Before I enter year 14 of this recording, I’ll compare some aims, (to read older material and diversely, and equally for gender parity,) against what I actually did.

I’ll elaborate on trends of books I have finished reading. (There are a few on the table that I may still finish but in rough shapes this will hold up.)

Overall I read about 41,000 pages. That’s about 110 pages a day on average. It’s a ballpark because some were facing pages translations, some had no page numbers so I didn’t count or made a guess. I only counted up to appendices if I didn’t read those. Assist points go to my back and sciatica and energy crashes which left me capable of doing little more than reading.

I am always adding new questions to track. This year I added a couple new columns to the spreadsheet: re-reads (28 titles) and cost of title.

• 66% were free to me: downloads, contributor copies, review copies, gifts, jury copies, library, or little free libraries
• 19% were bought at full price, from the author directly, at small press fairs, by subscription, or else came from indie bookstores
• 8% from Amazon (sorry)
• 7% came from thrift stores or used bookstores (so 50 cents to $10)

This time, rather than list all titles, which I’ve done on Instagram all year, and rather than what I rated highest as in a recent post, I went back through my list.

Here are 30 titles that live rent-free in my head or rearranged my mental furniture . (About 8% of those completed.)

An unordered list under each category:

Essays/Memoirs/biographies

• Letters to Lost Souls by Kai Cheng Thom (Penguin, 2023)
• Notes to Myself: My struggle to become a person by Hugh Prather (Real People Press, 1970)
• James Wright: a Life in Poetry by Jonathan Blunk  (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2017)
• Some Silences: Notes on Small Press by Cameron Anstee (Apt 9, 2024)

Novels

• Looking for Her by Carolyn Marie Souid (Baraka Books, 2024)
• Dear Elsa by Marco Fraticelli (Red Deer Press, 2023)
• Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins, 2012)
• The Jasmine Goats by Georgia Katz-Rosene (self-published, 2024)

Fantasy 

• Buffalo is the New Buffalo by Chelsea Vowel (Arsenal, 2022)
• The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (Viking, 2020)
• The Wee Free Men: Discworld Novel 30 by Terry Pratchett (RandomHouse, 2003)
• Once Upon a Death (Days of Death Series, Part 1) by Dzintra Sullivan (self-pub, 2019)
• Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch  by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (Corgi Books, 1990)

Fan Fiction

• Demonology and the Triphasic Model of Trauma: An Integrative Approach by Nnm (Archive of Our Own, 2019)
• Bleating Hearts by HK Black (Archive of Our Own, 2023)
• Golden Handcuffs by seekwill (Archive of Our Own, 2020)
• By My Side series by DemonicPutto (Archive of Our Own, 2020-2023)
• Bonds of Blood by Dee_Morris (AO3, 2024)
• Artist in Residence by Caedmon (AO3, 2024)

Plays

• Faith Healer by Brian Friel (Faber & Faber, 1980)
• Pink Mist by Owen Sheers (faber & faber, 2013)
• Green River Killer by Michael Sheen (2015)

Poetry

• Vallejo’s Marrow by Phil Hall (Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024)
• A Pandemic Inventory: Spring-Summer 2020 Brooklyn NY by Zane Koss (above/ground, 2023)
• between the lakes by Ben Robinson (above/ground, 2023)
• Frontenac: Autumnal Hymns by Michael e. Casteels (Puddles of Sky, 2022)
• The Last Song of the World by Joseph Fasano (Copper Canyon, 2024)
• The Unfolding: poems by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer, (Wildhouse, 2024)
• The flesh is not a prison by Graham Cwinn (Things in my Chest, 2023)
• Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World, edited by Pádraig Ó Tuama (Canongate, 2022)

If, in the next week, I read something that blows my mind, I’ll bump it to next year’s list, or maybe I’ll append.

