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• Despite catching COVID, I’ve been doing a lot of reading. Approaching the end of the year, I find it appropriate to share what I’ve read.
• I was going to do this all in one great big long post, but decided to split each book into separate posts.

The day I type this, Sunday 3rd December, is the first day I’ve had the strength to work on the blog at my Desktop. I took a test Tuesday last, and yep, I got got by COVID. It’s every bit as foul as folks say it is, and maybe even more so for the fact that the pandemic is over, done and dusted, like a football game. It’s not, of course, but that’s another story.

In my downtime, although my eyes constantly flickered from wakefulness to sleep, I managed to get a lot of reading done. I mentioned last post how many books I had in the backlog:

https://brologue.net/2023/11/25/now-we-are-twenty-three/

I’d love to tell you I’m reading two books. I’d love to tell myself that, I really, really, REALLY would. It’s more like fifteen. I may have a further backlog of fifty books I want to get through.

me

That’s because at the start of the year, I’d made a list in my journal of books from last year that I wanted to get through. Last year, I also had the brilliant idea to write down all the books I finished on a list. This year, I didn’t do that. I think I’ve written about every book I’ve read this year, but missing one or two won’t be the end of the world.

The reading list for last year – well, the past four years of Uni – had scunnered me of most books of the pop-sci self-help type. They definitely pop like a firework, and a good author in the area is one that can hook your attention to an idea for more than thirty seconds. The trouble with the self-help genre, however, is that it can frame any issue as an individual’s issue, who is ethically moved to do this, that, and the other to fix the issue and thus fit the line of normality better.

How dare we think of an alternative – that what we face may be part of a larger systemic issue, and something that requires more help than just from yourself. The world I was brought into has rules, and I wanted to know where those rules came from. This year, that sentiment pushed me to read more non-fiction books that dealt with social issues of all kinds, and got me to view them from newer, more critical perspectives.

I’d planned to do this all in one big long post, but having just started the blog, it’s probably easier if I do each book/series its own dedicated post per day. See you tomorrow!

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1. Image © Frank Schulenburg ↩︎