A Year of Reading: Reflexions on 2022, Plans for 2023 & Beyond

Written By Zacharí Brumaire

i got this image off of reddit but now i can’t find the original : /

Year In Review: 2022

Somewhere in my infinitely self (re/un)organizing notes and journals and blog posts back in January or February this year, { there’s a lot of despair in that} while my partner and I were still nomadic if not quite homeless { gates to levels of trauma? } I wrote out some goals for my reading this year, including topics, specific books, number of books, kinds of books, etc. Here I’ll be doing a review of my reading as recorded on my goodreads and possibly audible, their user data is kinda whack.

I do want to note at the start however that I remember one of my big goals was to start reading more political economy again. I moved How The West Came to Rule to my book altar/temple/shrine and did read some passages back in the early autumn i think? And of course I began the year with the Communist Manifesto. I would like to make progress on both HWCR and Capitalist Realism before the year is out. I think organizzing my books has helped tremendously with reading prioritization, motivation, inertia, etc. carrying around books in my bag locks them into the level of functionality my bag has, which fluctuates but is usually higher than, e.g., my desk or bedside shelving.

{ Feast of Aphrodite | 31 March 2023 | 11 Germinal CCXXXI }

{ its really interesting and (re/)orientating to read myself from four months ago talk about myself from a year ago. i guess by before the year is out i didn’t mean end of 2023, which brough reassurance, but rather 2022, which is now a fail state. so i’m changing my goal to:

make progress on How The West Came To Rule by the end of the year (general)

make a bubbles chart creation list with How the West Came to Rule on it tonight (next action)

to return Capitalist Realism to the shelf cause i’ve got gates for the chapters i’ve read for the next time i want to make a full pilgrimage of it. (goal negation)

….

{ }

  • The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Chambers

  • Females, Chu

  • The Camelback Dogs!, Tomkins

  • Ideas Are All Around, Stead

  • The Last Days of New Paris, Miéville

  • 20020: An American football story, Bois

  • Perdido Street Station, Miéville

  • Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy, Eilenberger (Twice)

  • 1776: What Football will look like in the Future, Bois

  • Apost(le)aate, Steele-Fisher

  • A Scanner Darkly, Dick

  • Lent: A Novel of Many Returns, Walton (Twice? Thrice?)

  • The City & The City, Miéville

  • The Strange Death of Liberal England, Dangerfield

  • Embassytown, Miéville

  • The Subtle Knife, Pullman

  • The Golden Compass, Pullman

  • Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Hacking

  • The Tranmigration of TImothy Archer, Dick

  • Alexander and the Wind-up Mouse, Lionni

  • Death’s End, Liu

  • The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, Duncan

  • The Dark Forest, Liu

  • The Divine Invasion, Dick

  • Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Anderson

  • Foundation, Asimov

  • The Prince and the Dressmaker, Wang

  • Julián Is a Mermaid, Love

  • VALIS, Dick

  • American Gods, Gaiman

  • The Einstein Intersection, Delany

  • Blowback: Season 1, James & Kulwin

  • Anathem, Stephenson

  • Flight, Kazu

  • The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, Laing

  • In Orbit Medievali, Buckell

  • This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life, Wallace

  • Joseph Anton: A Memoir, Rushdie

  • The Fire Next Time, Baldwin

  • A Country of Ghosts, Killjoy

  • The Three-Body Problem, Liu

  • Waiting for Godot, Becket

  • Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It, Trotsky

  • Axiom’s End, Ellis

  • Democratic Confederalism, Öcalan

  • How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Kohn

  • City of Saints and Madmen, Vandermeer

  • Reform or Revolution, Luxemburg

  • Clan Apis, Hosler

  • On Revolution, Arendt

  • Blowback: Season 2, James & Kulwin

  • October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, Miéville

  • The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx & Engles

Currently Reading

  • Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative (Re-read) 2

  • Lent: A Novel of Many Returns (Re-re-read) 3

  • One Hundred Years of Solitude (Re-read) 3

  • Infinite Jest (Piecemeal) 2

  • Collected Fictions, Borges 2

  • Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination 3

  • Debt: The First 5,000 Years 2

  • Invisible Cities 2

  • Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism 2

  • The Amulet of Samarkand (Re-read) 1

  • The Collected Schizophrenias (Re-read) 1

  • Devil House 2

  • Three Moments of an Explosion 3

  • Memoirs of My Nervous Illness 2

  • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity 3

  • Midnight’s Children, Rushdie 3

  • The Golden House, Rushdie 2

  • The Society of the Spectacle 1

  • Jesus the Magician 2

  • A Brief History of Neolibeeralism 2

  • Hell of Presidents 3

  • The Templars: The Rise and Fall of God’s Holy Warriors 3

  • Black Sun 4

  • Revolutions: The Haitian Revolution, Duncan 4

  • There is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution 3

  • Jury Duty, Cawdron 3

  • On Guerrilla Warfare, Mao Tse-Tung 2

  • Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment, Snow 4

  • The Four Loves, Lewis 4

  • On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. Nelson 3

  • The Philosopher’s Tarot, Sereptie 2

  • The Gospel of Loki, Harris 4

  • House of Leaves, Danielewski 2

  • Seeing Like a State, How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Scott 3

  • Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings; Benjamin 1

  • The Portable Jung, Jung 3

  • How the West Came to Rule

Thus far this year I have completed 54 books out of the 52 I initially set myself. Rather than extending my goal as I did last year prior to or upon completing my goal, I’m spending the last 2 months of the year (Halloween to New Years Eve) on a more relaxed reading schedule. Rather than focusing on getting a book finished every week, I’m allowing myself to start books frequently across a wide range of topics, styles, etc. In addition to recharging this is allowing me to get a head start on a lot of books I most likely won’t finish until 2023, which feels like cheating but in a good way. what counts is when I finish it.

{ yess cheating but in a good way is a good example. }

Books that made a deep impact on me and my thinking included Lent (read 2-3 times), Time of the Magicians (read twice), Rewriting the Soul, 3 Body-Problem and The Dark Forest, VALIS, The Divided Self, The Fire Next Time, Waiting for Godot, and How Forests Think.

{ i think i feel guilt about re-reading, and also guilt about not re-reading. I want to re-read Time of the Magicians because i relate to the charachter’s precarity so much but feel guilty for not making progress on all the books i haven’t read at all, and especially the ones i’ve done an attempt at. i have this completionist idea that i can’t write on a book till i’ve become familiar with it back to front and front to back in a recent reading, which of course can often get put on back burners for a year or more necesitating to my disciplinarian - as - academic that i must start again, as if i cannot remember what i read over the course of a year, as if at the end of my life, as i often return in my dreams, there will be a final exam and more importantly an ethics review for plagarism, skimming texts, bullshitting, etc. }

I’m proud to have finished Anathem, a very long book i raced through in a couple weeks, and The Strange Death of Liberal England and Apost(le)ate, both of which I’ve been reading off and on or at least had for 2 years. { specifically since the autumn after i was homeless and spent an entier semmester living off my 1 month of work at hellway (safeway, where the manager refered to me as his slave) and money from the covid loss of job payouts. }

same with The Divided Self { i don’t think this was the same book order, unlike strange death and apostleate and it may have been from a further year back? } Several have been very vaguely aspirational but I ordered them this year and made a point to read them, including Democratic Confederalism, Rewriting the Soul, Reform or Revolution, On Revolution, The Three Body Problem. I’ve gotten into PKD this year and continued exploring Miéville. Especially since my first re-reading back in like September and getting a visible copy of the book a month or three later Lent has earned a central place in my personal cannon. In recent years I’ve avoided re-reads but as of the later half of this year they’ve become more important to me, and more recently I’ve made it a habit to get physical copies and audio copies of books that mean a lot to me.

{ phillip k dick’s lesser works are also really misogynistic and the endings are pretty rushed. i like his theology and conceits, but idk. like wallace, i gassing the breaks on recommending them to anyone }

Back on 29 Fructidore CCXXX i posted an announcement called Demon Days:

ANNOUNCING: Demon Days! Inspired by a recent conversation with a friend […] I will be orientating my reading for the next several months around works which feature spiritual themes of deception, rebelion, temptation, and circumscription.

I’ve already read the first 2/3 of His Dark Materials (Pullman), as well as having begun a re-reading of Lent (Walton). I’m also part way through Apost(le)ate (Steele Fisher). Other books on the roster:

Paradise Lost (Milton)

Caliban and the Witch (Federici)

The Bartimaeus Trilogy (Stroud).

I am considering a re-read of The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce (Lewis), though i read the former recently and will need to track down a copy of the later.

I also plan on curating a monstrous playlist, partly in order to collect a list of all songs mentioning demons by The Mountain Goats, though other songs will be included, including Devil Town (Cavetown), Roll Me Through The Gates of Hell (Mischief Brew), and so forth.

Ok so follow up. I have finished Apost(le)ate and am on my re-re-read through of Lent. I have acquired Paradize Lost and have begun listening to the first Bartimaeus book. I am also listening to The Collected Schizophrenias and want to continue Devil House, Jesus the Magician, etc.

