2023 in Reading

I was hanging out with some new friends recently and the conversation turned, as it inevitably does, toward books. Someone asked me to guess who read the least out of the assembled company. (Weird move, but okay.) I guessed that one person had grand bookish intentions, but really only read one “big ideas” book a quarter, another escaped into lengthy fantasy series, and the third was a wild card bouncing between fiction and pop psych. Not far off, it turned out. But that’s subject matter, not quantity. Someone said they had a hunch I went through books “like food,” which is true. “A book a month?” someone suggested. I looked shifty. “A book a week?!”

I had to pull up this list to check. It feels off to make that claim when I read so many graphic novels, but it’s true. I love books. I love devouring them. I love thinking about them and talking about them and letting them change and shape me.

Interesting that so many of my top favorites this year were comics! Getting back into working on Seacritters has me wanting to explore the medium more than I usually do, and I found some real gems. I love looking over the list and remembering where I was while reading each of these. It’s a strangely vivid experience. Getting lost in Hilary Mantel at Christopher’s was otherworldly. Plowing through Aidan Truhen at home was a riot. Being bewitched by Trung Le Nguyen’s lines on a beanbag in the Ojai Library kids’ section was nostalgic and peaceful.

I look at these lists and struggle to explain to new people what and how I read. In some groups it’s a shorthand for belonging—in others it’s a gateway to somewhere else.

(Previously: 2022 in Reading, 2021 in Reading, 2020 in Reading)

LegendRough Guide to Ratings
🎭 – Plays
📝 – Poetry
📖 – Books (Fiction)
📓 – Books (Nonfiction)
💬 – Graphic Novels
🔄 – Reread
🎙️ – Audiobook
❤︎ = Yes
❤︎❤︎ = Oh Yes
❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Oh Hell Yes
  1. 📖 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin ❤︎❤︎
  2. 📓 The Quiet Eye – Sylvia Shaw Judson
  3. 📓 Soundings: the Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor – Hali Felt
  4. 🔄 💬 Diary Comics – Dustin Harbin
  5. 🔄 📖 This is How You Lose the Time War – Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  6. 📓 The Wisdom of Insecurity – Alan Watts
  7. 📓 Also a Poet – Ada Calhoun ❤︎❤︎
  8. 💬 The Well – Jake Wyatt, Choo
  9. 💬 The Magic Fish – Trung Le Nguyen ❤︎❤︎
  10. 📝 The Wrecking Light – Robin Robertson ❤︎
  11. 📓/💬 Solutions and Other Problems – Allie Brosh
  12. 💬 Snapdragon – Kat Leyh ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  13. 📝 Four Reincarnations – Max Ritvo
  14. 💬 It’s Okay That It’s Not Okay – Christina Tran ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  15. 💬 Queenie: Godmother of Harlem – Elizabeth Colomba & Aurélie Levy
  16. 💬 Garlic and the Vampire – Bree Paulsen
  17. 💬 Garlic and the Witch – Bree Paulsen
  18. 💬 Lightfall Book 1: The Girl & The Galdurian – Tim Probert ❤︎❤︎
  19. 📓 A Sacred Shift – marlee grace
  20. 💬 The River – Alessandro Sanna
  21. 🔄 📖 The End of Mr. Y – Scarlett Thomas
  22. 💬 Skim – Mariko & Jillian Tamaki ❤︎❤︎
  23. 💬 Lightfall Book 2: Shadow of the Bird – Tim Probert ❤︎
  24. 💬 Grass of Parnassus – Kathryn & Stuart Immonen
  25. 📓 Facing the Wolf – Theresa Sheppard Alexander ❤︎
  26. 📖 Hamnet – Maggie O’Farrell ❤︎❤︎
  27. 🔄 📖 A Wizard of Earthsea – Ursula K. Le Guin
  28. 📖 White Cat, Black Dog – Kelly Link ❤︎
  29. 📓 Recollections of my Nonexistence – Rebecca Solnit ❤︎
  30. 📓 Art + Faith – Makoto Fujimura
  31. 💬 Ducks – Kate Beaton ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  32. 💬 I Thought You Loved Me – MariNaomi
  33. 💬 Dear Sophie, Love Sophie – Sophie Lucido Johnson ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  34. 💬 The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil – Stephen Collins
  35. 📖 Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel
  36. 📖 Bring Up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel ❤︎
  37. 📓 The Old Ways – Robert Macfarlane ❤︎❤︎
  38. 💬 Tales of a Seventh-Grade Lizard Boy – Jonathan Hill
  39. 💬 Equinoxes – Cyril Pedrosa ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  40. 💬 Feeding Ghosts – Tessa Hulls ❤︎❤︎
  41. 📖 The Mirror and The Light – Hilary Mantel ❤︎
  42. 💬 Hoops – Matt Tavares
  43. 📓 The Book Lover – Ali Smith ❤︎
  44. 📖 /📓 Kick the Latch – Kathryn Scanlan
  45. 📖 The Big Over Easy – Jasper Fford
  46. 💬 Himawari House – Harmony Becker ❤︎
  47. 💬 Always, Never – Jordi Lafebre ❤︎❤︎
  48. 📖 Just Like Home – Sarah Gailey
  49. 📖 The Fourth Bear – Jasper Fford
  50. 📖 To Rise Again At a Decent Hour – Joshua Ferris
  51. 📓 Giving Up the Ghost – Hilary Mantel
  52. 🔄 📖 Thief of Time – Terry Pratchett
  53. 🎙️ 📖 A Magic Steeped in Poison – Judy I. Lin
  54. 🎙️ 📖 A Venom Dark and Sweet – Judy I. Lin
  55. 📓 Enchantment – Katherine May ❤︎❤︎
  56. 📖 Fugitive Telemetry – Martha Wells
  57. 🔄 🎙️ 📖 Thud – Terry Pratchett
  58. 📖 System Collapse – Martha Wells
  59. 🔄 📖 Carpe Jugulum – Terry Pratchett
  60. 📖 The Price You Pay – Aidan Truhen
  61. 📖 Seven Demons – Aidan Truhen
  62. 📓 Mending Life – Nina and Sonya Montenegro

2022 in Reading

Back at it and even less able to provide commentary than I was this time last year, but hot damn I love books.

(Previously: 2021 in Reading)

LegendRough Guide to Ratings
🎭 – Plays
📝 – Poetry
📖 – Books (Fiction)
📓 – Books (Nonfiction)
💬 – Graphic Novels
❤︎ = Yes
❤︎❤︎ = Oh Yes
❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Oh Hell Yes
❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Priestdaddy
  1. 💬 Five Worlds: The Sand Warrior – Mark Siegel, Alexis Siegel, Xanthe Bouma,  Matt Rockefeller,  Boya Sun
  2. 📖 Pirate Freedom – Gene Wolfe
  3. 💬 Thirsty Mermaids – Kat Leyh ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  4. 🔄 📖 Going Postal – Terry Pratchett ❤︎❤︎
  5. 📖 A Dark and Starless Forest – Sarah Hollowell
  6. 📖 Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
  7. 🔄 📓 The Do-it-yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin’ Sad — Adam Gnade 
  8. 💬 The Daughters of Ys – M.T. Anderson, Jo Rioux
  9. 📓 How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne – Sarah Bakewell
  10. 🔄 📓 Burnout – Emily & Amelia Nagoski
  11. 🔄 📖 Small Gods – Terry Pratchett ❤︎❤︎
  12. 📓 At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life – Fenton Johnson ❤︎❤︎
  13. 📖 A Psalm for the Wild-Built – Becky Chambers ❤︎❤︎
  14. 📖 Luster – Raven Leilani ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  15. 📓 A Primer for Forgetting – Lewis Hyde ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  16. 📓 The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  17. 📓 Tiny House Living – Ryan Mitchell
  18. 💬 Amulet Book 1 – Kazu Kibuishi
  19. 💬 Amulet Book 2 – Kazu Kibuishi
  20. 💬 Amulet Book 3 – Kazu Kibuishi
  21. 💬 Amulet Book 4 – Kazu Kibuishi
  22. 💬 Amulet Book 5 – Kazu Kibuishi
  23. 💬 Amulet Book 6 – Kazu Kibuishi
  24. 💬 Amulet Book 7 – Kazu Kibuishi
  25. 💬 Amulet Book 8 – Kazu Kibuishi
  26. 📖 Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
  27. 📖 River of Teeth – Sarah Gailey ❤︎
  28. 📓 The Four Agreements – don Miguel Ruiz
  29. 📖 The Echo Wife – Sarah Gailey ❤︎❤︎
  30. 📓 When Strangers Meet – Kio Stark
  31. 📖 Sing, Unburied, Sing – Jesmyn Ward ❤︎
  32. 🔄📓 The Sabbath – Abraham Joshua Heschel ❤︎
  33. 📓 On Imagination – Mary Ruefle
  34. 📓 The Timeless Way of Building – Christopher Alexander ❤︎
  35. 🔄 💬 Mighty Jack – Ben Hatke
  36. 💬 Dancing at the Pity Party – Tyler Feder
  37. 💬 Zita the Spacegirl – Ben Hatke
  38. 📖 A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles ❤︎
  39. 📖 The Decagon House Murders – Yukito Ayatsuji
  40. 💬 Salt Magic – Rebecca Mock & Hope Larson
  41. 📖 Lies Sleeping – Ben Aaronovitch
  42. 🔄 💬 Mighty Jack & Zita the Spacegirl – Ben Hatke
