A Wee Book Tag for the End of the Year

Somehow, 2022 is listing in its shallow ends. This is the final full year of my 20s, and despite this I am looking forward to my 30s. In fact, I have already planned that my first book of my 30s will be my favorite, The Call of the Wild. I cannot think of a better blessing than the poetry and lyricism that define Buck’s wild journey.

But 2022 is not over just yet, and I am doing a quick end of the year book tag (as made popular by Booktube) to carry me through until Christmas, when I get a new book from my mother (our tradition is to exchange books). The excitement is palpable. For now, here are some questions to steer us home.

Are there any books that you have started this year that you need to finish?

Welcome to the chaos that is my currently reading cart. I am on the go with thirty — yes, thirty — different books. My goal is simply to consolidate that into a much smaller shelf for the new year. Among other books, I am reading Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, The Death of the Moth (a collection of essays by Virginia Woolf), and Rebecca Wragg Sykes’s superb Kindred. If anyone has been paying attention on this blog, they were know that I have literally been reading Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky since late 2020 (Indeed) and that is on high priority to complete. It is not that it is a bad book — in fact, it is stunning and epic — but it is that I have been in a perpetual and agonizing book slump for some time now. Every now and then, I slough off that slump and get to work trying to whittle down the number of books on my currently reading shelf on Goodreads.

I do not think I will finish The Wheel of Time or The Journey to the West this year, but they will certainly be on my shelf for 2023. It is worth noting that I will also unlikely reach my Goodreads goal of 60 books — going into December, I have read 32. There’s always next year.

Do you have an autumnal book to transition to the end of the year?

Just as I have been reading Dostoevsky forever, I have also been reading (and yet loving) Dracula for some time. Dracula is the ideal book for October, but I am finding that it carries through like a river into the year’s coda. I love the style of this book, of the fact that it is told in a series of journals.

Building on this love of journals, I want to complete my reread of The Diary of Anais Nin before 2022 expires. I do not know exactly why I consider Nin’s diaries to be fall fodder, but I love the crisp air that seems to waft upwards from the book’s pages, as well as the scent of pines in Colorado. Nin’s writings begin in Paris in the Winter of 1931 and continue across the span of wars and centuries. Would that my own journal were that important and beautiful.

Is there a new releases you’re still waiting for?

Volume five of Rumi’s The Masnavi is due to be released on Book Depository on December 3rd. This is from the Oxford World Classics series, one of my favorite collections. The familiar white band that crosses the bottom half of these editions is always a familiar and wonderful sight. I am gradually adding the other volumes of The Masnavi to my poetry shelf, as well as the sticky tabs that I want to annotate it with.

What are three books you want to read before the end of the year?

If you take these three books and multiply it by ten, then perhaps we will be getting somewhere. If I had to narrow it down to three books, however, they would likely be:

Dostoevsky by Joseph Frank. As mentioned above, this brick of a book has been occupying my shelf for over two years now, and it is time to get through it so I can start my autodidact’s unit on Fyodor Dostoevsky. This year, I acquired an incredible copy of Crime and Punishment, which I have not read since I was fourteen and want to reread. What is interesting about this book is that it is not just a biography, it is a compelling account of a specific time in the life of Russia itself. I will talk more about the act of reading Russian literature in this moment in history in a different blog, but I find it soothing to realize that we are all anchored in the hands of others, of the history-makers and the witnesses to that history. That is all a writer really is.

Natasha’s Dance by Orlando Figes. This book has been on my reading shelf the second-longest after Dostoevsky. It, too, deals with Russian history, though this is a cultural overview. Though still long, it is not as lengthy or loquacious as Dostoevsky.

The Door by Magda Szabo. This is a smaller book than the previous two, and it is a required book for my workshop class. Thus far I am finding the pacing and characterization to be sublime. Despite its modest page count, it is slow moving.

Is there a book that could still shock you and become your favorite book of the year?

Any book vying for the title of Favorite Book of the Year has to compete with Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. Toppling Pessoa from the high horse I have put him on is no small task. If any book can manage, I think it would be Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. That one is tracking at a five out of five star rating.

Second to this may be Dracula itself. Third in line is David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. This was recommended to me by classmates in my fiction techniques course as something that might inspire my own novel, and thus far it has been something influential. I am gaming for something modular in its structure, and the quirky structure of Cloud Atlas is what makes it so famous and potent as a bomb.

Have you already made reading plans for 2023?

I am a planner when it comes to reading, so naturally the Elk and I have a few books to discuss for the new year. I do hope to get through more fantasy and more drama. To be more specific, I will be continuing on my Stephen King Project with The Shining, Pet Sematary, and It.

There you have it, the books that have flavored 2022. Cheers to the New Year!