FAREWELL 2022. I WELCOME A NEW YEAR WITH A 6-STARS-OF-FIVE REVIEW!

It's time to get my 2023 house in order. 2022 saw me pass out 77 4.5* or higher reviews of 393 total, or 19%. Quite a good year indeed. I think the most amazing part of my reading year was the consistently good quality of my non-fiction reading, from Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America and Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: What China's Crackdown Reveals about Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere through to Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism and High-Risk Homosexual. I read with a slack jaw and a wildly beating heart the beautifully unconventional Before All the World, not one single thing about that read has dimmed a notch in my memory's lantern. I became misty and sad and still uplifted when I read Natasha Pulley's gorgeously wrought The Kingdoms, alternate history that has the one and the only truthful and accurate to my own experience portrayal of non-consensual heterosexual sex where the woman is the rapist. It was stunning. It was freeing to read on a page that someone else knew. I am forever in her debt for this alone, and am always eager for more like 2022's The Half Life of Valery K. There's a peak reading year in those reads alone! HOWSOMEVER....

It's my annual six-stars-of-five read! Kibogo (my book review), a beautiful tale of colonial-era Catholicism meeting, battling, and suffering defeat at the hands of Kibogo, the Rwandan folk-religion's organizing spirit. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Literature in Translation. It was the most unforgettable book I read in a year chock-a-block with wonderful reading. It explored the many ways colonialism tries to destroy the colonized, insidious personal invasions that are masked by pious mouthings and cold, cruel hearts crossdressing to seem unthreatening. And it still told a fine and exciting tale!

In 2022, I posted 370 reviews here, and 393 on my bookish social media sites. I don't think I can sustain such a pace at my time in life, but there's no sense setting meager goals is there. In 2023, my goals are:

To post 395 reviews of all sorts here

To post at least 120 Burgoines here and on my bookish social media sites of ARCs
      and/or DRCs from before 2022

To review at least 50% female or -presenting authors across genres

To post a review every day during #PrideMonth and #WomeninTranslationMonth

If I've learned nothing else in my *hack*ty-three years, it's to keep the goals from being the focus. It's the achievements I'm after, not the check-box ticking!

Happy 2023 to all my readers, and to your friends and your families and your companion animals (unless they're cats) and your delivery providers and...everyone we've ever met in our entire lives, to misquote Maureen Stapleton.