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Big Round Numbers

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I read more than 100 books in a year for the first time in 2023, with a grand total of 125. 2024 looks to be the second year I pass that mark: 102 books read so far, plus a few I forgot to record on Goodreads.

Sounds impressive, right? As a culture, we seem obsessed with quantifying our activities, and big round numbers (100, 1,000, etc.) are the ones deemed worth celebrating. Just look at all those zeros!

But what if I said that 37 of the books were audio books? Or that 11 of the books were picture books? Or that I didn’t actually finish 7 of the books, just finished more than half and rounded up? Or that 13 were comics or manga or illustrated short stories? Do they all still “count”? And why do big numbers matter, in the end? Looking back on the list for this year, I can barely remember what some of the books were about. (I want to say, “They went in one eye and out the other,” but that doesn’t have quite the same ring as “in one ear and out the other.”)

I often think that “my eyes are bigger than my free time,” a play on “my eyes are bigger than my stomach.” I feel greedy for words, for the experiences promised by books. There’s so much out there that I want to read, even if they’re not all worth the time I spend on them. Some, like audio books, can be helpful distractions that make the walk I didn’t want to take or the cleaning I didn’t want to do a bit easier. But others contribute to a habit of “virtuous” procrastination I’d like to stamp out: I couldn’t possibly do any writing right now! I have to finish this book before it’s due back at the library.

Out of the 100+ books I read this year, these were the ones I got the most out of reading (in order of date read):

  1. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (historical fiction)
  2. The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan (nonfiction)
  3. Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn by Catherine Friend (memoir)
  4. Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (historical fiction)
  5. The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (mystery)
  6. The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another by Ainissa Ramirez (nonfiction)
  7. Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft by Brooks Landon (nonfiction)
  8. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman (nonfiction)
  9. At the Mountains of Madness, Volumes I and II, by H.P. Lovecraft, illustrated by Francois Baranger (horror)
  10. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf (nonfiction)
  11. Something in the Woods Loves You by Jarod K. Anderson (memoir)

My friend Sabrina recently recommended The Read Well podcast, which has the tagline “It’s better to read well than to be well read.” In the first few episodes, Eddy Hood talks about the challenges of slowing down and focusing on a book and then doing something with the information you’ve acquired (such as writing an essay) that adds to the conversation about a particular topic. I ended up buying my own copies of some library books I read this year, including Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman and Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon, with the intention of rereading them in order to take notes. I wanted to explore the ideas they discuss more deeply–after all, it’s hard to write things down when you’re listening to a book while driving. Here’s hoping. I’m also going to scale my reading goal back from 75 to 52 books for 2025. I don’t want to feel that I have to read books just to finish them.

At the same time, I want to use 2025 to start clearing the overflowing shelves taken up by my to-be-read pile, which grows every year because most of the books I read come from the library. I likely won’t read or finish all of them (there are somewhere around 150 books), but I want to give most of them a shot. So I’m cut off from reserving books at the library until that’s done. This is a resolution that has quickly fallen by the wayside in the past, so I need to make better use of the “For Later” button on the library’s website.

What are your 2025 reading goals? How did you finish out 2024?

Review: Dinner for One (@ the Jungle Theater)

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I curse the phrase “Always leave them wanting more,” because when it comes to media, I’m the one who wants more. More background, more explanation. I want to know why. Which is one of the reasons this play has stuck with me since I saw it on Monday night.

The American Swedish Institute’s (ASI) newsletter described Dinner for One as being based on a comedy sketch that is watched as a New Year’s Eve tradition throughout Europe. In an interview with the play’s creators printed in the program, Christina Baldwin described seeing the sketch playing on a loop during a tour of ASI and being fascinated by it. I, too, might have seen a bit of the sketch at the first Winter Solstice event I attended at ASI, but it didn’t have the same draw for me.

I’ve often gone back to the original source a movie was based on, hoping for additional background or clarification. In some cases, such as reading Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House after watching 1999’s The Haunting, I discovered a completely different story. In this case, I watched the original sketch and discovered the bones the play was built upon . . . and an ending that made sense in context but that I disliked. As with other American interpretations of British works I’ve seen (I’m looking at you, The Prestige), the American interpretation seems to have a lot more heart (or just more emotion in general?).

Even with a bit of a slow start, the play felt longer than its 60-minute run time, and I was glad for that. The actors had time to develop the relationship between Miss Sophie and James, her butler, before hilarity ensued in the form of James playing the parts of absent guests while getting progressively drunker. I also appreciated how the musicians were incorporated into the play–as soundtrack providers, as foley artists, as decoration, and as participants. Even the audience played a role. Before the theater opened for seating, we were asked to answer three questions that the actors would use to guide some of the performance (the title of your autobiography, your favorite vacation destination, and a sea creature). As a result, Jim Lichtscheidl, the actor playing James, was forced to come up with an extemporaneous romantic poem with the title “I Floss Until I Bleed.”