  43. 💬 Making Comics – Lynda Barry ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  44. 📖 A Master of Djinn – P. Djèlí Clark
  45. 💬 Coyote Doggirl – Lisa Hanawalt
  46. 🔄 💬 Mighty Jack and the Goblin King – Ben Hatke ❤︎
  47. 💬 Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? – Roz Chast ❤︎❤︎
  48. 📖 Fair Play – Tove Jansson ❤︎
  49. 📖 Plus One – Christopher Noxon
  50. 💬 Berlin – Jason Lutes ❤︎❤︎
  51. 💬 Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe – Yumi Sakugawa ❤︎
  52. 📖 Matrix – Lauren Groff ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  53. 💬 Belonging – Nora Krug ❤︎❤︎
  54. 💬 My Depression – Elizabeth Swados
  55. 💬 This Woman’s Work – Julie Delporte ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  56. 📖 Shadowshaper – Daniel José Older
  57. 💬 Genderqueer – Maia Kobabe
  58. 📖 Full Dark House – Christopher Fowler
  59. 📓 Polysecure – Jessica Fern
  60. 📖 Spear – Nicola Griffith
  61. 💬 Dying for Attention: a Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care – Susan MacLeod
  62. 📓 300 Arguments – Sarah Manguso ❤︎
  63. 📓 More Than Two – Franklin Veaux & Eve Rickert
  64. 📖 Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls – Alissa Nutting
  65. 📓 Notes from Walnut Tree Farm – Roger Deakin ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  66. 📓 Unmastered, A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell – Katherine Angel ❤︎❤︎
  67. 📖 Maxwell’s Demon – Stephen Hall
  68. 📖 Magic for Liars – Sarah Gailey
  69. 📖 A Prayer for the Crown Shy – Becky Chambers
  70. 🔄📓 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Annie Dillard ❤︎❤︎❤︎ (last read in 2017)
  71. 📓 Everybody: A Book About Freedom – Olivia Laing ❤︎❤︎
  72. 📖 Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  73. 📓 The Joy of Small Things – Hannah Jane Parkinson
  74. 📖 Fisher of Bones – Sarah Gailey
  75. 📖 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John le Carré
  76. 🔄📓 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write – Sarah Ruhl
  77. 📓 Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again – Katherine Angel ❤︎
  78. 📖 Toad – Katherine Dunn ❤︎
  79. 📖 No One is Talking About This – Patricia Lockwood ❤︎❤︎
  80. 📖 The Impossible Us – Sarah Lotz ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  81. 💬 Sheets – Brenna Thummler
  82. 📓 Priestdaddy – Patricia Lockwood ❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎
  83. 📖 Upright Women Wanted – Sarah Gailey ❤︎
  84. 📖 When We Were Magic – Sarah Gailey
  85. 📓 Emergent Strategy – adrienne maree brown ❤︎❤︎
  86. 📖 The Daughter of Time – Josephine Tey
  87. 📖 Fantasian – Larissa Pham ❤︎
  88. 📓 A Handbook of Disappointed Fate – Anne Boyer ❤︎
  89. 📓 Love – Leo Buscaglia
  90. 📓 Delight – J.B. Priestley ❤︎❤︎

