Under the wire

On goals, and what I'm reading for the rest of the year

In the interest of getting back up to speed, I’ve started work on an “everything I’ve read this year” roundup, but in the interest of accuracy I’m waiting to publish it until the year is, well, over.

My goal for 2024 was to read 30 books, a number I had come up to the precipice of before but never actually crossed. I’d finished several of the past few years at 28, which I was happy with. But I wanted to see if, with steady progress over the course of the year, I could break into new territory.

I don’t have much interest in chasing big numbers, reading-wise. Number-of-books-read and meaningfulness-of-reading are hardly correlative, and if you’re not careful the former can even get in the way of the latter. But I love reading and I’ve found that I’m happiest when I’m consistently making time in my life for books I care about. 30 wasn’t so much a number I wanted to claim as it was a benchmark for the time I wanted to make in my life for reading. The number reflects my priorities; it’s not a priority in itself. Or at least that’s what I try and remind myself.

As of yesterday I’ve read 41 books this year. The shortest, Rebecca West’s fantastic The Return of the Soldier, is 90ish pages. The longest, Moby-Dick, was over 700 counting the endnotes. My reading ebbed and flowed over the course of the year, but around July it became clear that, if I kept operating the way I had been, I’d hit 30 no problem. At that point I stopped paying attention to the numbers.

I will not be pushing that goal number higher in 2025. If the point of a numerical goal is to codify the act of reading as a habit — and not as a performance or a sport or a test of will — than it ought to stay at the lowest possible number at which that intention can be fulfilled. That’s different for everyone. With me — work-from-home/self-employedish, trying to get up to speed for an MA in English, only responsible for me and my cat — 30 is just about perfect. That number will likely get lower as those life factors change. I doubt it’ll ever get higher.

Several of the books I read this year are now ranked among my favorites ever. Some of them were real challenges to get through. A couple are both. It’s been a good year.

So, in the interest of finishing strong, I’ve got a few books I’ve really been looking forward to on the docket for the last few weeks of December. Here are a few of them:

Suttree, Cormac McCarthy

The recent news regarding McCarthy was a bummer¹ and it also confirmed what I’ve known in my gut since I was a teenager: Cormac McCarthy is the guy who writes my favorite sentences in the world² and also who I absolutely don’t want to meet in real life. I’m finally reading Suttree and both of these are holding true.

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

I’ve been saving this one and oh boy am I excited. Will report back.

Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky

I’ve never read any Russian lit, but I’ve decided this is the winter I tackle a few I’ve been wanting to read for a while (Crime and Punishment, Death of Ivan Illyich, etc). Notes from Underground is 130 pages so it feels like a good place to start³.

Terra Nostra, Carlos Fuentes

The ominously-thick, big honkin’ used paperback I’ve had on my shelf for a few weeks and am finally working up the nerve to start. I’ll probably try and read this over a month or two with a bunch of short books interspersed as breaks throughout. I haven’t read a book this long since high school⁴ — wish me luck.

1. “Bummer,” of course, is putting it really lightly, but also that Vanity Fair piece was its own bizarre can of worms. Augusta Britt sounds like an incredibly interesting person. I — like others — hope somebody a bit more qualified and a bit less McCarthy-worshipping can manage to interview her soon.

2. He’s actually locked in an eternal stand-off with Toni Morrison and Flannery O’Connor, who together form my literary big three. Who among them is my favorite? Whoever I’ve read most recently.

3. Famous last words?

4. A Storm of Swords, which I believe — at 1008 pages — remains the longest book I’ve ever finished. That was in 2016.