2016 Retrospective: This Year in Books

I'm increasingly able to think clearly - a tremendous relief. The work feedback loop I often find myself in isn't actually useful for producing good work; it's only good for producing sloppy work quickly. I emailed the professors who sat on my committee thanking them for their time and effort. In a response from one - a professor known for being particularly prickly - i was basically told that the defense process really can be enjoyable, but generally only if the paper was a good one, and he reiterated that mine turned out really well. His recommendation contradicts my chair's a bit - to focus almost exclusively on two important ways I was attempting to address subject positions in my work, where my chair recommends heavy style editing - and I'd prefer to take his advice, but I do think I'll attempt to address at least some elements of style. It's the chair who signs off on the work, after all, and her concerns are easy (if time consuming) to meet if only because they don't address substantial issues.

Because of the work I'd been doing, and how wrapped up I'd been, I haven't had as much time for reading as I typically do. My book count is down from 36 last year to 30 this year. I'm not sure there's been a substantial dip or increase in length of text or difficulty.

I started keeping track of my reading in 2015, and this year I've attempted to keep track of movies, video games, and major essays I've completed. There is this element of trying to "get my numbers up," I think, as a kind of challenge to myself. That's kind of fun, but since I'm not listing them on something like Goodreads (I deleted my account in 2014, I think) I've got nobody to boast to - that helps keep me kind of honest. The goal isn't to artificially boost my "books read" count, really, but just to see how I've been spending my time. I'm abysmal at placing myself at any particular date - I really can't keep track of my temporal perspective. I can remember that things happened, but I can't tell when. This has had a really nice side effect of helping remember what's actually happened to me during the year at a glance.

It's felt like an incredibly long year.

So, under the cut is what I've read in books this year.

( Here's the list. )

There's a pretty good amount of theory here, and a few textbooks. Some of them are obviously easier to get through than others - I made a judgement call with the Black Quantum Futurism, for example, because they're really very short. They didn't really fall under the heading of a long essay or what I'd consider a typical book - even of essays, as many of my selections are - so it's like... whatever. Best judgement. Homestuck is also something of a judgement call, because it's mixed media.

I'm hoping to read more fiction in the upcoming year, and I'm hoping to continue to write, but I honestly think that writing for a committee seriously curtailed my output and caused me to spin my wheels much harder than I normally would have. All of that really ate up a lot of time and energy that prevented me from reading more extensively.

The amount of reading I've been doing is pretty unlikely to go up from now until the end of the year. I'm in the middle of getting through Sartre's Being and Nothingness, and it's like... 800 pages. So that's probably not gonna get complete in this time. I'm looking forward to reading Gibson's newest novel, The  Peripheral which I know very literally nothing about. So, those are my first two objectives. On a different note, I'll probably be adding Exalted 3rd Edition to the list as well.

Still, despite being down from last year, I feel pretty good about this. I found Hakim Bey's work to be particularly interesting from a theoretical perspective, and heavily influenced some of my writing despite not getting a chance to really integrate it into my actual thesis.