I turned 30 a decade ago yesterday. I’d started a little blog a year or so beforehand (lost to time, thankfully) mostly as a project to try to quell my homesickness as I adjusted to living in Reno, and as part of it I set out a list of 30 things I wanted to accomplish in my 30s. The full list has been long since misplaced, but one of those goals was to read 500 books in the course of my 30s. I’ve always loved to read, but I’d largely fallen out of the habit until I picked it up again in my late 20s. 50 books per year seemed like a reasonable goal. Just about one per week. To keep myself accountable, I started a side blog, which quickly became the main and only blog: 500 Books.
Many, many things have changed since I first typed into the text box on Blogspot and hit publish. I got a dog. I got married. I wrote book reviews and published one every week, quickly building up a buffer and writing reviews well in advance of the date they would run. I found Top Ten Tuesday and participated in that every week, too. And then the pandemic happened and things shifted for me, as they did for so many people. I found it incredibly difficult to sustain my attention on things that I’d previously enjoyed doing (situational depression is after all still depression). Writing book reviews became less and less of a priority for me. I couldn’t get started, couldn’t edit or revise. I’d open the window, type some halfhearted ideas in, close the window without saving. My backlog kept the reviews going, but I didn’t have the same drive to keep it up.
We bought a house. I got pregnant and had a baby. And that’s when the big shift happened. Reading remained a priority. But finding the time to do that was hard enough. Time to maintain and update a blog? Just not there. I nearly threw in the towel, but then I thought better of it. What if instead of pretending I was ever going to be able to be that devoted to a pure reading blog again, I changed focus? I do enjoy writing about books, engaging with other readers, thinking critically about what I’ve read. But I wanted to feel less constrained by the format I’d set up for myself, freer to talk about my life outside of the pages. I thought about retooling the original blog, but ultimately felt like it was neater to just establish a new space, porting over what had come before but taking a new tack going forward. Hence, A Portable Magic. And here we are three years later, still going strong. I look back on the last ten years of posts and it’s really cool to have a record of my life in this way, to be able to see what I was thinking about and what was important to me. I’ve gotten to a point where the pace of posting feels sustainable to me and I hope to be writing here for years to come.
All of that being said, I wanted to take an accounting of the last ten years of reading, as a way to wrap it all up with a little bow. Without further ado, I read 732 books. Crazy! My most productive reading year was 2016, the year I got married, when I read 101 books. I was incredibly stressed in the lead-up to my wedding and leaned hard on reading as escape to compensate. I’ve never come seriously close to that number again. I read the fewest books in 2022, the year I gave birth, finishing only 46. I dealt with serious post-partum depression and anxiety, and also just…had a newborn. I knew I’d have less time to read, certainly, but I hadn’t really understood the full ramifications on my free time. I don’t know that it’s really possible to understand until you do it. But each year since, I’ve read more than I did the year before. I feel good about that! Genre-wise, I read truly a little bit of everything with perhaps the exception of self-help. My beloved literary fiction most of all, but also memoirs, young adult novels, biographies, science fiction, history, romance, horror, even a book about physics that left me more and more out of my depth the further I went. I’ve read books that were so bad they made me actually angry. I’ve read books so wonderful that turning the last page and realizing there was no more story felt like a gut punch. I continue to get a lot of use out of my Kindle though I prefer the feeling of a book in my hand (storage space, alas, is not infinite even though I do my best to stretch it as far as I can). Some books take me just a day or two to read. Others take weeks. I’ve learned that what I really love is a character-driven drama, and a book that neglects character development is unlikely to be one I really care for, no matter how exciting the plot may be. I’ve learned that I tend to find writing on the flowery side more appealing than very spare prose. I’ve learned that I’m a very literal reader, satire tends to leave me cold and imagery and motifs often escape my notice. I’ve learned that I mostly find short stories frustrating. There are an embarrassing number of authors I’ve read for the first time. There are some I will never read again.
So what’s next? I’m not setting a numerical goal for my 40s, though I’d be lying if I pretended I didn’t want to read just as much if not more as I did in my 30s. I’ve been flirting with the idea of finally abandoning books I’m not enjoying, but this still feels like a bit of a road too far for me personally though I’d never judge anyone else for it and will freely acknowledge that it’s probably a better way to go about things. But especially right now, when it seems like the concept of intellectual curiosity is itself being devalued, I’m more determined than ever to be an enthusiastic reader and raise my son to be one as well. I want to keep reading as much and as widely as I can. I want to read books to enhance my understanding of issues I find important. I want to read books that I might find disagreeable to try to understand where people with other perspectives are coming from. I want to get totally caught up in stories. I want to read the kinds of things that make me want to get another copy to press into someone’s hands and tell them they absolutely have to read it too. And I want to keep putting my thoughts about what I read out there, as insignificant as my reach might be. I don’t say that to be self-deprecating. I just think there’s an inherent value in engaging critically with the culture around us, and my thoughts are no less valuable than anyone else’s. So here’s to another decade of changes that are sure to come and the books I’ll be reading along the way!
