I see this recap as a way to be at least a little more conscious of how and what I’m reading. (Some things are easier to see in the aggregate.) Also cf. last year’s stats.
In 2022 I read an even 100 books, a number I achieved largely because I stacked the end with novellas. I have no shame. There were also 37 books I decided not to finish. (Those abandoned books are, however, included in the count of 36,440 pages that I read, to provide a slightly more accurate picture.)
Of the 100 that endured to the end:
55% were fiction and 45% were nonfiction
Of the fiction, and acknowledging that genre boundaries aren’t always clear cut, the genres were: 53% fantasy (29 books), 35% science fiction (19), 7% horror (4), 4% classics (2), and 1% general fiction (1)
39% of the 100 had at least one female author, 61% did not
14% were written before 2010 (9% were before 2000 and 4% before 1900)
A whopping 54% were written in the last three years (18 from 2020, 19 from 2021, 17 from 2022)
The earliest book I read in 2022 was written around A.D. 731 (go Bede), roughly thirteen hundred years earlier
After looking at this, I’ve got a microresolution to get myself to read more old books this new year, so that I’m not skewing quite so much toward the hyper-recent.
Peter Baker’s Ygt, a TrueType hinting app. Peter wrote the textbook we used in my Old English class many years ago. He also designed the Junicode font.
Wyldcard, e-ink playing cards. Cool. I’d love a small e-reader around this size (smaller than my phone, super lightweight, no bells or whistles), especially once e-ink resolution gets better.
John Keegan on visualizing rivers and floodplains with USGS data. A few months ago I played around a little with QGIS’s hillshade rendering for DEMs and with rendering DEMs in Blender and need to get back to all that. Also, Daniel Coe’s work (mentioned in the post) is lovely.
Tom M on things he wished he knew when learning C. Ah, C. (My first two languages were BASIC and Pascal, but then for a fairly long time my main languages were C and C++. Haven’t used either in years, though, other than during my master’s.)
Markos Kay’s process video for his Creature Perch piece using Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. (I’ll add here that the ethics of the training sets for these aren’t great, especially for the artists whose works were taken without permission. Hoping that gets better.)
Google’s Infinite Nature paper on generating 3D flythroughs from still photos. Slowed down a lot, this would make for a nice screensaver or decorative display. Reminds me a bit of those eight-hour train ride videos on YouTube, too.
New story: Saying Goodbye. About eight pages long, science fiction.
This one came from wanting to write a story with virtual reality involved (which admittedly ended up being more of a bystander in the finished piece) and then my recent experience with my dad took over and became the main driver, though the details in the story are all quite different.
Together Forever II. This one came out of losing my father. (That said, it isn’t actually a depiction of my own family — my parents were divorced and I have more siblings than this.)
Abide with Me II. This has felt applicable to me a decent number of times these past few months.
Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker is finally available as an ebook! (On the Kindle store, anyway. I haven’t checked other places.)
Recent nonfiction reads
Terry Pratchett, by Rob Wilkins. Quite liked this one. The end is sad, but that’s usually the case with full-life biographies. Probably about time to read another Discworld novel.
Chokepoint Capitalism, by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow. Maddening. I really, really do not like big, hungry capitalism, and I hope we as a society can push things back to a healthier level. Job guarantees sound amazing.
Human Errors, by Nathan H. Lents. So fascinating! I jabbered about this book to my wife and coworkers ad nauseam — the RLN, throat structure, wrist bones, DNA copy rates, sickle-cell disease, retinal wiring, I’ll stop now. For me the takeaway that I think I’ll remember most was that animals in the wild are constantly on the edge of starvation and so we’re evolutionarily wired to eat as if it’s our last meal before winter, which also leads to it being really easy to gain weight but really hard to lose it.
Recent fiction reads
I tried to read China Miéville’s The City & the City, but the central conceit — two cities interleaved in the same space where each city’s residents straight up ignore the other city — just wasn’t doing it for me. Probably because I went into it expecting there to be a magical/supernatural reason people couldn’t see the other city (a ghost city of sorts that occasionally leaks through).
The Expert System’s Brother, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A novella. Enjoyed it, and looking forward to the sequel. And to the rest of Tchaikovsky’s books (including City of Last Chances, which came out today, I believe).
The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor LaValle. A novella. Quite liked it. A bit graphic at the end, which reminded me that this was horror and not just dark fantasy, and that horror isn’t my thing most of the time.
A Mirror Mended, by Alix E. Harrow. A novella. Really liked the variations and folktaleishness.
Not much going on here lately because I’ve had a fairly bad flareup of back pain since early Thanksgiving week.
(This is from my grade 2 spondylolisthesis at L5-S1, which I’ve had for nineish years now. Every once in a while I move wrong and get a flareup. The more flared up it is, the more back pain — mostly lower but often upper too — and the harder it gets to walk. When it’s really bad I’m hobbling around like a ninety year old.)
Lots of lying in bed on a heating pad trying to recover and to avoid flaring things up further. Lots of reading, but not much else outside of work. I’ve got a handful of projects in progress, though, that I’m hoping to get to a presentable state before long.
