Welcome to my yearly summary of books!

Table of contents:

  • Intro - my process and tools
  • The Books - which books I recommend
  • Analysis - some introspection and goalsetting
  • Previously - links to prior years

Note: I will use Bookshop affiliate links when available, throughout this post. You don’t have to buy from my bookshop, but if you do, I put that money back into more books.

Intro

I use and recommend Libby for getting ebooks and audiobooks from the library. Most books I borrow digitally, but there are exceptions:

  • Books I plan to re-read
  • Deluxe or art-filled editions
  • Books I will use as a referenrce
  • Books I enjoyed and want to keep around

For those cases, I get physical editions via Bookshop. And lest you think I don’t really do physical books: my household has 15 brimming bookshelves.

I take copious highlights and notes, and save them to Readwise. Here’s how. Highlights and notes are especially important for me with digital books, where spacial-temporal recollection is not as easy, but spaced-repitition and note-linking can make up for it (and then some).

I track my reading in The StoryGraph. I prefer it because not Amazon and because it incorporates some data elements other than ratings which are useful for describing and finding books. I’m hoping micro.blog’s bookshelves feature continues to improve, so that I could rely on book tracking directly in my blog, as well. (Today, it doesn’t handle book search well nor let us use our own Bookshop links, but we’ll see what the future holds.)

I keep my to-read/wishlist as a Bookshop list, for ease of sharing and gift-giving.

The Books

Let’s start with the recommended ones, collected in this Bookshop collection or visually:

20222books

And here are all the books I read, individually, and in reading order (within rating):

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ :

  • The Six Deaths of the Saint (Into Shadow #3) - Alix E. Harrow (see also)

👍:

🤷‍♂️:

👎 (authors and links removed because I feel bad about even putting these in, but wanted to show the broader view):

  • Keeper of the Lost Cities (Keeper of the Lost Cities #1)
  • Tell the Machine Goodnight
  • The Prophet
  • A Calling for Charlie Barnes
  • The School for Good Mothers
  • The Garden (Into Shadow #1)

Did you read anything I did? What’d you think?

Based on looking at my list, is there anything you’d recommend?

Analysis

This was an mixed year for reading goals. I exceeded by book goal (55 out of 53) but missed by pages goal (15,868 out of 17,500). I’ll go for 60 books next year, but keep the 17,500 page goal.

Similar to my normal ratio, I read 63% fiction this year:

fiction v nonfiction

I continue to add to my intentionality in reading, seeking a variety of voices, formats, styles, etc. With such a long list of things I’d like to read, I’m also trying to be wiser about what I should read sooner than later such as things related to health or permaculture.

Here’s to a good year of reading!

Previously 📚: