In January of 2013, I began blogging once a year about everything I’d read that previous year. This tradition began when my dad asked me how many books I’ve read in my entire lifetime. I couldn’t begin to give him an answer to that question, but it did make me decide to start keeping track from that moment forward. The previous posts in this series are as follows: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.
Over half of the books I read in any given year are for a review site that I volunteer for under a pseudonym. I always omit those titles from this post for obvious privacy reasons, but I am able to talk about everything else that tickled my mind since the last post in this series.
Once again, most of the science fiction and fantasy I read was for that review site I mentioned earlier in this post. This section of the list was much longer than it might appear.
The young adult genre remained a popular one for me. There’s something nice about reading stories that are (generally) a bit more cheerful than the ones written for serious adult audiences.
My poetry consumption was way this year. I made a concerted effort to read more of it after noticing last year that it had been a long time since I dug into this genre.
I finished fewer biographies than normal in 2018. While I started quite a few of them, I found it a little trickier to keep reading this year than I normally do.
It will be interesting to see if all of these trends continue in 2019. If any of my readers have decided to join me in keeping tracking of what you read, I’d love to see your lists for the past year!
Biographies, Autobiographies, and Memoirs
“A Forever Family: Fostering Change One Child at a Time” by Robert Scheer
“Marjorie Her War Years: A British Home Child in Canada” by Patricia Skidmore
“Educated” by Tara Westover
Fiction
“Marilla of Green Gables” by Sarah McCoy
“Caroline: Little House Revisited” by Sarah Miller.
History
“Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists: The Origins of the Women’s Shelter Movement in Canada” by Margo Goodhand
“Children’s Homes: A History of Institutional Care for Britain’s Young” by Peter Higginbotham
“Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, and Criminal in 19th Century New York” by Stacy Horn
“The Bedroom: An Intimate History” by Michelle Perrot
Mystery
“The Broken Girls” by Simone St. James
Poetry
“Collected Poems” by Chinua Achebe
“Copper Woman and Other Poems” by Afua Cooper (Poetry)
“How Lovely the Ruins: Inspirational Poems and Words for Difficult Times” by Annie Chagnot
“Cartography and Walking” by Adam Dickinson (Poetry)
Science and Medicine
“The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully” by Aaron Carroll
“Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change” by Mary Beth Pfeiffer
“When Humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Tora Volcano“ by Donald R. Prothero
“Patient Care: Life and Death in the Emergency Room” by Paul Seward, MD
“Treknology” by Ethan Siegal
“Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World” by Paul Stamets
“Best Before: The Evolution and Future of Processed Food” by Nicola Tempa
Science Fiction and Fantasy
“A Sincere Warning About the Entity In Your Home” by Jason Arnopp
“Semiosis” by Sue Burke
“The Last Neanderthal” by Claire Cameron
“Only Ever Yours” by Louise O’Neill
Sociology and Psychology
“An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments” by Ali Almossawi
“Mass Starvation” by Alex de Wall
“Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups” by Andrew Fisher
“Leftover in China: The Woman Shaping the World’s Next Superpower” by Roseann Lake
“The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt” by Robert J. Sutton
Young Adult
“A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo” by Jill Twiss
“Out of My Mind” by Sharon M. Draper.
“Odd and the Frost Giants” by Neil Gaiman.
“No Laughter Here” by Rita Williams-Garcia
“Blue” by Joyce Moyer Hostetter
“Comfort” by Joyce Moyer Hostetter
Merry Christmas to everyone who will be celebrating it tomorrow! I hope it’s a joyful time for you and your loved ones.
The rest of the day is spent napping, relaxing, playing games (generally of the computer variety, although occasionally I’ve amused myself with board games and puzzles), or doing other quiet things that don’t require outdoor time. It’s nothing at all like the Christmases of my childhood, but I’ve come to look forward to this time quite a bit all the same.
Like many other places, Toronto’s malls, subway system, and other public places are bustling with activity at this time of the year. No matter when someone might use or visit them in the month of December, there will be far more folks there than will be the case in January when the new year has finally arrived and everyone has settled back into their usual routines.
Instead, it’s about seeing how real people behave on a perfectly ordinary day that stands a very good chance of being neither the worst nor the best one they’re ever going to experience. In fact, they might not remember anything about it at all six months from now. They’re simply a regular person (or, in some cases, animal) going through the routines of their lives.
Lately, I’ve been taking a break from my normal interests like reading science fiction and exercising outdoors in order to try other stuff. One of the consequences of this has been that I haven’t come up with as many blog post ideas related to those topics as I’d normally be playing around with.
That is the only story I know from that portion of his life. He took everything else with him to the grave. While his body survived the war without any catastrophic injuries, his mental health was severely affected by the things he experienced during those years. He became physically and emotionally abusive and remained that way for the rest of his life.
Can you believe it’s November already? It feels like January ended last month, and yet here we are moving quickly into the 2018 holiday season.
My various allergies can sometimes make attending certain functions tricky or even impossible. I’ll often eat before going to certain gatherings to make sure I’m not sitting there with a growling stomach and the inability to eat anything there due to North America’s tendency to toss milk products into so many festive foods.
I’d be especially interested in reading posts about gifts that are inexpensive and not a knick-knack.
Nuit Blanche is a free annual art festival that occurs overnight or at night. The first one happened in 1990 in Barcelona. As the tradition spread to other cities and countries, they used their own language’s words for White Night as the name for this event.
One of the things I love the most about Nuit Blanche is how accessible it makes art. While some of the attendees are obviously experts on the creation and interpretation of this sort of thing, many more are people who are casually interested in the topic but who have no specific training or background on it. Some of them are even small children! This isn’t something that is specifically geared towards this age group, but there are exhibits every year that are child-friendly.
I’ve wandered into the middle of a zombie uprising, danced with spotlights, explored an abandoned subway tunnel while listening to music the creator thought would increase the chances of us spotting a ghost, and heard the stories of people who work or worked in the sex industry at this festival in past years.
This year there was a dumpling exhibit that caught me a little off guard at first. You could go into it, buy real dumplings (all of which smelled amazing), and eat them while you walked around looking at other artistic displays.
There’s something about the autumn season that makes me want to write out lists and accomplish things. Maybe it’s because of how much I generally looked forward to school beginning again when I was a student.
There have been references to the argumentative nature of the Internet for as long as I’ve been aware of such a thing, much less an active participant in it.
At any rate, this pattern of behaviour carried over to social media as soon as such a thing existed. It’s shown no sign of of stopping since then.
There’s something liberating about choosing not respond to everyone who wants to debate. The Bernards of the world obviously have the freedom to rant about cats and dogs as much as they wish, but they’ll soon learn that I’m not someone who will jump into fruitless arguments with them.