It’s so funny that only now (it’s April!) do I think of making a summary of my reading activities last year. I did plan to write something, but then laziness overcame me as I faced writer’s block. I just thought, “Oh, well. I’ll just pass this year’s wrap-up,” though I had TheStoryGraph generate my overall 2023 wrap-up in a nice, pretty little collage. Be that as it may, lately I somehow found my motivation back to do so. So here it is.
As everyone generally does, I have my yearly reading goal of what to read and what to finish. Last year, I particularly put Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber, Lord Seventh, Olive Kitteridge and Kura-kura Berjanggut on my “top priority” list. While I managed to finish Lord Seventh and Olive Kitteridge (plus Sang Raja!), which I started the year before last, I didn’t do so with Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber (because I was bored with the plot) and Kura-kura Berjanggut (because it’s thicker than anything and I was distracted by other, “thinner” books). I also got to finish The House of Mirth by the genius Edith Wharton, and now am planning to write an article (analysis?) on Bertha Dorset. Yep, you read it right. Bertha Dorset. You just wait.
There were also things unfinished: The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo and Home Remedies by Xuan Juliana Wang. What hurtful the most wasn’t that I DNF-ed them―which I rarely do to a book―but the fact that I had been wanting to read them for so long. I had racked my brain as to how to get my hands on Home Remedies for years and once I did, it didn’t work for me. It just didn’t. And The Old Woman with the Knife worked for me even less. Stories with older women protagonists were not anything new to me, and I loved all of them. But not that one.
So, overall, I read 20 books in 2023 but “only” finished 18. And you may call me a cheater becase among those 18, two I enjoyed in an audiobook format. Seriously, if you’re a slow reader like me, audiobooks help―especially when you’re “reading” a book as boring as Murakami Haruki’s First Person Singular. I miss those days when I read Norwegian Wood and felt in awe and thought I would have the same experience with First Person Singular, but I apparently did not. Hallowe’en Party is another disappointment. Not for the movie adaptation, though. When I feel bored or distressed, I usually go and read some Christie for fun and murder. Alas, after struggling for 2-3 months, murder I had, but not the fun.
Where there were bad surprises, there were also the good ones. Love in the Big City and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous are only two of the examples. It’s not that it was the first time I read queer literature, but both were definitely the most surprising and the most exceptional. Not definitely Lord Seventh was on a par with them. It was actually pretty good, with good three-dimensionally portrayed characters, a good, long (and windy?) plot, good humor in the middle, good battle scenes toward the end―the problem is that it didn’t suck me into the story. I can say it was good, but then what?
There were good and bad, and there was also the “mixed” category. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan has been hailed as an outstanding book; as I read it, however, I couldn’t find what it was that made it “outstanding”. I could understand the political message and why it is such an important work in Irish contemporary literature, I just didn’t feel anything strong toward it as I did toward Anna Burns’ Milkman I read in 2022. Cursed Bunny is another widely praised book that I didn’t have much feelings for. I did respect its good quality: good writing (and translation), good bizarre vibes, good unusual ideas. But that’s it. I felt nothing more.
If I have to mention my last year’s favorites, they were definitely (in no particular order) Love in the Big City, Olive Kitteridge, Sang Raja, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and The House of Mirth. At least these five books got me hang on through a difficult year where there was a long period of reading slump and boredom, writer’s block here on my blog, and my mom was seriously ill (twice).
I really, really hope this year will be a better one. I have finished four books so far and three of them were so good. Not something that could pull my heart’s string but really good. They were something that got me wonder, while reading them, how could stories be written this way. The writers must be geniuses.
And the plan for this year?
No. I don’t have any plans.
The Bookly Purple 