2021 in Reading: The Big List

Trying not to be precious about year-end stuff right now because I’m feeling stuck, but here’s a big list of things I read in 2021! Reading was hard this year for…well, you know. All the reasons. I needed a lot of comfort food to get through the upheaval of moving home, and for huge swaths of time I felt as if I’d lost access to the part of my brain that thrilled to Alberto Manguel or Le Guin in the first part of the year. I’m still sort of there.

Read a lot of comics (thanks, Danielle’s studio library and also The Actual Library) because I started drawing a graphic novel and it turns out reading more comics helps your brain think in comics??? Who knew. I still feel like I’m scratching my way towards figuring out what really makes a comic work for me. It takes a lot to get me excited about them, which feels somewhat icky as a person who knows first-hand how much fucking time they take. But there it is!

Started trying to track rough start/end dates towards the second half of the year because I got curious. I’ll probably stick with that into 2022.

Bubble and The Liar’s Dictionary both made me laugh out loud. The Creative Habit and Always Coming Home reminded me how I got to be the way I am. I’m sure there are other books I felt feelings about but I’m just going to HIT PUBLISH.

See previously: 2020’s Big List

LegendRough Guide to Ratings
🎭 – Plays
📝 – Poetry
📖 – Books (Fiction)
📓 – Books (Nonfiction)
💬 – Graphic Novels
❤︎ = Yes
❤︎❤︎ = Oh Yes
❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Oh Hell Yes
  1. 📝 An Ocean of Static – J.R. Carpenter
  2. 📓 The Book of Delights – Ross Gay ❤︎
  3. 💬 Oksi – Mari Ahokoivu
  4. 📖 The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories – Ed. Mahvesh Murad & Jared Shurin
  5. 📖 Solaris — Stanisław Lem
  6. 📖 The Liar’s Dictionary – Elly Williams ❤︎❤︎
  7. 📖 There but for the – Ali Smith ❤︎❤︎
  8. 📓/📝 Bluets – Maggie Nelson ❤︎
  9. 📖/🎭/📝/📓 Always Coming Home – Ursula K. Le Guin ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  10. 📖 Never Mind – Edward St. Aubyn
  11. 📖 Bad News – Edward St. Aubyn
  12. 📖 Some Hope – Edward St. Aubyn
  13. 📓 A Reader on Reading – Alberto Manguel ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  14. 📖 Mother’s Milk – Edward St. Aubyn
  15. 📖 At Last – Edward St. Aubyn
  16. 🔄 📖 Guards! Guards! – Terry Pratchett ❤︎
  17. 📓 The Mother of All Questions – Rebecca Solnit
  18. 🔄 💬 Delilah Dirk and the Pillars of Hercules – Tony Cliff ❤︎
  19. 📖 The Fellowship of the Ring – J.R.R. Tolkien
  20. 📖 The Mezzanine – Nicholson Baker ❤︎
  21. 📓 Big Magic – Elizabeth Gilbert ❤︎
  22. 📖 The Two Towers – J.R.R. Tolkien
