pesbo blog – Page 26

As I mentioned in a previous post, I do an analysis of what I consume each year to be accountable to myself and see patterns I want to change. (Be the change.) This tracking allows me to identify trends and gaps. From this I can direct my reading and intentions for the future.

First nations, Metis and Inuit writers comprised 7% of books read, People of Colour authors comprised 9%, Black authors were 4%, and the rest were White.

10% of books I read this year were by queer authors.

By default the easiest books to find are by white, abled, straight, middle class, English people. You have to make an effort to read anything else. I was pushing myself to read more indigenous voices but I fell down in reading Black voices.

Traditionally I read more male than female. I was on the lookout for trans and non-binary writers.

Pretty evenly split for male and female at 40% and 41%. Non-binary were only 4% and multiple authors were common at 15% since I read a bunch of translations, anthologies and collections.

Overall, this year I read more titles than any year on record, certainly since my concussion. In 2015 I came close with 216 books read but this year at 266 was a lot even for me. They were not all book-books. I didn’t count the children’s books I read but I did count chapbooks.

Of poetry read, about a quarter was in chapbook form.

Half of what I read was poetry and of that, a quarter were chapbooks. Poetry tends to be physically slim but can be conceptually and emotionally weightier.

On average, it worked out to a 138 page length per book, but novels averaged 300 pages and memoirs averaged 224 pages. Poetry averaged 86 pages with a minimum of 8 pages and maximum of 480 pages.

Poetry, Novels and Memoir comprised nearly 80% of all the reads finished. (I have 2 dozen partly read titles spilling over into the next year.)

Half the time I was reading newly published things, the vow to read classics having slipped off somewhere. In my defence there is so much excellent writing being done and poetry of our own zeitgeist is more interesting than something in a context before my birth, which is also more likely to be formal, racist and sexist.

2021-2022 titles are 46% and 2010-2020 a further 34% of the titles. Only one title from pre-1800s.

Where do all these books come from? (A phrase often heard about the house.)

The biggest source is the library but of those that stay, direct from the publisher. Or from a used book store. Or a review copy. These four sources accounts for half of them. My Amazon buys are down. Free downloads, such as from the Haiku Foundations, are up.

I got 16 from an indie bookstore. It was more bought, but I have a box and a few stacks in my To Be Read piles. I have 12 books that I got direct from the author, my fav place, to put cash directly into a writer’s hands.

Something else new in trends is reading aloud to each other more than any other year. My partner and I read almost a book a week aloud to each other. 45 books, mostly memoirs or sci-fi.

This is the first year I’ve tracked rereads so I don’t have comparative data but I can say I re-read 24 titles this year, so close to 10%.

Reading in French is slow for me and it fell off over the year. I only read 6 books in French in 2022, but a good one. “La route des oiseaux de mer” of Hélène Leclerc won Honourable Mention in the Prix André-Duhaime pour les livres et plaquettes (chapbooks) du haïku francophone.

I’d like to read more science. I read articles but not books. From looking at this year, I decide that for 2023 I want to set the goals of more science, more stretch of reading in French, more BIPOC writers, more queer writers, more books in translation, more stories by disabled writers, and more re-reading to dive deeper.

Coming up: my fav reads!

EARLY IN THE MORNING

While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher’s ink.

She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.

My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.

For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.

But I know
it is because of the way
my mother’s hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.

Li-Young Lee in Rose (BOA, 1986)

I saw him read this at Dodge Poetry Fest. The slow cadence imbued with humility and vulnerability.

These exquisitely tender moments, these carefully tended to everyday beauties given love syllable by syllable.

It seems much of American poetry is better at it, while Canadian poetry is more bent towards dissonant traumatized cacophony. Perhaps also it was more common in the previous century as an acceptable expression, to be timeless and bound inside a lovely moment.

Nelson Ball Prize Ceremony: Dec 30

Demographics and Stats of Books Read

Loved Then, Loved Now: Early in the Morning

Betty Drevniok