Last year I posted a bright year-end reading blog, talking about how I fail at all New Year’s resolutions, except for reading. “It was a cool year,” I wrote, “with rich reading from beginning to end.” I had set a 2014 reading goal of 150 books, essays, or lecture series. Because of a strong first half of the year, I hit that goal on June 30th, finishing the year with 225 pieces in total, including 108 books. It really was a great year.

I knew that 2015 was going to be a challenge going in, so I set the goal of 200 books, essays, and lecture series. If I only met that goal, it would be the first time I hadn’t grown as a reader (in quantity) for a decade. I wanted to read 100 books in total, knowing that if I went into a deep literature review the number of articles I read fully could really mount up.

One year ago, I couldn’t have anticipated how difficult 2015 was going to be. We began the year at the hospital bedside of a suddenly disabled parent, and have ended it preparing for the loss of another parent. I have lost teaching opportunities, faced simultaneous work pressures and financial strain, and saw a dream lurch suddenly over the horizon of possibility. While my writing has not gone dry, my hunt for an agent and publisher has. It has been a tremendously difficult year.

Yet, I am reading. As a PhD student it is my “job” to read. More than this, though, through the difficulties and disappointments of 2015, reading is a solace to me. Books are for me mental playgrounds, intellectual exercises, escapes not from something but into everything all at once.

In 2015 I met my goals and exceeded them a little. I read 109 books (Goodreads recognized 105 of them in the banner below), representing more than 30,000 pages of reading. I also listened to 5 lecture series and read 115 articles or essays. In total, not counting media, scans, quick reads and the like, I read more than 1,000,000 words in the stories, poetry, and nonfiction works that filled my year.

Essentially, I read just a little bit more in 2015 than in 2014. I’ll share the whole Goodreads infographic on Friday, but I’ve noticed an interesting pattern in my reading. While the number of articles and essays I might read goes up and down in my patterns of C.S. Lewis reading and academic writing. my book reading has a regular pattern. Here are my last two years of literature in graph form.

I did a literature review in spring 2015, so you can see how the essays count goes up. But watch what happens when I select out just the books.

Except for March 2015, a stronger beginning to 2014 and a stronger ending to 2015, the charts are identical. I begin the year strongly, read a lot in summer, and finish each year well. Despite the fact that I am starting new classes in January as well as September, it is the fall semester preparation and spring marking that are the greatest barriers to reading.

It has been an eclectic year of reading. In 2014 I explored the 1980s SF and Fantasy writers. In 2015, I went back to the 1950s and 1960s, reading authors like Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, and James Blish as they published work that C.S. Lewis may have read in his last decade, as well as some that came later (like Frank Herbert’s Dune or Ursula K. Le Guin’s earlier work).

In fantasy, I am reading through Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett‘s work–up to the 15th Discworld novel–and was sad to hear that we lost Pratchett in 2015. I look forward to continuing on this path and rereading Harry Potter with my niece in 2016.

This classic SciFi and contemporary fantasy reading is a kind of canonical recovery for me–returning to books that have formed me whether or not I have actually read them. I also did this by reading Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and classical Christian writers: Dante, Augustine, Athanasias, Chaucer, Milton, Chesterton, Calvin, Reinhold Niebuhr, Thomas à Kempis, Dallas Willard, and Watchman Nee.

These books contributed to a theologically strong year, adding to it work from emerging thinkers like Rachel Held Evans, Scot McKnight, and Anna Fisk’s groundbreaking Sex, Sin, and Our Selves. In 2016 I’ll continue moving toward a feminist theology reading path as part of my PhD work.

I finished a paper for the upcoming King Arthur and the Inklings collection, and spent a great deal of time in Charles Williams and literary criticism in the first half of the year. Williams continues to capture my imagination, and I will move deeper into his world by reading Grevel Lindop’s new biography. I also started working in Owen Barfield and reading more deeply in Dorothy Sayers and G.K. Chesterton.

And, of course, I have continued on in my project of reading C.S. Lewis chronologically. Half of the pieces I read in 2015 were by Lewis–though he is a brief writer, so that’s probably only 1/4 or 1/3 of the actual reading time. I began 2015 in Lewis’ 1945, and am now closing in on the end of his 1958. In that period of time:

• WWII ended but rationing continued in England
• Lewis finished his Ransom Cycle and never returned to long-form Science Fiction
• He lost his close friend Charles Williams, his step-mother, and a literary pen-friend, Dorothy L. Sayers
• He completed his magnum opus in 16th century literary history
• He began and completed Narnia, changing his literary destiny forever
• He changed his academic position, moving to a Chair in Cambridge from a support position in Oxford
• He wrote Till We Have Faces, which almost nobody read (at the time)
• He wrote his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, and fell in love with a dying woman

It was an absolutely transformational period for Lewis, and effected me as I read it. In my 2015 reading, Lewis began as a Christian public intellectual who dabbled in fiction, and ended as an eminent literary historian and globally recognized children’s author. He began as a bachelor and ended as a lover. He began as a young, fiery contender and ended as a quiet and witty professional writer in the twilight of his life.

Because of where Lewis was in his historical moment, I explored dystopian literature (like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell), and did a good amount of reading about the context of late war and post-war Britain. I spent a good deal of the year in the 16th century, because that is where Lewis’ work led. I think my 2015 bookshelf is darker than you might guess from my personality–not least because of Lewis’ context in the 1940s and 1950s.

What of 2016?

It is difficult for me to predict. I don’t know my teaching load past the winter, but this semester I am working with a team on an intro course at UPEI called, “Inquiry Studies.” I have a handful of graduate students with Regent College’s excellent distance program–a great Eugene Peterson course on Soulcraft–and I have been invited to be a preceptor for a course called “The Inklings and Science Fiction” at the Mythgard Academy. I look forward to Doug Anderson’s course, and putting “preceptor” on my resume should raise some eyebrows! I would encourage you to sign up for one of these great courses.

There are personal struggles ahead, I know. And my work in consultation is intense right now, and may be intensifying. I think 2016 is going to be a challenge. There is grace, I trust, in these times too.

Still, I would like to set my sights high. In 2016 I aim to hold steady, with 5 lectures series, 115 articles, and 110 books–230 pieces overall. We’ll see. But I would rather fail in actuality than in intention.

Here is my list of books in my 2015 reading. “CSL” below means “C.S. Lewis.” I’ve linked some of the blogs that connect with the things I’ve read. Are any of these books yours? If so, feel free to link my list. If you have your own year-end list or best-of blog, make sure you list it!