Perhaps I would be disappointed if there were more explanation. Sometimes friendships or relationships are difficult to define–either between James and Miss Sophie or between Miss Sophie and her guests. But I would have liked to know who Miss Sophie was mourning for the first few years shown in the play. Initially I’d assumed it was a husband, but later I wondered if it was said guests. And did James love Miss Sophie in a way it was difficult to express except through playing Mr. Winterbottom? Hard to say. But I appreciated the mystery in the play that was missing in the original sketch. Definitely worth paying the full market price for a ticket. And, as it looks like the play has become a holiday tradition at the Jungle Theater, I may see it again next year.

If you’d like a more traditional review/reflection on the play, Jill at Cherry and Spoon has described it beautifully here.

Review: Something in the Woods Loves You

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Though I’m trying to spend less time on social media, I will admit that the Instagram algorithm got one thing right in introducing me to the poetry of Jarod K. Anderson. The pandemic pushed me to spend more time outside, and Anderson’s poetry reminded me of why I kept it up afterward: for the small moments of magic. These vignettes were interwoven with insights about the interplay of the natural and human-made worlds as well as how nature could help to illuminate (though not necessarily cure) mental illness. I bought his first two slim volumes of poetry (Field Guide to the Haunted Forest and Love Notes from the Hollow Tree) and then a third (Leaf Litter). When I learned that he had written a memoir, Something in the Woods Loves You, I made sure the publication date stayed on my radar.

After reading the first few pages, I already knew I was going to love this book, which is Anderson’s story of learning to live with mental illness. Each chapter focuses on a particular lesson he learned, intertwined with memories and observations of a particular plant or animal that helped him learn it.

I’ve struggled with anxiety and depression for many years, and many of the observations in Anderson’s poetry resonated with me. Something in the Woods Loves You was the same but magnified. I rarely dogear pages of a book, but I wanted to make note of certain statements and take them to heart. Since college, I’ve fallen out of the college practice of reading with a pencil or highlighter in hand, so this was how I signposted the places in the book I wanted to return to. (I already know I’ll have to reread the book again to find them all.) Some examples:

  • “Hopelessness is painful, but so is hope. The pain of hopelessness is that there is no rest in sight from the pain and misery. The pain of hope is that happiness and peace are possible, and possibility opens new paths to exhaustion and disappointment. Hope is, all by itself, a courageous act.” (p. 45)
  • “The kind and worthy wisdom we need involves learning to embrace the truth that we will never master ourselves, our lives, or our worlds, though we can learn to view the concept of mastery as what it is: a toxic fantasy that clashes with the reality of our minds and our nature. We don’t need perfection, and we don’t need to land upon one final, objective truth.” (p. 158)
  • “Words matter. They themselves are potent magic. As such, it’s worth noticing what our word choice is doing to our realities. Are our word choices closing gates or opening ways to larger vistas?” (p. 179)

While I was reading the book, I occasionally worried that the language was becoming too “poetic” for some readers. But then I thought of another phenomenon Instagram had introduced me to: timelapse paintings. Occasionally it seems that the painters are being reckless with large swathes of color. As the details are added in, though, it becomes clear that these backgrounds were created deliberately and that they are necessary to the overall composition. Similarly, by the time the chapter was wrapping up, the ideas and images had fallen into place to make a larger point.

Many memoirs I’ve picked up fail to answer the basic question of why I should care about this person’s experience. Is beautiful writing enough to get people past that? Or was I already primed to care because of my own struggles with depression and familiarity with the author’s other works? (Note: I’ve listened to an episode of Anderson’s podcast, but it wasn’t quite for me.) Or because I agree with him on a lot of points? Unknown. But if you’re curious as to whether the book might be up your alley, reading a few of Anderson’s poems on Instagram just takes a small investment of your time.

Origins

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I’ve been sitting on this domain for years. It’s time I finally do something with it.

The domain name is borrowed from the poem “A Poet to His Beloved” by W. B. Yeats:

I bring you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams

These lines resonated with me when I first read them back in 2001. Like many people out there, I have thoughts and creative efforts I want to share. However, for a host of reasons, I’ve been hesitant to start a blog. The “numberless” part in the name is a clue: the things I want to write about don’t cluster around a particular theme. Professional bloggers stress the importance of choosing a niche, after all. Perhaps I’ll find my place in the blogosphere eventually. For now, I’ll revel in being an amateur.

In the absence of a specific “you” to present with my excess of dreams, I’ll just leave them here in case someone needs them. You never know.