“With such wishes for the New Year as still seem possible”
~ C.S. Lewis to his father from the WWI trenches in France

“Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much…. Do these notes merely … confirm the monotonous, tread-mill march of the mind round one subject? But what am I to do? I must have some drug, and reading isn’t a strong enough drug now.”
~ C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed

As a PhD student it is–was, as of the fall–my “job” to read and write about what I read. 2019 was an exceptionally difficult year for me, but one that ends in hope. At the end of 2018, I was writing at a terrifying speed. By the end of this October, my dissertation was successfully defended, minor modifications complete, a postdoc applied for, and classes well underway. My relief for finishing 2019–and the decade–with a PhD complete is beyond words.

Yet, I continue to struggle. There is damage left behind by the years of neglect–damage that emerges in variable and interesting ways. Like Lewis upon the death of his wife (see the epigraph), I have found work this autumn to be incredibly difficult. My mind and body are lazy, so that unless a task is before me, it seems impossible. Unlike Lewis, it is to reading rather than writing that I turned for a medicinal draught. I now realize that the strong reading I did through the spring and summer to prepare for my Viva was actually a way to heal my body, to rest my mind, and to cover my laziness. That spell continued into the fall, so that 2019 was a crazy year for reading.

I had a few goals for 2019:

• Ease off my reading to 100 books (averaging 320 pages/book)
• Read 120 articles, shorts stories, essays, or other short pieces
• Listen to or watch 10 lectures series or classes
• Read one theological or devotional book each month
• Achieve a 1:2 female:male ratio of authors (as I did in 2018)

My goals this year were really about:

• focusing my reading to be successful in completing my PhD with strength, including a rereading of key C.S. Lewis books and Lewis studies texts
• reading for course prep (which overlaps with my PhD program)
• extend my reading of L.M. Montgomery‘s catalogue and other Canadian authors, complete Stephen King‘s Dark Tower Cycle (including the tangibly connected books), and finish my chronological reading of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld

So, how did I do?

Once again, I did not manage to reduce my reading, radically increasing it to just shy of 50,000 pages and 154 books. Here’s hoping for 2019! My average word length went down, though, to an average of 323 pages/book (from 333 in 2018).

Though I didn’t reduce my book-reading, and I only read 2/3 of the short pieces, I met most of the individual goals, including reading Lewis, King, Pratchett, and Montgomery. And I completed my thesis well, and probably over-read for my Viva and final dissertation submission.

As is pretty usual for me, my reading was seasonal:

• Winter and Early Spring: I completed my too-slow autumn reading of Harry Potter in a season largely dedicated to the closing chapters of my thesis. I did a great deal of reading about gender and C.S. Lewis (basically, this bibliography) and larger questions of feminism and theology, including work by Dorothy L. Sayers, Roxane Gay, and Anna Fisk. I also taught my annual course on Lewis’ fiction at The King’s College (NYC), and read the fiction along with the students through May. In that late-stage PhD period I also read a number of Lewis studies books, some for the second or third time. For bedside reading in the cold Canadian winter, I finished the terrible Tom Clancy book, The Bear and the Dragon, and read some Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, and L.M. Montgomery–as I did throughout the year.
• Late Spring and early Summer: Because of the Tolkien biopic and some writing I was doing about it, I did some background reading, including John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War. I had a turn to the apocalyptic for a paper I presented at the International Conference on Religion and Film, including the Hunger Games trilogy. I reread The Stand (the restored version, this time), and did some reading on literature and spirituality. Otherwise, the spring was mostly about submitting my thesis.
• Summer: When I was free of the thesis, I sort of went mad reading, especially SF: Suzanne Collins, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Haruki Murakami, Walter Miller, Charlie Starr, P.D. James, Orson Scott Card, H.G. Wells, N.K. Jemisin, and Margaret Atwood’s nonfiction collection on SF, In Other Worlds. It was a great summer, though I did little writing about those great books!
• Autumn: I indulged in Stephen King‘s Dark Tower cycle throughout latter-2018, with only the final volume remaining for 2019. I picked it up again by rereading Gunslinger in the summer (the edited version, this time), before finishing The Dark Tower. In the fall, I then read the tangibly connected books, like Rose Madder, The Regulators, Desperation, and Doctor Sleep–which isn’t connected, but I read it just for fun. The fall reading was otherwise defined by my “C.S. Lewis and Mythologies of Love and Sex” course, and you can see the eclectic reading list here. Beyond more L.M. Montgomery, I extended my Canadian reading in the fall with Emily St. John Mandel’s lovely Lola Quartet, and with two brilliant new novels: Atwood’s The Testaments and Michael Crummey’s The Innocents. Add a little T.S. Eliot, Neil Gaiman, and the completion of Pratchett’s Discworld for a full fall reading.
• Early Winter: November saw a shift for me as I began to prepare for Winter classes, including C.S. Lewis’ fiction and local courses on “Christian Literature” and “Japanese Religion and Culture.” The result is an increase in Japanese fiction, like Shūsaku Endō, Yasunari Kawabata, Arthur Golden, and some nonfiction. Nervous about teaching Flannery O’Connor for the first time, I read three of her books in December.