I see impact in novels, short stories, non-fiction, plays, but, curiously, not as much poetry as I expect, considering percentage-read. (Curious. Am I not reading challenging, transformative poetry? Not attending deeply enough? Or is the work that poetry does not my medicine now?)

Maybe some sci-fi will shake out as memorable later and stick with me. Some I ranked highly then forgot entirely. Some I ranked lower but stays with me. Everything is an estimate.

This year I read 46% each, male and female with no disparity of ranking by gendered or non-binary or multiple genders.

47% Canadian, 53% other nations. My Indigenous reads, including First Nations, Inuit and Metis, was a measly 2% and roll into 9% total who were BIPOC. 

Queer reads, so far I know the authors who are 2SLGBTQ+, comprised only 7%. (For science reads, no data.) Most fan fiction are by people with pen names which don’t  display gender, nation, queerness, or melanin, but many stories feature gay, ace, art, bi, or queer characters and those novels, and novellas comprise 20% of titles read. So maybe queer reads are over a quarter?

Poetry comprised 60%. Most of the rest are novels or novellas. Chapbooks rang in around 20%. The next biggest categories were memoir or essays, then history or science. 

55% were published in 2023-2024, Only 6% were earlier than mid 20th century. (In subjective time however, the Jane Austin books were may more than 6%, especially Sense and Sensibility. A dubious success to finish that one. I tended to bail rather than persist under the principle of you read more if you read what you like and quit more that you don’t like.)

What work is it that I want written word to do?

To expand me. To teach me how to be a better human. To understand angles of human nature. To conceive of a supportive world. To enter play and silliness, and to enter scary experiences completely unlike my own. To live more lives and to live a life I’m better equipped to understand.

I added to literary resources, on the author site, where I make available tips for running s reading series, or open mic, or tools for writing, a card game for thinking poetics. I added to templates for flutter books and chapbooks from 8 pages— now there’s 36-page and 24-page templates for Apple pages and and MS Word. It has page numbering and what goes where. Unfortunately both pieces of software have removed the function of text boxes flowing from one to the next, and have to add text to each page separately. A pain but there are slower work arounds of more cut and paste.

I added a post at substack. I do that each month or so. They tend to be longer and involved.

I use Patreon for smaller tidbits, such as upcoming events, reports on going to readings, or poems in progress. Except I haven’t had any upcoming events, or gone to readings, or written much. I added a poem post there for Patreons who are kind enough to support financially. I hadn’t posted for months. I meant to get to the last oh, 6 or 7 readings I put in my calendar but either knackered or lost track of time, or too headachy or dizzy, or in the last case, miscalculated how long it takes to clear the driveway to actually be able to leave. And another dump of snow today and more coming. Undeniably winter.

Summer seems a minute ago when it didn’t looks like midnight at 5pm. I meander, so I meander. It doesn’t always have to be tight. It doesn’t always have to be packaged for instant consumption. It doesn’t always have to follow the adage of Chekhov’s gun, of if the revolver is in the scene in act 1, it must be used in act 2. I like the splooge, the extraneous, the outside the margins. Being singularly efficient makes everything kind of transactional, formal, correct. The incorrect has some tasty excess.

I recall the days of yore when I had a dozen daily blogs, each catered to someone’s complaint or wish. That is someone said at general blog, like the food stuff, focus on that. Or I despise foodies. Or, never mention the scourge of pets. And I’d trot off and make a spin off blog to accommodate those 10-second commenters. One for selfies, one for vegan cooking, one for general photographs, one for life minutia, one for poetry, one for flash fiction, one for dreams, one for my sock puppet musings, one for cat, one for reflecting on people who influenced me, one for hm, was it twelve? It was a lot of verbiage at any rate and bending over backwards for diminishing returns.

Now I’m still spread far but don’t spend much time on the computer or on the internet. I’m at a few places, sorta, sorting out what they’re about. I’m hoping Pinterest might serve the function of Instagram so I can leave the Meta-empire. I’d rather someone bought Instagram from them. I’m monthly or so at substack but I’m not finding things to read. Some post too often too much. I skim at best. Which is something but I’m in the mood for deep dives, immersions in worlds.

