Top Ten Tuesday: My status on my Bookish Goals for 2023

 

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week the topic is "Reading Goals I Still Want to Accomplish Before the End of the Year." 

I am choosing an alternate option, to report on how I have done on my Bookish Goals for 2023, which I shared in more detail last January on my blog. After each goal, I am adding a brief note about my status as of the end of September.

1. Read more graphic novels.  I was aiming for one a month.

Current Status:  I read a total of five so far: two graphic memoirs in August, and three books in the A Man and His Cat series (Japanese manga). This is an improvement over last year.

2. Read more science fiction. My aim in 2023 was to read ten novels or short story anthologies.

Current Status: I did not do very well in this area. I read two science fictions novels (one by John Scalzi, the other an alternate history book). And a few short stories. Next year I would change this goal to also include fantasy novels. 

3. Read more espionage novels. My goal was to read 10 or 12. Specific authors I would like to catch up on are Anthony Price, Victor Canning, Len Deighton, Mick Herron, and Charles Cumming.

Current Status: I have only read six spy fiction novels in 2023 so far. I read novels by Anthony Price, Victor Canning, and Mick Herron, but haven't read any by Len Deighton or Charles Cumming.

4. Aim at reading books on my shelves rather than buying new books. 

Current Status: I did very well on reading books from my own shelves. My goal for 2023 is 48 books, and I am only one shy of that at this point. But I have not succeeded at all on cutting back on buying new (to me) books.

5. Read more ebooks. I continue to buy ebooks but hardly ever read them. 

Current Status: Total Failure. I have read one ebook this year.

6. Read some every morning. Anything would be fine, but I can't read ebooks at night because it interferes with my sleep, so ebooks would be a priority. 

Current Status: Not much progress on this one either. I sometimes read in the morning or afternoon, but only now and then.

7. Read more books from my Classics List. My goal was to read at least one classic a month. 

Current Status: I think I only read five books from my classics list this year. I am far behind on completing my Classics List.

8. Train myself to write short reviews. I don't necessarily want to write only brief reviews, but I would like to master that art.

Current Status: I did make some efforts in this area, but with little results. However, it is still an important goal for me.

9. Complete more short story anthologies or collections. I currently have many half-finished short story books all over the house. 

Current Status: My goal was to complete one short story book a month. On a quick glance through the blog, I think I finished 5 collections or anthologies so far this year. That is not bad, but I may have to accept that I just don't like that approach to reading short stories; usually I just want to dip in and out of short story anthologies or collections.

10. I want to regularly track my goals and any challenges I participate in. 

Current Status: I knew that would be a real challenge for me, and I haven't kept up with it. I have to decide how much I care about this, and whether it is worthwhile for me.

Summing up

To be honest, I don't know that I am going to push to finish any of my current goals in the last three months of the year. In the summer months, I read a lot of books from my TBR shelves for the 20 Books of Summer (all of which I enjoyed), and now I am more interested in just reading what strikes my fancy for the rest of the year. Between now and the end of the year, I plan to read two books for the 1962 Club in October and I hope to read some books with Christmas themes in December.

However, this has given me a great opportunity to think about what Bookish Goals I want to aim at in 2024.

 

A Fire Story: Brian Fies

From the dust jacket on my edition:

Early in the morning on Monday, October 9, 2017, wildfires burned through Northern California, resulting in 44 fatalities. In addition, 8,900 structures, including more than 6,200 homes, were destroyed. One of those homes belonged to author and illustrator Brian Fies’ and his family.  In the days that followed, Fies hastily pulled together a firsthand account of his experience in a twenty-page online comic entitled A Fire Story, that went viral.

The version of A Fire Story that was published online was a short webcomic (which is included at the end of the book). In 2019, Brian Fies published this expanded version of the story, adding more of his and his family's experiences following the fire, and a few sections on other people who lost homes due to the fire and their experiences.

Brian Fies' book does a very good job of conveying the stress that the victims of the fires had to deal with, and the unimaginable sadness of losing not just your home but everything in it. In some fires, the people in the paths of the fire have enough warning to gather some important possessions, but that was not the case here. 

I found it interesting that Brian Fies and his wife Karen went directly to her work place when they left their home and got safely out of the path of the fire. That made sense because she was the Director of Sonoma County Human Services and part of the County Emergency Response Team. And it had a backup generator, telephones, and internet. She ended up working there on coordinating emergency resources for the next 16 hours. 

My favorite parts were the wonderful, detailed sections telling the stories of other people who lost homes due to the fire and their varied experiences of finding a place to stay afterward and replacing their homes. There was Michael W. Harkins, a journalist and media consultant, who actually stayed and tried to save his house, unsuccessfully. And Dorothy Hughes, a senior who lived in a mobile home park. Her home was one of 44 in the park that survived the fire but she was never able to move back in. 

There is a very good review of the book at the Los Angeles Times. I am including a few paragraphs because I am not sure if the article can be read without a subscription.

Rooted in Fies’ webcomic, the book-length graphic account details life during and after the second-most destructive wildfire in California history. Now refined and enriched with more color and detail, opening pages depict their house’s silhouetted exterior and adjacent shrubbery, rimmed in carrot orange against an ash- and beige-streaked horizon. Karen smells smoke and from their bedroom window monitors a glowing sky that Brian attributes to “just the Calistoga fire.”

“I’m sure everything’s fine,” he assures his wife. “We haven’t gotten any phone alerts!”

Seventy mph winds that night ushered the fire that began near Tubbs Lane toward the Fieses’ front door, which was north of Santa Rosa. For the couple and thousands of other Californians, nothing would ever be the same again. Following a tense sequence that has the cartoonist and his wife springing from bed and frantically hauling belongings out to their driveway and the palpable heartbreak that materializes later when Fies scouts out their rubble-strewn streets, “A Fire Story” shares lesser-broadcast hardships as well as how quickly wildfire victims are expected to process a frenzied cycle of emotions.

Although my husband and I have been affected by wildfires in our area for many years, we have never been anywhere close to the type of devastation depicted in this book. In 1990, we had to evacuate due to the Painted Cave fire, which came down from the Santa Ynez mountains, jumped the freeway, and burned some homes close to where we lived. We were scared and for a short time I was separated from my husband and son when they had difficulty accessing any routes to our home. But we were only away from our home for one night after evacuating. We were very lucky. And that was before wildfires in Southern California became so prevalent and so damaging.

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Publisher:   Harry N. Abrams, 2019.
Length:       154 pages
Format:      Hardcover
Genre:       Graphic nonfiction
Source:      On my TBR for four years.