It’s new year’s eve. Happy New Year’s Eve! We made it. Barely.
2025…ups and downs. I know a lot of people who are very much “fuck this year.” It wasn’t quite that bad for me. I had some wins this year. For sure. The losses were intense, too. No question of that. It was…a fine year. I don’t think it’ll be a particularly memorable one. Certainly not a banner year. But that isn’t to say it wasn’t a valuable year, because it was. A building block is what it felt like. Prep, both for good things and bad, which are coming in the new year.
I finished my 27th book of the year, which is the most I’ve read in a calendar year in quite some time. The reading routine I fell into last year really paid dividends. Didn’t make nearly as much progress in my Shakespeare reading as I’d hoped…but that’s okay. It’ll take however much time it takes, and I can take breaks whenever I want to. Like…reading Tolstoy these past couple days. That was nice. I’ll probably do that every so often.
Reading was definitely a highlight this year. I’m back. Back to where I was before my mid-twenties…looking forward to reading. Consistently. God, I used to read so much. I read all the time. School crushed that a bit for me, I don’t know why. I don’t know why it happened to me and not others, why it made me stop reading. But it did. I really didn’t read hardly anything for about fifteen years. All of my thirties. Half my twenties. That’s such a long time. I can’t account for it, really. And now that I’m back into it, I’m all that much more aware of what I lost by stopping for so long.
But…I’m here now. And at the same time I feel so bereft about that time lost, it also feels like the only thing that matters is I’m back. The past doesn’t matter nearly so much as right now. I’ll set the same goal for 2026, I think, that I set for this year: two books a month. 24 books. And I’ll see how much I can push that up towards the next marker of three books a month. That would be hard. I’m already struggling to find time to read with the writing and work taking so much time. But, that’s the goal. I know it’s doable.
Yeah. That’s what’s on my mind tonight with Coops snuggle up against my foot, Joy out with Liz in the living room, and the rain falling softly outside. It started to rain again today, like, light drops and drizzle all day. Apparently supposed to pick up more tonight and into tomorrow morning. We’ll see. I’m up and writing tomorrow morning. Wish me luck.
Night night, and…Happy New Year’s Eve. I’ll see you in 2026.