I've just finished my first book (reading, not writing) of 2021 (Fermat's Enigma), which led me to my reading journal, which led to some interesting observations about my 2020 reading.
I suppose first I should state that I have a general goal of reading at least 12,000 pages of new-to-me book-bound (not periodicals) material each year (it used to be 20,000, but that fell by the wayside around the third kid, and as a serious reader it's a measure of the chaos in my life that I've missed even just 10,000 several years). In 2020 I hit 12,802 pages.
2020 had a few key patterns:
(1) In 2020 I read more books that were gifted to me (four books, by three gifters) than in probably any year since gradeschool (when sometimes I was gifted series by adults: the 8-book Little House on the Prairie when I was 8, the five-book Belgariad when I was ... maybe 12?).
1a) The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, from Amy L, when I social-distance visited her on her front porch a day or two before I came down sick -- social distancing works, folks, because she did NOT get sick, and I must have been shedding virus like crazy at that point. She also very generously gave me a purse-size bottle of hand sanitizer, among the last Amazon sent out at the time (she checked back just minutes after her order to get more and there was zero left). It luckily lasted until there was a stock of hand sanitizer in some stores so I could refill that tiny purse-bottle. (Initially I could only find hand sanitizer at the natural foods store -- I presume both that less people looked for it there and that the smallish chain store had contracts with a different set of suppliers than the national drugstores/Kroger had.)
1b+c) The Sword of the Lady, and Island in the Sea of Time, by SM Stirling, from the Yahns, as part of a COVID-recovery care package (with chocolate!). These were much appreciated as my brain came slowly back online after being sick, and filled in most of the gaps in the series (I've read the series nearly completely out of order, as I find miscellaneous volumes at Goodwill) ... they were narratively challenging, but since I already understood the basic structure of the series, I could keep up. I should try reading them again in a year or two and see how much of the challenge was the story and how much was COVID brain-fog ...
1d) The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler, from Leslie B, a friend of a friend, who (long story short) gave me the only physical package I had on hand to open on Christmas Day (and nearly the only gift I got this season at all -- which isn't a problem, but it was a point of psychological interest to me, and mostly reflective of the economic stress of the pandemic on my entire network). A book about a book, by an author who taught herself to hand-age and hand-bind her manuscripts in order to complete the sale <3!
2) This year was all about completing sets -- filling in the gaps in series I have been reading, or building out my reading of authors I like. This was probably due to the COVID shutdown of my local book-browsing options (my local Goodwill stayed closed even after the other Goodwills reopened, because they have decided to remodel it, and I don't have a car and I am avoiding public transit because of the pandemic -- and the physical libraries are of course still off-limits), so I can't just discover new interesting-looking books (this has probably saved me quite a bit of money over the year). So, when the library system reopened for pickups, and using a little bit of my $1200 stimulus check to support some of the businesses I most want to stay open (Powell's and Goodwillbooks.com), I borrowed or bought the missing pieces of my collections of Shannon Hale, Jim Butcher, some Jane-Austen-adjacent stuff (including The Mysteries of Udolpho, which I'm glad I read but I do NOT recommend), McCaffrey, and the Avalon books (a Paxson followup of MZB's work) -- and also was gifted those two key volumes of SM Stirling (per (1b+c)).
3) About 5,000 of my 12,802 pages were books by Jim Butcher ... his Dresden Files series is amazing, and I actually liked his aeronaut book (a lot of other people didn't -- it wasn't stellar, which was considered a let-down) ... quarantine and closed book-browsing options led me to speculatively buy Book One of the Codex Alera -- which was somewhat pedestrian as fantasy books go, although well-written, but I liked the characters, so I checked out the other four books from the library, and they got better as they moved forward (although I liked the middle one best). AND I got caught up on the Dresden files (a book and a novella that I'd somehow missed over the years), although now there are two new books published this year that I don't know when I will be able to afford. (One of the small tragedies of 2020 was that there were going to be a series of really cool in-person fan events for the series, starting at Emerald City Comic Con, which had been scheduled for right when the COVID shutdowns hit Seattle. I wasn't going to be able to afford any of it, but a lot of fans were SUPER excited (as was the author). Sigh.)
4) I cleared some of my 'nightstand' stack (which I've been better about in recent years ... sometimes my nightstand stack has been like 60 books and becomes more or less my actual nightstand). Among the highlights:
4a) Myst: the official strategy guide: Schoolmates might remember that I was not as interested in this game as they expected me to be ... when newly-wed, my husband played it and so I paid a little more attention and it turned out I not only didn't like the story, I couldn't correctly parse the 2-D representation of the 3-D world, making the 'easy' part (physically explore the environment) actually stupidly frustrating, which rather explained my initial hard-rejection of the "puzzle" game (normally I rather enjoy puzzles). Anyhow, I finally know (30 years later) what the whole story was and what all the puzzles were and I don't regret not actually playing it out. The two brothers made me ill and angry just reading about them and since back in the 80s and 90s computers generally made me ill and angry just working with them, this was not a game I would have enjoyed or found satisfaction in 'solving.'
4b) Several of the fill-in-gaps books (per (2)) had been sitting in my possession for a while. 'Glad to get those off the stack.
4c) The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. I don't know if I'll keep this, but I'm glad I finally read it. It has reinspired dreams of running my own bookstore, but that is clearly 100% out of reach anytime soon, and the older I get the stupider it would be to try to start the size of enterprise I'd like to start, so that will probably remain a pleasant occasional daydream. In any case I'm more likely to build a store around ideas than around the age/provenance of any given book. (We'll pretend I didn't find what I'm pretty sure is a second edition Jane Eyre at Goodwill for $6 a couple of years ago, and totally snatch it up even though I've already read Jane Eyre. I also viscerally love the paper, print, and art of English-language books from around 1910, and own some perfectly silly books from that time simply based on their physical attributes.)
Most of my books are in storage right now ... I'm up to 42 regular-sized moving boxes of them, and some of them have been in storage since my previous move (2015) ... I'm looking forward to unpacking eventually and properly cataloging them and sorting out duplicates or not-as-important books for resale (because then I can buy more books). Of all of the books I phsycially own, I've probably read 2/3 of them (usually more than once) ... there were quite a number bought on speculation around 2015/2016 which lowered my read/not-read ratio considerably, as I had to pack those before I had time to get into them ... and I've read quite a lot from the library, and also passed off to my kids a couple hundred others that I have reread bunches of times ... I hope before I die to completely catalogue (probably on Goodreads.com) my bibliophile history. We'll see.
Anyhow, 2020 was a reading year quite different from my normal reading years, and I was surprised how much the pandemic directly affected my reading options and therefore chocies.
