Reaching higher for even better reads and reviews in 2024

Time to set 2024's goals! A bad year for me health-wise started me on the path of pulling in my horns, making my goals and my ideas about myself and my capacities smaller in the wake of the disaster. That really doesn't work for me, as a person, I found out. I got hugely lucky...I'm walking, talking, reading, and writing, despite the consensus opinion that I wouldn't be doing much of any of those things. And that somehow means I need to rein my ambitions IN?! What kind of dimwitted thinking is that?

So I set bigger and bigger goals as 2023 went on. I made them all. That leads me to think this year shouldn't be started with self-limiting smallness. If I reviewed 222 books in 2023, why not go for at least 250 in 2024?

So I will.

2023's six-stars-of-five read was a gay classic, winner of the National Book Award for Translation, The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel and translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato. It was published in the US by New Vessel Press, and I got a DRC from them via Edelweiss+. An excellent read. It was the sweetest, most poignant tale of the immense agony that homophobia perpetrates on its victims that I have read. It transported me back to a time in my life where a similar thing happened to me that happened to the boys in the story, and seeing that awfulness perpetrated by others put my own pain into a new perspective. Author Stênio Gardel and Translator Bruna Dantas Lobato deserve all the accolades, and this novel of the sweetness and delight of young love destroyed by the unreasoning hatred of homophobia deserves a place on everyone's shelf.

All but 36 of 2023's reviews were from NetGalley and Edelweiss+, the DRC aggregators I use to get my biblioholism fixes. That's 16% of the total actually read and reviewed. In 2024, I think that percentage is just fine to maintain, so I'll settle on 41 reads not from those two sources as my soft goal...I don't much care if I hit it exactly, but I do need to leave room to read and review books I've been gifted over the years!

2023's #Booksgiving review blast resulted in my blog views for the month being 177% of November's total. So that worked. I only used Twitter for all of November, then for #Booksgiving, added Bluesky and Tumblr. That worked, too. The sadness of my #PrideMonth limp, flaccid performanceless unblast made me realize that, if I'm going to get a big project done, I need to break it down into steps. This is new for me, and a result of the actual limitations that the strokes have imposed on me. Like no longer being able to read handwriting or decode graphics like Wordle, this acquired dyslexia is a limitation I need to acknowledge. Not to say I won't keep pushing against it...but it's real, and planning needs to be based in reality.

I hope all y'all have 2024s that brim with good reads, good news, and good love.
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