“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.”
~ C.S. Lewis “On Stories”

2020 was my first full year since 2013 when I was not a PhD student where it was my “job” to read and write about what I read. As someone who loves to read and write and teach, no doubt I stretched the definition of PhD student–as the 1,100 articles on this website can attest to. 2019 was a tonic year, where reading was a salve for the soul, an attempt at recover and quiet while still feeling the drive forward. 2020 was a much more normal year for me in terms of reading. I suppose that’s about the only normal thing about it! (see my reflections here and here) In particular, in 2020 I was able to set the book down when tired–or, especially, to turn the audiobook off. 2020 was much more about reading what I wanted to read than anything else. 

I feel like I am starting to heal from the damage of the PhD period, though 2020 has created its own wounds. This post is a chance for me to look back at the reading (and writing and teaching) year that was 2020 and to think ahead to 2021.

I had a few goals for 2020:

• Ease off my reading to 120 books (averaging 320 pages/book)
• Read 90 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 and 2019)

These goals for this year were really about:

• reading for course prep, particularly in the Winter and Fall of 2020;
• extending my reading of L.M. Montgomery‘s catalogue and secondary sources; and
• enjoying books by reading what I wanted to read.

Really, honestly, 2020 was not very goal-oriented. That turned out to be a good thing!

So, how did I do?

After years of pushing myself to read more and longer books, 2020 was a good step back for me, both in terms of length and in the sheer number of books. 

I dropped from 154 to 133 books (134 books on my spreadsheet), reduced the length of the books (to 315 pages, from 323 in 2019 and 333 in 2020), and reduced my short pieces reading. That is still more books than I aimed at, and though I have read fewer short pieces, overall it is still a strong year.

In the manner of drawing a target around the arrow you have thrown, I feel like I met most of my individual goals for 2020. It was an unfocused year, but a literary year that I quite enjoyed from beginning to end.

As I did not plan for a global pandemic, between teaching schedules and research projects, my reading was seasonal in 2020, as it usually is:

• Winter and Early Spring: I loved my teaching schedule in early 2020. I was teaching “Christianity and Literature” at Maritime Christian College, “Lewis and Tolkien” at Signum University, “The Fantasy and Fiction of C.S. Lewis” at the King’s College (NYC), and for the first time, “Japanese Religion and Culture” at the University of Prince Edward Island–which I co-opted as a literature and film class. Thus, I had an awesome semester: Milton’s Paradise Lost (with Lewis’ Preface to Paradise Lost), Dante’s Inferno (in a couple of translations), Charles Williams’ Descent Into Hell and some of his poetry, Frederick Buechner’s gorgeous fictional hagiography, Godric, most of Flannery O’Connor’s catalogue, Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time, Walter Miller’s hilarious and troubling, A Canticle for Liebowitz, works by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and a number of Tolkien works, including The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, the Tree & Leaf collection, and parts of the Middle-earth histories. This semester also gave me an opportunity to explore C.S. Lewis’ catalogue from the Ransom Cycle to Narnia to his less well-known jewels, like An Experiment in Criticism, The Weight of Glory, and Till We Have Faces, which I taught twice and created a blog series on. I also spent time exploring a number of texts about Japanese religion, history, and warfare, as well as the brilliant work of Haruki Murakami, Shūsaku Endō, and Makoto Fujimura. 
• Late Spring and early Summer: Even though most of my conferences were cancelled in 2020, springtime was still a period of paper writing and academic reading, as my full list below can bear out. Most of my academic work was focused on C.S. Lewis and L.M. Montgomery, as I was finishing up one project and beginning another. But the spring also bears out my reading out of pure interest. In the spring, I began a good ole’ paperback reading of Harry Potter, which I am just now finishing in early 2021. I read Tolkien’s medieval translations, Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen, some writers on writing like Anne Lamott, and some nonfiction just for fun. In 2020, I was supervising a thesis on Octavia Butler, so spent the better part of the year reading my favourite of her works and some new materials, which was especially powerful for me in the spring and the summer.
• Summer: My summer began with some intense research, but I did not go lean on reading for fun. I read Stephen King’s 11/22/63 for the first time, and encountered Nnedi Okorafor’s incredible Binti series. My estimation of Black women who write SF continues to rise, as I also spent a good deal of time getting to known Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January, which was an award-nominated book that includes Prince Edward Island in its fictional universe. It was a thin Canadian year, but I did read the work of Rebecca Rosenblum and Mark Sampson in the sunlit hours. Essays and nonfiction by N.T. Wright, David Foster Wallace, Verlyn Flieger, Annie Dillard, Huston Smith, James W. Sire, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Elizabeth Epperly also filled my spring and summertime reading. As I set C.S. Lewis aside for a season, my 2020 summer was filled with Lucy Maud Montgomery works, including successive rereads of Anne’s House of Dreams and her poetry, the Emily series, and the manuscript version of Anne of Green Gables—as well as a number of critical Montgomery articles, and biographies by Mary Henley Rubio and Liz Rosenberg.
• Autumn and Early Winter: Autumn began early with vampires. This was for a simple reason: I taught the Folkloric Transformations course at Signum University in the fall, and I wanted to slowly read the material. This meant starting early. So I found myself reading Bram Stoker and those who study him at a campground, as well as classic texts like Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla, John Polidori, The Vampyre, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Christabel.” In August, I began rereading Anne Rice’s The Interview with the Vampire, and I have continued reading the series into 2021. There were quite a number of vampire and werewolf texts this fall, but my favourites were texts that were more vampiric than vampire tales, like Charlotte Brontë‘s Jane Eyre and her sister’s Wuthering Heights. I also read through Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Cycle this past year, beginning with Gilead in the winter and ending with the new release of Jack in the fall. And in the fall, following my great reread of Anne of Green Gables in the summer, I began reading through Montgomery’s fiction in published order. My nonfiction in the last half of 2020 has included a number of religious studies and worldviews texts because my teaching has been more foundational in that period.