{ alright so i finished Lent, at least i think i did? i was doing two readthroughs simultaniously (one audio the other visual) and it was kind a special interest burnout. I finished all 4 Bartimaeus books but stalled out around 1/3 of the way through Schizophrenias and more recently stalled out a second time on Devil House, the white witch grusome stuff. Jesus the Magician i don’t think i picked up and opened more then once. }

!Create a Demons Days article or tab or hashtag for essays, dispatches, and Readings. also xercises i suppose

{ ?? }

!Add Paradise Lost to book shrine

{ i think its come and gone a couple times, i think come autumn i’ll read it with the amber spyglass, Borges, Autumn of the Patriarch, finishing Infinite Jest, Spectres of Marx, Caliban and the Witch, i.e. the last few year’’ usual autumn line up }

!Add Caliban and the Witch to book shrine

!Write on Christmas as a Demonic Holiday season

{ i’ve wanted to do this for a while in theory but i’ve stared at a blank page several times and barely got more than “the demons wait outside the manger, they are interested in the outcome of this too but for different reasons.”they maybe want to get de-addicted from humans? or maybe they see Jesus as not so different from them?dialectics of the house divided against itself cannot stand/must expand. hell as a prison state, anarchy, a fortress, workers’ state, monestary, aristocratic parliament, … }

well i think we should make worldbuilding and stories on hell and demonic christmas essays, or one essay for now, because attempts are sacred

!Make a monster/demons playlist

{ hmm exegesis on The Mountain Goats? should exegesis be in the essays too? i need to familiarize myself with tags }

!demons essay

!exegesis essays

!familiarize self with tags

!list of books to make bubblelist for how the west came to rule

Subjects: Politics (Ideology, Military, History), Magical Realism, theology, …

Scales:

1 Excited to Be Reading this
2 Interested in Reading this
3 Undecided
4 Don’t Want to Read Now
5 Don’t Want to Read

I want to be reading history, theory/philosophy, fiction continuously.

{ thats nice, but your attention does tend to focus on one book at a time, gnawing on two audiobooks in particular doesn’t usually happen in the same few days even. add maybe one book for visual reading at a given time, and reading anything other than maybe fiction continuously is ahabitual. }

I want to be reading an anthology, a long book (1000+ pages), a postmodern work and a traditional narrative continuously.

{ maybe, on my shelf of interest i’d like these genres represented and progress made on them/engaged with over a matter of seasons or years. }

I want to read poetry more often.

{ what’s the next book of poetry i want to read? probably Eating God, i don’t think i have that one though. i need to do an audit of the library eventually, but its not one i think i would have hidden away? but if it was a gift i might not have been able to emotionally process it due to the context. }

I want to read more political economy, especially How the West Came to Rule.

{ reading groups. i would like to be able to be a lurker for starters in reading groups }

I want to read both highly theoretical and highly applicable works continuously.

{ again, i’d like a moree theoretical work and a more practical work represented on my active interest shelf, ie book shrine, traveling with me in my bag, or top of library in audible. }

I want to read more Sacred Texts.

{ interested lately in I Ching, Tarot, Walter Benjamin, Eating God }

I want a set of books i can pick up and put down on a whim, reading in and out of order, always in the same places (book shrine, my bag, green shelves, maybe another shelf near my altartempledesk).

{ maybe this is the active interest thing i was refereing to, though the language of whim and always in the same place (same place on the shelf, or shelf-to-shrine-to-bag?) isn’t quite right. i do sometimes reach for a book on my green shelf just to touch base with it, see if it flares, but that’s different enough from whim that the description does’nt sit righjt.}

I want other books designated to make more rapid and closely monitored progress on.

{ yeah so here the self of interest is being invoked again but more narrowly inside it or otherized in this case, are the books i’m focusing on, or trying to focus on. }

..

I want to read Infinite Jest in 2023. Avrg. 5 pages a day (not sure how I’m going to do footnote pages yet) i aim to finish by 1 August 2023. I’m currently 5.5% of the way through. {22 Nivose CCXXXI, 11 January 2023}

{ so i a while ago changed this to by halloween. currently focusing on the bubbles. }

I want to read A Hat Full of Sky.

{ we;ll see if the mood strikes me. }

I want to re-read How Forests Think.

{ uh, idk. maybe in the autumn. }

I want to record myself talking about what I’ve been reading and start podcasting.

{ nice }

I want to read Vonnegut, specifically God Bless You Mr Rosewater.

{ or another vonnegut, yes. }

I want to read an average of a book a week., and try to read at least a book every week until i get to my goal. { thats not how i work } would like to reach 60 { 52 } by Halloween and then take 2 months of a more relaxed, impulsive reading.

♂️ | 31 January 2023 | 12 Pluviôse CCXXXI | 🌔 | Surgery Day

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Second Season Within The Wires

More Political Economy

Poetry

Anthologies (Three Moments in an Explosion!)

More tactics, strategy, praxis, political theory

Zacharí Brumaire

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