#definitely more than zero which is what I’ll make if I nap thru the dinner rush 😭😭😭

[milo-is-rambling]

I’m addicted to the grind (I doordashed for three hours this morning after only sleeping for four hours and now I’m contemplating abandoning my nap to go doordash for like. Twelve hours.)

[judithbutlersdealer]

favorite books of 2018

yes I know we’re halfway through January but time isn’t real

goals: read 30 books

don’t read white men/read everyone but white men

at this point I naturally gravitate towards books that aren’t about or by white men so this wasn’t a big issue for me, plus I didn’t have any strict restrictions about Not Allowing Myself to read white men at all or anything, because if a book is good then it’s good and if an author is good then they’re good! I don’t want to willfully rob myself of a good experience, my main objective was just to broaden my horizons and focus overwhelmingly on people who aren’t white men so GOAL ACCOMPLISHED

data ripped from my Goodreads page because I think it’s fun:

69 books

20,879 pages

shortest book: letters to a young poet (52 pages)

longest books: the unabridged journals of sylvia plath (732 pages)

top 10

I Can’t Believe You Just Said That by Danny Wallace

this book was great. Danny Wallace basically meets a Rude Man and it upsets him so much he just starts investigating the history of rudeness. so fun and smart and tender and amazing. I read this book while continuously failing my driving test because the guy who was doing the test was a notorious sadist and I was really just Going Thru It on all fronts and this book was actually such a breath of fresh air right in that period of my life. like yes some people are very terrible and there’s nothing for you to do about that and some people are very good, and you will probably meet an equal mix of both in your life and that’s pretty fascinating, all things considered. great stuff written by a great man.

white man?: yes but Danny Wallace is one of my all-time favorite writers and also human beings so!!! I can’t believe I have less than a year until I go to the same school he went to and move to the city where he lives!!!! what the fuck (please Danny Wallace if you’re reading this don’t get a restraining order I’m actually a quite normal and stable person I swear)

How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell

are you an opium memoir, alcohol memoir, or amphetamine memoir type of person? personally I love them all but I used to be an amphetamine person and now I can’t be an amphetamine person so I’m an amphetamine memoir person. I wish people would take this book (and all books like this) more seriously. I took it seriously and it was painful. very fast read, very fun, very sad. can’t ever watch Catfish ever again.

white man?: no

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

WOWWWWWWW this book. this book right here! this fucking book. it ripped out my heart and then fed it to me again. what is it about seeing your own home described so carefully & tenderly & lovingly & with such surgical precision by someone who’s an outsider there? idk but it makes life worth living for me. I’m still 100% convinced that Elif Batuman wrote this book for me, specifically. you guys get to read it and that’s cool because it’s a great book but it was written for me. thank you Elif!!! so generous.

this book punched me in the mouth then kissed me on the forehead then baked me a cake then got me drunk.

white man?: no

Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman

I still haven’t seen the movie, and that should tell you how much this book hurt my heart. it didn’t even hurt it as much as it moved inside it & lived there & probably will for the rest of my life. I read it while trekking through the Alps and also so deeply in love I felt like it would never go away (and it didn’t) and this book just Got It. it didn’t get me as much as it got the concept of love & desire & knowing yourself vs knowing someone else vs knowing the two of you together. the whole book is one long, breathless sentence. there’s a quote I sometimes use on my blog to tag stuff and it’s “desire is always leaving the door open” and that’s what this book is about.

white man?: yes

Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith

this is the book I’ll always read when I want to remind myself how much smarter I can be.

white man?: no

Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher

perfect book to read on a rocky beach on the Côte d'Azur in late August. equal parts glossy fun & thought-provoking. all in all I’m really thankful that Carrie Fisher found the strength to write as much as she did throughout her life, and I’m thankful that I found her books this year

white man?: no

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

perfect Christmas break-read. this book is so different from what I usually read (I pretty much never read historical fiction & whenever I try I just can’t get into it) but something just drew me to it & I needed something to read while sprawled out on the couch post-Christmas dinner, so I bought it on a whim and I’m so glad I did! the prose was great, the characterization fantastic, and the whole premise of the book was just cool as fuck tbh. unnerving & sad & tender & so so so lovely. the ending was strange and perfect just like the whole book. makes you Think and Feel.

