it isn't enough to read for fun you've got to be ahead of your reading challenge you've got to read (x) number of books with y-specific rep in them in order to be seen like you're Consuming The Right Media. yes, i have a reading challenge on storygraph but it's partly because i just like graphs and diagrams and have a brain made of swiss cheese. just have fun with it man! it's not a competition and it's not a game it's something that should be done for pleasure and information :)