Immanentize the Empathy
August was a month for reading in a variety of genres and formats. Not much, due to burnout etc., but varied.
Acquisitions
Reading List
Books
Acquisitions
Reading List
Books
Short Prose
June is my birthday month, and I celebrated by driving clockwise around Lake Michigan, starting in my home town of Grand Rapids and hitting Madison, Marquette, and Sault Ste Marie before returning home. In each city, we stopped at an independent bookstore where I offered my monetary support in exchange for bound bundles of words. That, plus the arrival of a couple of Kickstarter rewards, made this the biggest book acquisition month of the year thus far.
Acquisitions
Reading List
Books
May was a slightly better month for reading than April, if only because there was more daylight to be had and I had the occasional opportunity to sit on the porch with a glass of wine.
Acquisitions
Reading List
Books
Short Prose
April was a mediocre month for reading. I don’t know if it was post-COVID brain fog or general stress, or just a heavy work project maxxing out my brain capacity. As you can see, I read two short books at the beginning of the month, then the third one took almost three full weeks to complete, then a short book of poetry to round out National Poetry Month. Maybe May will be better.
Acquisitions
Reading List
Books
February was a good book month. Three of the five arrivals were from Kickstarters, and two of those were from Kickstarters over two years old. The rest were new purchases. Reading-wise, my reading list for the year caught up with my acquisition list, and I expect it to stay that way for the rest of the year, unless I either get sick of reading (not likely to happen) or I indulge in some serious emotional-support book buying.
Acquisitions
Reading List
Books and Journals
Short Prose
The above is the collection of books which I was fortunate enough to have signed by their respective authors at ConFusion 2023.
First up are Zoe’s Tale, The End of All Things, and The Last Colony by John Scalzi. I picked these books up over the past several years, and finally brought them with me to ConFusion to be signed.
I picked up The Pure World Comes by Rami Ungar when a dapper gentleman in a top hat asked me “Do you like horror?” as I was browsing the tables in Artist’s Alley during some down time. Rami and I talked for a hot minute about self publishing and horror, and I walked away with a new book.
Dark Factory and Velocities by Kathe Koja, I picked up back in December, expressly to get them signed during the convention.
On Saturday afternoon, and I stopped in to Catherine Stein‘s “Author Meet and Greet” event, and ended up purchasing Eden’s Voice and The Courtesan and Mr. Hyde, which are period romances in the steampunk and gas-lamp fantasy genres. I generally don’t read romance novels, but I love the myriad *punk subgenres so this might be an inroad into a genre in which I am woefully uninformed. And we discovered that we have a friend in common, in West Michigan author Jean Davis, who Catherine knows through the self-publishing and local/regional book event scenes.
On the bottom right is The Librarian, an anthology published by Air and Nothingness Press, which was funded through a 2022 Kickstarter campaign. One of the authors, Storm Michael Humbert, was in one of the author meet-and-greets, with a table of anthologies in which he has stories.
All in all, ConFusion 2023 was an excellent venue for picking up new books, and I am proud that I kept it to only four books purchased throughout the long weekend, as I have a shelf full of books which have been signed at ConFusions past, which I have not yet read. New books shall be my reward for reading old books.
One of these years it will be me sitting at a table behind a pile of books on which are printed the words “By John Winkelman.”
This was another great month for reading, though the list is short. But such is necessarily the case for Dostoevsky December.
And this rounds out the list for the year. 120 books or journals, and 252 pieces of short prose. Not bad at all.
Books and Journals
Short Prose
I didn’t read much this month, mostly due to spending all of my spare moments writing for NaNoWriMo. But what I did read was pretty good.
This was the month I finally made it to the bottom of my stack of back issues of The Paris Review. It was a wondrous, wild ride full of some of the best writing I have experienced in my adult life, but I feel a sense of relief now that I am done.
This was also the month in which I passed 200 pieces of short prose read, which means 2022, for all its chaos and uncertainty, was a stellar year for reading.
Books and Journals
Short Prose