  23. 📖 The Return of the King – J.R.R. Tolkien (Finished April 20th)
  24. 📖 Wonder Tales of Seas and Ships – Frances Carpenter (April 22nd – April 27)
  25. 🔄📖 The Raw Shark Texts – Steven Hall (July 20th – July 27th) ❤︎❤︎
  26. 💬 Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut, Ryan North, Albert Monteys (August 4th) ❤︎
  27. 💬 Lucky Penny – Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota  (August 4th)
  28. 💬 Kodi – Jared Cullum (August 6th)
  29. 💬 The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist – Adrian Tomine (August 8th)
  30. 💬 Girl Town – Casey Nowak (August 9th)
  31. 💬 My Life in Transition – Julia Kaye (August 9th)
  32. 💬 Bubble – Jordan Morris, Sarah Morgan, Tony Cliff, Natalie Riess (August 12th) ❤︎❤︎
  33. 📖 The Accidental – Ali Smith (August 23rd)
  34. 💬 Don’t Go Without Me – Rosemary Valero-O’Connell (August 24th) ❤︎❤︎❤︎ 
  35. 🔄 📖 The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil – George Saunders
  36. 📖 Water for Elephants – Sara Gruen (Finished Sept. 8th)
  37. 📖 All Systems Red – Martha Wells (Sept. 10th)
  38. 📖 Artificial Condition – Martha Wells (Sept. 10th)
  39. 📖 Rogue Protocol – Martha Wells (Sept. 10th-11th)
  40. 📖 Exit Strategy – Martha Wells (Sept. 11th)
  41. 📖 The Absolute Book – Elizabeth Knox (Sept. 30th? – Oct 17th)
  42. 📓 The Library at Night – Alberto Manguel (April 22nd – October 19th)
  43. 📖 Sphinx – Anne Garréta (Oct 28-30)
  44. 💬 Draw Stronger – Kriota Willberg (Oct 30)
  45. 📓 Goodbye Again – Jonny Sun
  46. 📖 The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle – Stuart Turton (Nov. 18th-20th) ❤︎
  47. 📖 Milk Blood Heat – Dantiel W. Moniz (Nov. 20th-22nd) ❤︎
  48. 📖 The Devil and the Dark Water – Stuart Turton (Nov. 27th-Dec 2nd) 
  49. 💬 Piece by Piece: the Story of Nisrin’s Hijab – Priya Huq (Dec. 6th)
  50. 💬 The Legend of Auntie Po – Shing Yin Khor (Dec. 7th) ❤︎❤︎
  51. 💬 Treasure in the Lake – Jason Pamment (Dec. 9th)
  52. 📖 The Glass Hotel – Emily St. John Mandel (Dec. 15th-17th) ❤︎
  53. 📓 The Collected Schizophrenias – Esmé Weijun Wang (Dec. 18th)
  54. 💬 Tell No Tales – Sam Maggs and Kendra Wells (Dec. 15th-21st)
  55. 📓 The Creative Habit – Twyla Tharp (Dec. 22nd) ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  56. 📓 Intimations – Zadie Smith (Dec. 28th) ❤︎
  57. 📓 I Shock Myself – Beatrice Wood (Dec. 25th – Dec. 31st) ❤︎

2020 in Reading: The Big List

The landing outside our bedrooms is tiny—barely big enough for one person to stand alongside the single floor vent that’s supposed to heat the entire upstairs. But! There’s enough wall space for two tall pieces of paper, so that’s where Zina and I have kept our reading lists since 2015.