Throughout the year I had a few projects and some nice unintended consequences:

• This is the first year that science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy are the largest category. This is partly about the heavy lit teaching year, but also because I just wanted to read great books I love!
• Actually, this was a light year for C.S. Lewis reading. Normally the ratio of Lewis books and Lewis studies books is about even, with few dozen articles and short pieces. This year, almost all my Lewis reads were his fiction and nonfiction books (23 of 27), and mostly in the first half of the year.
• This was my most successful year in reading Montgomery’s books (and a couple of biographies, one full work of literary criticism, and a couple of dozen articles). It seems I traded Lewis for Montgomery in the second half of the year, which largely matches the academic projects I was working on.
• I intended to read through Octavia Butler’s major novels, and did more than half.
• I read through Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Cycle.
• I wanted to get into classic literature, hoping to read about 1 per month. I came close.
• I intended to read one theological or devotional book a month, and again came close.
• It was a light Inklings year, mostly filled with Tolkien in the early part of the year. In 2021 I am reading The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Fall of Sauron. 

Here’s a pretty version of the same thing:

My final goal was to achieve a 1:2 ratio of women and men authors. This is tough to do when your primary author is male (C.S. Lewis), his primary partners are male (Tolkien and the Inklings), and my field has been largely male (theology). As I was extending more deeply into Montgomery studies, and reading through the catalogues of Octavia Butler, Marilynne Robinson–and added Harry Potter, Flannery O’Connor, and Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles as well–I was confident I would surpass that ratio this year, and come much closer to gender parity. In that way, it was my best year yet. For entire books and in my reading as a whole, it was 54% men to 46% women, and for all my reading. In 2021, I suspect that will be closer to 60/40. 

There are limits to how effective tracking of reading by gender (or other categories) can be, but it is a helpful reminder for me. In 2020, I intentionally expanded my reading of Black women writers, with a total of 10 books.

The Goodreads app is kind of limited, though you can check out my 2020 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. It gets worse every year. So, in my limited way, this year I also tracked books by era, with some mixed results. The charts are a bit lopsided as almost 3/4 of my book reading is since WWII–despite studying figures that were active in the “modernist” period, which was only 15% of my book reading. As my reading was a little less academic this year, the 2010s dominated less–and 2020 starts a new decade!

What does 2021 look like? As long as I’m doing literary scholarship, it will be weighted upon the last century, though Montgomery and Lewis scholarship has proliferated in this century. Looking ahead, once again the first half of the year is heavy with Lewis and the second half with Montgomery. Unusual for me, I have no literature classes this year, so things are completely open. I have some personal goals:

• Complete a chronological reading of Montgomery’s major works, with journals and letters
• Read one Shakespeare play a month
• Reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Fall of Sauron
• Read one theological or devotional book each month
• Continue to extend my reading of Black women SF writers, critical race theory, and classics I have missed

Until next year, here is my old-fashioned reading excel sheet list. I wish I was infographically-inclined, but I do like lists! This is my list of reading from 2020. “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.