I like books is the thing. I have hundreds of books I haven’t yet read the first time.

Books must be balanced with action and interaction. Carrying firewood, for instance. The insurmountable task of winter laundry. Although in summer, with sweat, we probably make as much volume. And cooking. Made the tortiere, and the fruitcakes but no other adjunct desserts of the holidays. I’m not feeling Christmas as intensely for some reason.

Despite rigorous applications of holiday movies and despite putting up a tree, and even getting a xmas sweater and a xmas t-shirt and doing the xmas letter, which I can’t really send far since apparently I know street addresses but not email for a lot of people…

Mostly I’m looking forward to staying at a hotel with a jacuzzi while in town to visit in-laws. But as with every social, I expect it, or the roads to travel there, to be the accident, or covid death of me. It does acidify the chrome shine off.

Not that this is new. I was born in the 1800s as a farm hand on a flat earth reading the 1880s novels and 1920s school readers. I expected the Second Coming every hour from grade 4 to university. Death was always imminent. Not until I was late 30s did I receive a life-wish instead of living inside death-aspiration. Maybe the cultural was hung on the convenient coat hook of my birth-chem/psychology. If not Christianity it would have been some other Fatalist scheme. Thank goodness for grants to catapult me to university where I talked with Sikhs, Jews, Muslims, atheists. Where I took a history of Christianity from a prof who thought the myths were cute but silly. Where I took Islam from a prof who was Sunni and the student behind me was Shi’a and run a running counter corrective on stories. Or the reverse. Where I took the history of science. Where I took biology and economics and history of art, and linguistics. University where I met a person who was kinder and more respectful to me than anyone I had ever encountered and also not Christian. So many pivot points. And so long on this path where I value things not pat, where if things don’t perfectly dovetail and feel less perfect, are at least less likely to be false.

I suppose it’s a symptom of winter closing in, roads being clogged with storm, awards season swinging, the 2025 book catalogues coming out, the Auld Lang Syne season of reflection, taking stock of who is still known, who had passed and what next for hope and ambition and leaving behind. Considering who and what I will become based on choices and chutes and routes from where I’ve been.

Anyhew, time time to make lunch, make a fire, get myself sorted.

Towards to the end of the year I’ll post my usual summary of my reading stats, how many Canadian vs, not, and indigenous reads or gender parity, by genre and all the etc. For the moment, I’m collecting up my fav reads. With caveat that I have in progress probably a dozen.

Here are my top 10% of I read so far in 2024. Maybe this will tip an idea to you of what to give for gifts. (Bolded are the ones released this year.)

Memoir:

• Notes to Myself: My struggle to become a person by Hugh Prather (Real People Press, 1970)
• And Now I Spill the Family Secrets: An Illustrated Memoir by Margaret Kimball (Harper, 2021)
• Summer of the Horse by Donna Kane (Harbour, 2018)
• James Wright: a Life in Poetry by Jonathan Blunk  (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2017) 
• Crooked Teeth by Danny Ramadan (Viking, 2024)

Short Stories:

• Buffalo is the New Buffalo by Chelsea Vowel (Arsenal, 2022)

Plays:

• Faith Healer by Brian Friel (Faber & Faber, 1980)

Novels:

• Looking for Her by Carolyn Marie Souaid (Baraka Books, 2024)
• We Meant Well by Erum Shazia Hasan (ECW, 2023)
• Denial by Beverley McLachlin (Simon & Schuster, 2021)
• The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (Viking, 2020)
• Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (Corgi Books, 1990)

Fan Fiction:

