Checking Out All the Books

A New Year's Resolution for the win: To read and borrow more

Last year's resolution wasn't to be bendier or more fit, but to dive deeper into something I love doing: reading. It seemed like an easy win, like eating more cheese or chocolate.

Also, I felt was slipping into some bad reading habits. The pandemic had got me hooked on instant gratification of buying e-books on my phone, and splurging at the book store. Wanting to be "responsible" in my spending, I gravitated to bargain books (some super bad), thick "more bang for your buck" books, and ones from familiar authors; my choices becoming both narrower and more erratic in terms of quality.

Clearly it was time to head back to the library -- the mothership of books. An added bonus, late fees, my previous downfall, had been waived during COVID and continued in 2023. In fact, recently the Greater Sudbury Public Library decided to get rid of fines forever, seeing them as a barrier to borrowing. Yet, one more reason to love the library!

Around this time, I also read Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project. Rubin believes in taking a methodical approach to happiness: learning what you value in life, what you want to spend your time doing, and taking all the baby steps needed to get there.

Each month of her year round project, Rubin tackled a different theme, almost like mini-New Years resolutions. She also espouses this idea of "doing you," no matter how dorky doing you might be. For instance, Rubin realized, she'll never want to go listen to live jazz but did want to keep collecting and reading biographies. (This book spun off into others focused on how to build and keep new habits, as well as journals with stickers to reward yourself for staying on track with your goals. Yes, adult can do stickers too, if that is you.)

Learning from Rubin that tracking is key to habit building, I decided for my resolution to keep a tally of both book spending and my library "receipts" --how much I saved by borrowing-- as well as the book titles themselves.

My own experiment lacks a baseline. I have no idea how much I read the year previous or really how much I spent. However, in looking at the numbers it does seem to tilt in favour of winning my resolution with following results:

• $1,858 saved by borrowing at the library
• $319 spent on buying books
• 67 books read

But this New Year's Resolution wasn't just about the numbers and ticking boxes; rather about opening up my reading habits by discovering new authors and letting whim (or is it whimsy?) play a role in expanding my reading universe. I'll confess here that I love many types of fiction (literary, fantasy, speculative fiction and sci-fi) but rarely read non-fiction ones. This preference pretty much held true over the year but I did discover some new authors -- which I see as another win for this one.

These books -- all "new to me" authors -- shook me up, gave me all the feels, some new ideas, and, in some cases, a sense of time or temporal travel:

• When we were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo- Set in Trinidad and partially in a graveyard, it weaves together generations through magic and asks some big questions about the dead. Immersive.
• Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett - There is a pet fox, amateur theatre production, many out laugh out loud, and tender moments that will have you crying.
• Into the Riverlands, by Nghi Vo - A slim gem of a book that blends mythology with real feeling characters. Also brings you on a journey through the lushness of the Riverlands.
• The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean - About a branch of the human tree who literally eats books, setting them apart from the rest of human society and leading to some weird habits. (We do seem to share patriarchy with them.)
• The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave - Explores the dance hysteria of 1518 during a blistering hot summer. Gripping.
• No Two Persons by Erica Bauermeister - Superb storytelling and also an exploration of why we read.
• Breathe by James Nestor - This non-fiction book will make you breathe differently and through your nose.
• Greenwood by Michael Christie - Speculative fiction that starts and ends in a future where trees are almost gone, it follows a family's connection to trees over generations. (This future feels pretty near with last summer's wildfires.) Money is never the solution.

Some fantastic reads here as well, by some favourite authors:

• The Girl Who Was Saturday Night by Heather O'Neil - Her writing is magic and so fresh. Set in Montreal of the 1990s, it's about the young adult twins of a beloved and narcissistic folk singer who has let his kids be raised by the streets (Sainte-Catherine in particular) and his father.
• All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay - A long melancholy book that treads some familiar themes. Past characters surface as echoes here.
• Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice -In this sequel more is revealed about what led to the apocalypse and our way forward: learning from Indigenous teachings.
• The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman - I always read her books and love them
• The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende - Immigration stories, including one centred in the US's move to pry children away from their parents, are interwoven with ones focusing on the dangers women face. But there is hope.
• Starling House by Alix Harrow - Industrial devastation, poverty, despair and strange magic growing from the mix. Our destiny is our own.

I feel oddly elated to have actually completed a New Year's resolution over the full course of a year. Most of my resolutions have been monthly affairs, if that.

I've got a new one for 2024 too, also inspired by Rubin: to write for 24 minutes each day in 2024. And yes, there will be tracking, but without stickers. Wish me luck.