Reflections on reading one thousand books in a year
I’ve been using Goodreads to track my reading for over a decade. I’ve loved watching the numbers on my “Read” and “To-Read” shelves change over that time. The end of 2022 put me in an optimistic mood: why not read 1,000 books in a year? How hard could it be?
The results were mixed. There were weeks where I completely lost myself in the piles of books; content to explore the new and unexpected with no thought to reality. Other weeks I fell into a natural reading slump – we’re all familiar with them. In the end, I made it over the finish line on New Year’s Eve and was left with a heart and head full of inspiration and ideas.
I read a bit of everything across formats (physical, ebooks, audiobooks), audience ages (children’s, young adult, adult), genres (fiction, nonfiction), and sub-genres (romance, science fiction, mystery, poetry, graphic novel, adventure, biography). And from authors from as many different backgrounds as I could find.
Poetry is Powerful
The danger of reading across many genres is that occasionally some all by the wayside. It had been a few years since poetry made it to the top of my TBR. After my first of the year, I sought out more and more: Jaye Simpson, Anne Sexton, Eve L. Ewing, Lang Leav, Mary Ruefle, Nguyen Minh Hieu, Alison C. Rollins, William Evans, Remi Kanazi, and even some Billy Collins and Shel Silverstein.
Poems across cultures, time periods, and perspectives speak to our souls in a way that prose can’t always accomplish. These glimpses of interiority from authors so different from me are helpful reminders about what is important in life and how we are more similar than different.
Biographies as Inspiration
As a child in the ’90s, the “J Biography” section of the public library was fascinating, but monotone. Literally. It seems publishers had the idea at the time that for books to represent history they had to be shades of beige and sepia. Yet that aisle has remained my favorite. Even to this day, this is one of my favorite genres and formats – I may not have the time for 450 page biographies, making the junior biographies just perfect.
History is full of fascinating individuals, most of whom are rarely heard about. Early readers of today now have access to thousands of titles featuring people from more diverse backgrounds. Alice Waters to Aretha Franklin, Evonne Goolagong to Khutulun, Virginia Apgar to Nichelle Nichols, Roberta Flack to Jane Jacobs; and those are just what I read in a month! Seeing other people’s experiences helps show us what we are capable of ourselves. The more these are available to children, the wider their world will become.
Picture Worth a Thousand Words
The graphic novel artists of today are beyond incredible. The market has realized that there is room for every artistic style and has made space for them. From fully saturated colors with thick outlines, to duo-toned sketches, cartooned features to hyper-realistic characters; I love them all.
Graphic novels lend themselves so well to those genres that defy reality. Where prose would take pages of description to explain the spaceship/elven kingdom/manifestation of magic, that can all be effectively replaced by a single pane of illustration. Knee Deep (Joe Flood), Coda (Simon Spurrier), M is for Monster (Talia Dutton), Across a Field of Starlight (Blue Delliquanti), Djeliya (Juni Ba), Witchy (Ariel Slamet Ries), and so many others use this remarkably to their advantage.
Melissa Proulx | Author 