Throughout the year I had a few projects:

• I was obviously very focussed on C.S. Lewis, with 23 Lewis books, 28 Lewis studies books, and dozens of other articles
• I finally completed my chronological Discworld reading with 7 books, including #35 Wintersmith on New Year’s Day 2019, and concluding with #41, The Shepherd’s Crown, in December.
• 10 Stephen King books, most of which were connected to the Dark Tower cycle,
• 7 L.M. Montgomery books, and 5 other Canadian books

The chart shows the Lewis focus well, and shows that I didn’t get to read as much Tolkien as I’d like. I always think that I could have broken down the SF&F category into science fiction and fantasy, but it shows that this kind of reading is about 1/4 of my year, down from last year in ratio but not in sheer numbers of books. Feminism is a section I split off from nonfiction two years ago (what remains is mostly history and literary criticism), but I may change it again next year as I focus on particular projects. I met my theology goals, though much of the theology I read is under the C.S. Lewis category.

Here’s a pretty version of the same thing:

My last goal was to achieve a 1:2 female:male ratio of authors. This is tough to do when your primary author is male (C.S. Lewis), his primary partners are male (Tolkien and the Inklings), my field has been largely male (theology), and I’m trying to read through catalogues of Stephen King and Terry Pratchett. I wanted to increase my feminine voices in a few ways this year, but mostly succeeded in keeping steady with 2018. Working against me was that I didn’t do a full annual Harry Potter readthrough this year, and I intended to read Montgomery’s poetry, which didn’t happen. These were offset by some great recent SF and apocalyptic lit by women, and a focus on feminist theology, Lewis and gender, and spirituality.

As a whole, I achieved a slim 1:2 ratio on books (34% women authors), as well as nearly 40% of my overall reading.

There are limits to how effective tracking of reading by gender (or other categories) can be, but when designing my upcoming “Christian Literature” class, it helped me create a more engaging curriculum.

The Goodreads app is kind of limited, though you can check out my 2019 infographic. They have a thousand possibilities for creating infographics including gender, language, geography, genre, and popularity, yet they choose not to give us that power. This year, I also tracked books by era, with some mixed results. The charts are a bit lopsided as 5/6ths of my reading is since WWII–despite studying figures that were active in the “modernist” period, which was only 10% of my book reading.

What does 2020 look like? As long as I’m doing literary scholarship, it will be weighted upon the last century. Looking ahead, the first half of the year is heavy with Lewis, the Inklings, and Montgomery as I move into the June conference season. After that, I have no idea. Who knows where this adventure in reading may get me!

Until next year, here is my old-fashioned reading excel sheet list. I wish I was infographically-inclined, but I do like lists! Here is my list of reading form 2019. “CSL” below means “C.S. Lewis.” I’ve linked some of the blog posts that connect with the things I’ve read. Are any of these books or papers yours? If so, feel free to link my list. If you have your own year-end list or best-of blog, make sure you link it in the comments.