white man?: no

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

perfect plane-read. perfect read for the end of a week when you’ve visited your extended family back home & you've interacted with so many people & they’re all so complicated in their own way & it’s all been a lot and you just want someone to look inside your head and go, look, I understand, here, have some spiked lemonade. this book did exactly that! everything in it is relatable. it’s like you do all these small things throughout the day, and then it turns out that someone has noticed them all and they have been writing notes on them and one day they finally show you, but in a non-creepy way. very smart book, very entertaining, makes you ponder stuff that you maybe used to think was insignificant.

white man?: no

Reborn by Susan Sontag

reading this while feeling manic and hopped up on like five cups of green tea and black coffee was an Experience. smart. sad. hopeful. intimidating. mostly, what this book did was make me feel a lot less alone. like there was a woman out there whose brain was also going 200 mp/h all the time and she was also constantly in search of intellectual simulation and nothing was enough and she knew she had things to say but she had no one to say it to, and she was afraid of the future just as much as she fetishized it, and she didn’t always feel the right things in the right situations but she somehow managed. and in the end she found ways to fulfill herself and she found ways in which she could excel and she found work that was satisfying (and I say this with zero intent of romanticizing anything about Sontag’s life). so maybe there’s hope for all of us who are constantly bouncing off the walls and always feel like we’re living behind a glass wall.

white man?: no

Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich

definitely the hardest book to read of 2018. it’s so scary to imagine not just how much work Svetlana Alexavitch put into this book, but also how much it must have hurt her, emotionally, and how many times she must have wanted to abandon it all and lie down and just take a really long nap, because it was all so painful (or maybe she’s a much better and more productive person than I am and she never had those thoughts) anyways this was 100% a book where I was like, I hate all of this but I need to know these things so I’ll push through. everything my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles have ever told me was in this book, except it was all jammed up on steroids. but I know I need to learn about and understand their history better, even if it’s super painful, especially because it’s super painful! and especially because it’s not my history. I’m so glad this book won the Nobel Prize & I’ll never listen to anyone who thinks otherwise.

white man?: no

comments:

I’m satisfied with myself, I read more than twice the amount I originally set out to read, I read a wide variety of genres and subjects, I read a lot of books I liked, I read a lot of books that have been sitting on my TBR for a very long time, I didn’t read too many white men!!! I originally made it my goal to read 30 books because I was balls deep in a horrible depressive episode in late 2017/early 2018 and I just fully couldn’t even read a chapter of anything without getting a panic attack, so 30 books was an ambitious but still achievable goal. it’s nothing compared to how much I read when I’m doing better, but I was really struggling back then and frankly I wasn’t even sure I’d accomplish this much, so I’m very happy with my progress. I also pushed myself to read books that were difficult to read for different reasons and powered through many of them, which I’m also proud of. the second half of 2019 is going to be insane, but I still want to set myself the goal of reading 40 books, which I think I can realistically accomplish in the first half of the year, if things really do get so crazy hectic that I won’t have the time to read AT ALL later in the year, which it hopefully won’t. but I think 40 is a nice and realistic goal. we’ll see!!!

ultimately, this was the year I explicitly decided that I wanted to be a well-read person, that reading a lot was an important priority in my life, and it’s important to me that I push myself to continue to read a lot, because 1) it makes me a better person and 2) it makes me happy. so deciding to challenge myself to read as much as possible and actually set myself reading goals and challenges and then invest time and energy in accomplishing them has been an important consequence of this year’s reading challenge and it’s definitely something that’s going to affect how I read in the future. OKAY NERD EPISODE OVER BYE

(big thanks to Muffy @whitegirlblog for the inspiration 🤓)