I’ve never really gotten into tracking my reading online, so this practice has served as my visual archive of books devoured. It’s a lovely way to remind myself of when influential authors first appeared in my life, and to lend shape to the years. I used to keep the old ones pinned up in my room for easy access, but my impending move has meant getting rid of a lot of papery ephemera, so here they all are for posterity:

A collection of six tall, thin pieces of paper with lists of books written on them. They're dated from 2015 to 2020 and have the name Lucy at the top of each one.

Since I’m trying to keep more of myself on my own site, I figured I’d upload the whole catalogue from 2020 as a blog post. I’ll do a followup with a little more about my absolute favorites, but for now: here’s everything.

LegendRough Guide to Ratings
🎭 – Plays
📝 – Poetry
📖 – Books (Fiction)
📓 – Books (Nonfiction)
💬 – Graphic Novels
❤︎ = Yes
❤︎❤︎ = Oh Yes
❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Hell Yes
  1. 📖 The Starless Sea – Erin Morgenstern ❤︎
  2. 📓 All About Love – bell hooks
  3. 📓 Trick Mirror – Jia Tolentino ❤︎❤︎
  4. 📓 Atomic Habits – James Clear
  5. 📓 The Way of Zen – Alan Watts
  6. 💬 Unversed – Ed. Jonathan Hill
  7. 💬 Uncomfortably Happily – Yeon-Sik Hong
  8. 💬 The Chancellor and The Citadel – Maria Frantz
  9. 💬 The Northwest Passage (Vol. 1) – Scott Chantler
  10. 💬 The Hunting Accident – David L. Carlson & Landis Blair ❤︎
  11. 💬 Delilah Dirk and the Pillars of Hercules – Tony Cliff ❤︎❤︎
  12. 📓 Deviced – doreen dodgen-magee
  13. 📝/📓 Letters from Max – Sarah Ruhl & Max Ritvo ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  14. 📓 Van Gogh – Steven Naifeh & Gregory White Smith ❤︎
  15. 💬 Gaugin: The Other World – Fabrizio Dori
  16. 📖 The Ten Thousand Doors of January – Alix E. Harrow
  17. 📓 Madness, Rack, and Honey – Mary Ruefle ❤︎
  18. 📖 Axiomatic – Maria Turmakin
  19. 📓 The Crying Book – Heather Christle ❤︎❤︎
  20. 📖 Looking for Jake – China Miéville
  21. 🎭 Macbeth – William Shakespeare
  22. 📖 The Bird King – G. Willow Wilson ❤︎
  23. 📖 Steel Crow Saga – Paul Krueger
  24. 📖 On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong ❤︎
  25. 📓 The Salt Path – Raynor Wynn
  26. 💬 Displacement – Kiku Hughes
  27. 📓 Time is a Thing the Body Moves Through – T. Fleischmann
  28. 📖 The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book – Kate Milford
  29. 📓 Pleasure Activism – adrienne maree brown ❤︎
  30. 📖 Tales from 1001 Nights – Trans. Malcolm & Ursula Lyons
  31. 📖 The Fifth Season – N.K. Jemesin
  32. 📖 The Mermaid, The Witch, and The Sea – Maggie Tokuda-Hall
  33. 📓 Constellations – Sinead Gleeson
  34. 📖 The Reapers are The Angels – Alden Bell
  35. 📓 The Weight of Glory – C.S. Lewis
  36. 📖 Gideon the Ninth – Tamsyn Muir
  37. 📖 You Are the Friction – Ed. Jez Burrows & Anna Hurley
  38. 💬 The Golden Age – Cyril Pedrosa & Roxanne Moreil ❤︎
  39. 📖 Flights – Olga Tokarczuk
  40. 📖 Annabel Scheme and The New Golden Gate – Robin Sloan ❤︎
  41. 📖 How to Be Both – Ali Smith ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  42. 📖 A Burning – Megha Majumdar
  43. 📖 If Beale Street Could Talk – James Baldwin
  44. 📖 Blandings Castle – P.G. Wodehouse
  45. 📖 Summer Lightning – P.G. Wodehouse
  46. 📖 Heavy Weather – P.G. Wodehouse
  47. 📓 Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency – Olivia Laing ❤︎❤︎
  48. 📝 Citizen: An Americal Lyric – Claudia Rankine
  49. 📖 A Room with A View – E.M. Forster ❤︎
  50. 📓 Close to the Machine – Ellen Ullman ❤︎
  51. 📓 The Power of Ritual – Casper ter Kuile
  52. 📖 Artful – Ali Smith ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  53. 📓 Coming to Writing and Other Essays – Hélène Cixous ❤︎
  54. 📖 Attrib. – Eley Williams ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  55. 💬 Go With The Flow – Lily Williams & Karen Schneemann
  56. 💬 Knight and Beard (Vol. 1) – Tara Kurtzhals & Sarah Bollinger
  57. 📓 The Heroine’s Journey – Maureen Murdock
  58. 📖 Each of Us a Desert – Mark Oshiro ❤︎
  59. 📖 Self Care – Leigh Stein
  60. 💬 Syllabus – Lynda Barry ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  61. 💬 Grass – Keum Suk Gendry-Kim
  62. 📝 Handwriting – Michael Ondaatje
  63. 📓 Letters from Tove – Tove Jansson ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  64. 📝/📓 Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties – Trans. John J.L. Mood
  65. 🎭 The Tempest – William Shakespeare
  66. 💬 The Best We Could Do – Thi Bui ❤︎
  67. 📝 Beowulf – Maria Dahvana Headley ❤︎❤︎
  68. 📝 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  69. 📖 Piranesi – Susanna Clarke ❤︎❤︎
  70. 📓 A Reading Life – C.S. Lewis
  71. 📓 Better than IRL – Ed. Katie West & Jasmine Elliott ❤︎
  72. 📓 Split – Ed. Katie West & Jasmine Elliott
  73. 📖 The Waves – Virginia Woolf ❤︎❤︎

