{"id":9683,"date":"2017-12-30T10:42:22","date_gmt":"2017-12-30T15:42:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=9683"},"modified":"2017-12-30T10:42:22","modified_gmt":"2017-12-30T15:42:22","slug":"2017-year-end-wrap-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/2017-year-end-wrap-up\/","title":{"rendered":"2017 year-end wrap-up"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s not quite the end of the year yet, but I think it’s unlikely I’ll finish another book over the next two days, so here goes. I think 2017 was the first year ever<\/i> in which the number of movies I saw<\/a> was greater than the number of books I read<\/a>, which I attribute to having started to date someone who a) is very into\/knowledgable about film b) has a MoMA membership and frequently gets us tickets to film screenings there and c) convinced me to join MoviePass<\/a>, which has been a thoroughly enjoyable experience. But it was a solid reading year for me, too. I read fewer books than last year (50, as opposed to 52 last year) but enjoyed most of what I did read. The breakdown:<\/p>\n

Picture books\/middle-grade books\/YA<\/b> (including one play): 15. Highlights: Mermaid in Chelsea Creek<\/i> by Michelle Tea, with its magic of intuition and empathy, and the way it mixed fantasy\/Chosen One elements with real-world\/coming-of-age elements. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry<\/i> with its smart\/no-nonsense protagonist and its depiction of a Black family in the South in the 1930s. The First Rule of Punk<\/i> by Celia C. P\u00e9rez with its mix of prose and visual art, and its mix of plot-focused narrative and lovely descriptive passages. I also loved re-reading The Dark Is Rising<\/i> by Susan Cooper in December. <\/p>\n

Fiction<\/b> (for grown-ups, including graphic novels): 23. Highlights: Empty Streets<\/i> by Michal Ajvaz, with its gradually unspooling connected stories, The Chimes<\/i> by Anna Smaill, with its gorgeous and musical writing, and Autumn<\/i> by Ali Smith, which is so full of heart. I also was totally engrossed by Hag-Seed<\/i> by Margaret Atwood, both of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children books, and Max Gladstone’s latest in the Craft sequence: but, really, I read a lot of good fiction this year. More of what I read this year was of the plot-driven\/delicious variety than the thorny\/challenging variety, and I’m OK with that. <\/p>\n

Non-fiction<\/b> (including autobiographical comics): 12. In the books-about-other-places category I really liked Marcelino Truong’s graphic memoir about the Vietnam of his childhood, Such a Lovely Little War<\/i>, and Nell Stevens’s Bleaker House<\/i>, about going to the Falkland Islands to write. In the books-about-sex category, I was delighted by Emily Witt’s really really smart book of essays, Future Sex<\/i>, and by Toni Bentley’s memoir about sex\/submission\/transcendence, The Surrender<\/i>. And of course I loved Tamara Shopsin’s Arbitrary Stupid Goal<\/i>, which includes a lot of great bits about the NYC of decades past and about Shopsin’s quirky\/interesting family. <\/p>\n

I ticked off 14 of the 24 categories for the Book Riot 2017 Read Harder<\/a> challenge, and am probably going to approach the 2018 challenge<\/a> in a similar way as I did the 2017 one: keeping an eye out for books that might fit the challenge, but mostly reading according to my whims. I hope 2017 was a good reading year for you, whatever that means for you, and that 2018 is full of bookish delights. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s not quite the end of the year yet, but I think it’s unlikely I’ll finish another book over the next two days, so here goes. I think 2017 was the first year ever in which the number of movies I saw was greater than the number of books I read, which I attribute to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-generalmeta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9683\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}