For the last few years I've participated in the Goodreads Reading Challenge. For those of you who don't know, you enter a goal number of books into Goodreads, and then track your progress. I suppose it's great for someone who has trouble making reading a priority, but that isn't me. Like so many group activities on the internet, it made me nervously aware of whether I was keeping up with the Joneses or, even worse, a past version of myself. (And those versions, for all of my efforts, are really erratic; I have a handful of goals I've been able to stick to for two months, but it's taken me years to get to the point where I can predict what it is I both want and need to do. Making some kind of announcement on a public website that I'm going to read not only a certain number of books, but a specific set of them, frequently made me feel like I was setting myself up to feel like a failure. It may be illogical, but here we are.) All to say that I use Goodreads now primarily to track something I have already read, in large part because, when the planets are aligned just right, I occasionally get a good recommendation that way.
Anyway! I'm using the Boston Public Library's Bibliocommons site to track my reading goals (it's public, but this is primarily for library geeks like me, so I feel less judged). In addition to tracking titles that I am reading or would like to read, I can also track what I want to read. I can also create lists, and this year I pulled from my For Later "shelf" and created a TBR list for 2024 that has all of 41 books. This is less than I usually goal up for, but very realistic given last year and what I want to do this year. (But just to make myself feel better, I also created a TBR 2025 list.) And it's working: as of now, the first week of March, I've read eight of those titles, and unless something catastrophic happens, I think I can meet my goal and, more importantly, knock off some of my other big projects.
The two books I finished this week have been on my list for two years: Blood Scion by Deborah Falaye, and The Ocean of Churn by Sanjeev Sanyal.
Blood Scion has a compelling story, but the execution was off. I know it was marketed as YA, but the language the characters used seemed off for that crowd, especially when the characters kept referring to themselves as children; that especially didn't ring true. I feel pretty confident that this comes down to editing and not writing, but I suspect I won't be able to tell until Falaye is able to get an adult book published; the constraints of YA seem especially tight.
I wanted to pick up Ocean of Churn because it was something author Shannon Chakraborty recommended, and as she's an even bigger history nerd than I am, I knew it would be good. (I also have had stars in my eyes over the Indian Ocean ever since I read the New Oxford World History title on it. It's amazing how little we talk about that area in the United States, considering how much of the world's action took place there. Then again, maybe it's not.) It's a short book--less than 300 pages--but it's packed with history, much of which I had no idea about. One little factoid: Zheng He's fifteenth century voyages were primarily about projecting power to Southeast Asia. This was almost as much of a face-palm moment for me as when I read in The Origins of the Second World War In Asia and the Pacific that the original issue for Japan was access to China. Oh, that makes sense once you clear out some of the propaganda, doesn't it?
People, this is why I try to read so much.
Deb in the City