• Bleating Hearts by HK Black (Archive of Our Own, 2023)
• Demonology and the Triphasic Model of Trauma: An Integrative Approach by Nnm (Archive of Our Own, 2019)
• By My Side series by DemonicPutto (Archive of Our Own, 2020-2022)
• Salinity (and other measurements of brackish water) by drawlight (AO3, 2019)
• Bonds of Blood by Dee_Morris (AO3, 2024)
• Public Relations by Cards_Slash (AO3, 2024)
• On the Same Page by Chekhov (Archive of Our Own, 2020)
• Every Damn Day by klikandtuna (AO3, 2024)

Poetry:

• The Unfolding: poems by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer, [ARC] (Wildhouse, 2024)
• Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World, edited by Pádraig Ó Tuama (Canongate, 2022)
• Spøkjelse I Japanske Drosjar by Dag T. Straumvåg, translation of Michael Dennis (A+D, 2020)
• Get Well Soon by Jamie Sharpe (ECW, 2024)
• Your Therapist Says it’s Magical Thinking: poems by Sadie McCarney (ECW, 2023)
• Dancing with the Dead by Red Pine (Copper Canyon, 2023)
• Skirrid Hill by Owen Sheers (Seren Books, 2005, 2009)
• The flesh is not a prison by Graham Cwinn (Things in my Chest, 2023)
• Entre Rive and Shore by Dominique Bernier-Cormier (Icehouse, 2023)
• Like a Trophy from the Sun by Jason Heroux (Guernica, 2024)
• Love is a Place but you cannot Live There by Jade Wallace (Guernica, 2023)
• after that: poems by Lorna Crozier (M&S, 2023)
• Reckoning: a poem by Patrick Friesen (Anvil Press, 2023)
• Beyond the Flames by Louise Dupré, trans by Antonio D’Alfonso (Guernica Editions, 2014)
• Rose by Li-Young Lee (BOA, 1986)

Poetry chapbooks:

• A Pandemic Inventory: Spring-Summer 2020 Brooklyn NY by Zane Koss (above/ground, 2023)
• Apocryphal Girl by Rebecca Macijeski (Pinhole Poetry, 2024)
• Life Cycle of a Mayfly by Maya Clubine (Vallum Chapbook Series, No. 37, 2023)
• a very little street by Stuart Ross (Turret House, 2023)
• Blizzard of None by Jason Heroux (Puddles of Sky, 2024)

Haiku:

• Weather by Rob Taylor (Gaspereau Press, 2024)
• No Heroic Measure by Roland Packer (Red Moon Press, 2023)

Since 2012 I’ve done a complete list of books read in the year. I generally have add demographics of writers to make me conscious of who I read so I don’t read all old dead white American men but include in my view everyone else.That desire got a wrinkle when reading fan fiction since it is like old usenet days where people have handles not visible identities for gender or nation or any other marker. I think that’s good. It prevents me from getting fixated on ratios or quotas. I want to read not just current books but voices from the 1800s and before to balance my filters. I like to read works in translation to inform my perspectives. I want to read not only poetry that I default to, but memoirs, science, history, novels to inform that project that is Build Self. I want to include easy reads and hard stretch reads. 

About 10% of my reads were re-reads. About 15% of titles were read aloud, thus far. Knowing I will be listing all at Instagram causes some torque as I read, wanting to not read the last portion if I didn’t like it so I wouldn’t have to add it to my list. Loophole-mind is never healthy. I do not include children’s books read or often don’t include graphic novels or list a book again if I’m re-reading more than once within a year. I don’t include books that I quit, naturally, but i have added a spreadsheet page for abandoned books where I foundered or stalled. Not that you need to know, just saying.

That’s not so much creeping up but running full tilt. I’ll have the fabulous new Jamie Sharpe chapbook for sale and be browsing all the new wares. Cash or credit card.

Ottawa Small Press Fair, Fall Edition
Sat. Nov 16 12-5pm, Tom Brown Arena, 141 Bayview Station Rd, 2nd floor (overlooking hockey arena).