Book-A-Day May: Results

As expected, I did not read a book a day in May. Not even close, really. But I do think it worked as a proof of concept, and that I could do it next year with a little planning.

1) Stockpile novellas. I ran out of novellas I was excited about, but they fit the bill very nicely.

2) Earmark time.  The best part of this plan was that I actually spent a couple of afternoons reading for hours instead of puttering around getting not much done. It was motivating! And productive! It worked really well for that and I want to harness it sometime.

3) Stockpile comics and kids books. Adam thrust several books upon me in the past week that would have been great book-a-day reads.

[Very Important Aside: My kid is now spontaneously coming up to me sometimes and saying, "Mom this is a really good book. You should read it." PARENTING ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: 1,000,000 POINTS!!!!]

4) Plan end-of-April reading to trail off into May.  I counted books I finished in May, even if started in April. For the longer stuff, start it in April, to make a dent.

So this May I actually read 6 novellas, 5 graphic novels, and 4 novels, totaling 15 books, for the purpose of this experiment.  And this was during a month that included a Friends of the Library book sale, which is about my busiest week all year, and some intense volunteer commitments.

So look out next May, I'm planning ahead this time!

Stand-out book from the month: Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations, by Mira Jacob. It's the graphic memoir of a Southeast Asian American woman, framed around her trying to answer her young biracial son's questions about racism and Donald Trump near the election of 2016. The story spans the author's life, and it covers everything from being a child of immigrants to her marriage to a white Jewish man and relationships with her in laws, to goofy parent stories and trying to make it as a writer in New York.

It's a wonderful book about the experience of being brown in America and how that's changed over the past 40 years, and about being a parent and trying to make sense of a world that doesn't actually make sense, and then break it down into words a six-year-old can understand--especially when the six-year-old alternates between being scared of racism and pretending he's Spider-Man.

This was such a great, relatable, warm-hearted book, and I really loved getting to know Mira Jacob. Highly recommend.