2019: The year of books, books, and more books

When 2019 started, I felt a strong pull inward. 2018 had been about saying yes, stepping out of comfort zones, doing things that I knew would be hard, that I knew would make me uncomfortable, yet doing them anyway. 2018 had been about growth, about trying things. It was a year for trips and traveling, for new work and projects. 2018 was a year of Bryan and Sage both being healthy. It was good, and challenging, and exhausting.

So, I started 2019 tired. We started 2019 knowing Sage would need surgery and not knowing exactly when it would happen or how long her recovery would take. We kept our commitments small. We stepped back from things. We made space for being home, for healing, for lots of therapy. And that was pretty much how most of this year went.

Sage’s surgery was postponed a few times, recovery took even longer than we thought. Bryan started back into cancer treatment.

2019 was a year for sitting by hospital beds. It was a year for waiting and for being still. It was also a year for consuming, for taking things in, for learning from other people’s experiences, mistakes, and victories.

In addition to that, 2019 felt like it was also the year that I got truly serious about writing. I’ve written a lot, for a lot of years, but this year something shifted. I started revising, editing, and seeking out feedback on my creative writing more than I had in the past. I started reading not just for enjoyment, not just as an audience, but as a writer, as a craft person.

Before this year I knew I wanted to write, that writing would always be a part of my life and my life’s work, but I didn’t have much trust in my ability to write fiction. I didn’t have much trust in my ability to critique fiction either. This year I got serious not just about writing, but about fiction writing, about the art and craft of shaping a story.

I’m not very good at it. But, that’s ok. I enjoy it. I’m learning and I’m getting better. That’s what matters.

One of the biggest ways I learned this year was by reading a lot. Not just by reading a lot, but by noticing what I liked and didn’t like, what worked and didn’t work, and paying attention to the choices authors made.

In roughly the last year (I started keeping track sometime in December of last year) I have read 77 books. As part of my year end reflection I thought it would be interesting to document a bit of the data of this reading year, a bit of what I learned from these books, and perhaps award a few silly awards along the way.

So, here is my year in books :)

77 books read in total
6 non-fiction books
71 fiction books

39 Young Adult
11 Middle Grades
3 classics

41 Fantasy
16 Distopian
8 Sci-Fi books
6 Mystery

Clearly the vast majority of my reading happened in Young Adult Fantasy, but this was intentional. I am writing a young adult fantasy series, so I set out at the beginning of the year to read as much young adult fantasy as I could get my hands on. And I’m glad I did, partly because I enjoy reading this type of book and partly because it’s helping me get a better sense for the craft of writing this type of story, as well as a better feel for the market.

Recently, I asked a writer I respect if he would read my first three chapters and give me some feedback. One of the comments I got back from him was about the marketability of my book. He commented that YA is tending to skew dark and edgy and my book (at least the first three chapters) didn’t read very dark or edgy. This was invaluable feedback and has given me a lot to think about. If I hadn’t read so much in the genre this year, I may have taken the advice at face value, or I may have questioned it and dismissed it, having spent a good deal of my life reading older (more classic) young adult stories, which don’t tend to be as edgy or gritty.

Because I have recently read so much in the genre (largely by current authors), I could neither dismiss his observation or just blindly agree. He’s right. I can see it in so much of the books I’ve read this year. And yet I can also think of exceptions to that rule, books that push against that ever so slightly.

I can also think of authors who seem to take this advice to heart a little too much — throwing in gratuitous violence and death at every turn and making their writing unnecessarily edgy.

Needless to say, it’s been a good thought exercise to consider where my book lands on this spectrum, how much I want to cater to marketability, and what are the nuances of my own personal style and voice that may or may not fit with current trends.

One of the most remarkable things I think I’ve learned this year is a lesson that feels very visceral, and close to me right now, and that is this:

There is an audience for every book.

No, that’s not quite what I’m trying to say. It’s not that every book will have an audience, or that there is an audience for every book, but that there is a book for every audience. That’s not quite what I’m trying to say though either. Let me try again…

Not every book will be for you, but it might be for someone else.