Literary Archipelagos

Last week, in a moment of Peak Bellwood Weakness I signed up for an online class/study group called Literature at Sea: A Brief History of Existence. The facilitator shared something in today’s intro call that I can’t believe nobody sent me when it was released back in July. It’s called An Ocean of Books and it looks sort of like this:

A screenshot of the homepage for An Ocean of Books. It shows a pale greenish blue chart with a mass of tiny, tan islands spread across it. They're loosely grouped by subject: History, Science, Novels, Classics, etc.

This “poetic experiment” was made by Gaël Hugo during his time as an Artist-in-Residence at the Google Arts & Culture Lab. It pulls from the entire Google Books library and uses a bunch of (I’m waving my hands vaguely here) technology to generate a chart of Author Islands whose distance from each other is determined by their relationships on the web.

The site’s a little awkward in places, but I find the whole concept delightful. The weird aesthetic mix of pixelated game art and old nautical chart elements!1 The playful mechanism for revealing keyword searches within a bank of fog! There’s also little factoids beside various islands, like this gem about Maurice Sendak:

A screenshot from A Sea of Books showing a drawing of a boy riding a horse. The text beside it says The original title of Sendak's famous book was Where the Wild Horses Are but he couldn't draw horses. So, when his editor asked what he could draw, his reply was Things.

Anyway, I spent a lovely afternoon poking around in here, but what it really got me hungry for was a similarly attractive way to organize one’s own library for others to explore. The trouble is that I’m just not moved by reading lists—even ones curated by subject. I’m a visual thinker, and I need to make a big mess and tack a lot of red string to the wall before I can truly understand how all these ideas are contributing to the electric pinball machine.

I don’t want the map to be dictated by an algorithm; I want to play cartographer.

I rediscovered a piece of technology this week that might hold the key, but I’m saving it for now. You’ll just have to wait.


1. Fun pedantic terminology fact: if it’s to do with the ocean, it’s a chart, not a map. Yes, there will be a quiz on this later.