Reading and Writing in 2013

What did I do in 2013? On the Reading and Writing front, that is.

Well, I read some books. Sixty-nine of them, according to my Goodreads stats (that's 21,112 pages, an average 306 pages per book), a big increase over the forty books that Goodreads thinks I read in 2012. (I'm currently reading Tom Wolfe's doorstop THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, and still have about four hundred of its 659 pages left to go, so at best I'll barely make it to seventy books by the 31st.)

To eleven of those books I gave a five-star rating, the highest available on Goodreads. Here's the list (alpha by author):

THOSE WHO SAVE US, Jenna Blum
ANOTHER DAY IN THE FRONTAL LOBE, Katrina Firlik
THE APPRENTICE, Tess Gerritsen
THE SINNER, Tess Gerritsen
SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE, Austin Grossman
THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2012, Tom Perrotta, ed.
THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS, Jon Ronson
THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, Rebecca Skloot
HEADS IN BEDS, Jacob Tomsky
THE WORLD WITHOUT US, Alan Weisman
THE LAST POLICEMAN, Ben Winters

Of the above, I'd have to say my favorite work of fiction was THE LAST POLICEMAN, a pre-apocalyptic police procedural, while my favorite non-fiction book of the year was THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, about medicine, racism, cell culture and, well, cell culture in popular culture.

Eyeballing the remainder of 2013's books, I estimate at least two-thirds of them are fiction. Based on the above ratings, I suspect I'm judging the fiction harder than I am the non-fiction, a possible bias I'm going to keep an eye out for in 2014. I only gave a one star rating out to a single book (Thomas Pynchon's THE CRYING OF LOT 49, and I would gladly have given it a zero), and only a couple of two star ratings, all to works of fiction.

As far as my own fiction writing and writing support went for the year, one of my writing groups more-or-less dissolved itself, but the other is still going strong, as is the Grub Street writing community and various spin-offs from it, such as the unofficial Facebook support group organized by Cathy Elcik for November's novel writing efforts. And although I only ended up with a woefully incomplete seventy-seven page beginning of a lit-noir novel set in Las Vegas, November was an interesting experience for me, a month of writing every day, for at least a few hundred words, on the same large work. To be continued, I hope. (Although I have to confess the daily writing thing that I thought was getting to be a habit has already gone on the skids as holiday activities have ramped up.)

Short story writing is, however, still closer to my wheelhouse, as they say, and probably will continue to occupy most of my writing efforts. This year, I had various short fiction publications including a bit of Las Vegas flash in Prime Number magazine, a one-sentence piece of literary erotica collected in the Go Deeper Press anthology, Dirty Little Numbers, and a spoken word piece recorded at the Boston Book Festival and then published in The Drum.

It should go pretty much without mentioning that I also had a large number of rejections in the year, including a least one for all of the pieces that were eventually published this year (writers, take heart) as well as rejections for those yet to find a home. Which only means I need to finish writing more pieces, and send more out, in 2014.

Thanks for Reading, and Happy New Year!

Stephen