That’s part of what I’m getting at, but it’s not the whole of it, it’s not even the heart of it. Maybe what I’m trying to say is…

Even unlikely books find publishers.

No, that makes this whole point sound too negative and it isn’t negative at all.

Apparently, what I’m trying to say isn’t easy to boil down into one thought, or a single principle, but the idea, or rather the feeling of the idea, is crystal clear in my mind. It feels like… hope. After reading so many books so close together (not to mention countless years of reading before hand) what I’m starting to see more clearly is that lots of books do find publishers, even strange, odd, quirky books, that I wouldn’t have thought would ever find a publisher, or that I wouldn’t have thought would be marketable. And here’s the really remarkable thing, not only do they find publishers, but they find audiences, sometimes even cult-like followings.

Now, that’s not to say that EVERY book WILL get published or will find an audience, but maybe it’s just to say that there is some mystery to this whole process and it’s not entirely predictable. Books that I would have never thought would find a publisher, do. Books that are bizarre and out there and don’t fit the norm for what might be considered marketable, do find followings. It happens.

And while there is a time and place and reason for playing to your audience, for revising your book into something more marketable. I think this reminds me that there is also a time and place and reason for letting your inner weird out and simply not giving up. Maybe that story that you’ve kept hidden away because you don’t think it could ever be marketable, or that anyone else would like it, is just what someone else needs.

Now, let’s talk a few specifics about some of the books I read. I figured I do this in award fashion…so…drum roll please…

Book that made me cry the hardest at the end: Allegiant (the last book in the Divergent series)
Book that made me cry the earliest (in the first few chapters): Red Rising (first book in the Red Rising series)
Book that made me cry the most often: Farm Girl
Book that was most overrated (in my opinion): The Alchemist
Series I am surprised people don’t talk about more: The Winner’s Curse Series
Book that was most anticlimactic: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Book that I enjoyed a lot, but keep forgetting about: To Kill a Kingdom (this one also had a villain that reminded me of the villain in my WIP in odd subtle ways)
Book I recommend most often: The Silent Gondoliers
Book that I wouldn’t recommend to most people: American Gods (this definitely requires a particular taste)
Book with the most information dumps: The Last Dragonslayer (this whole book was more information dumps and world building than anything else, but I still enjoyed it)
Most visually beautiful book (in terms of descriptions): The Night Circus
Book that would be vastly improved by a slight edit to the end: Mockingjay
Book with the best tension (both in terms of questions in the mind of the reader and tension between characters): The Wrath & The Dawn
Book that took me by surprise: Caraval (the first book really kept me on my toes, and kept me surprised in terms of plot, the second and third surprised me because they felt so much more developed than the first and the world building grew much more complex, which I wasn’t expecting)
Book that left me unable to stop thinking about it and wondering about the ending: The Giver
Book for Enneagram 4s: Hunted
Book for the nerdy 80’s child in you: Ready Player One
Book for the literary: Jane Eyre
Book for the feminist in you: The Lady Sherlock series (this series feels like a feminist read in a very subtle way, that I really appreciate — it’s not the warrior woman or even the girl power, women run the world type thing, it’s very much set in the time period that it takes place in and the characters are directly out of that time period, but it handles some topics of woman’s rights and work in really interesting ways I think)
Most random book for people who like books: The Eyre Affair
Best resource book for writers: Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self Discovery
Best Non-fiction: Everything Happens for a Reason & Other Lies I’ve Loved
Favorite Neil Gaiman (since I’d never read him before and managed to read five of his books this year): The Graveyard Book
Favorite writing style: Light from Distant Stars

There you go. That’s not everything I read, but it’s a good bit of it. I normally leave comments off my blog posts, but I’m turning them on for just this post, cause I want to hear from you! Have you read any of these books? If so, tell me what you thought of them.

I’d also love it if you’d take a moment to tell me what you read this year, or recommend a book to me. I’d like to read between 50 and 100 books next year, and, although I have a list started, I’d love to hear what you would recommend I read next. I’d appreciate it!

Grace and peace,
Bethany