Originally posted on my short-lived reading journal on Tumblr, moved here on 04/13/2024

I got a Kindle in the Fall of 2013. It promptly froze, hilariously, on a page of Bleeding Edge. I was job hunting in Oakland at the time, and not just a little bit frantic, and I didn’t get around to calling in for a replacement. I got another Kindle, finally, after a lot of hem-hawing, December of 2014 and hoo does my reading volume show it.

Badly formatted, these are the books I bought from the Kindle store. I also read the entire corpus of A.J. Hall (btw, even if you don’t think you like fanfiction, if you like comedy of manners, you should go read Lust over Pendle), which spawned me to finally pick up the Vorkosigan saga and damn! better break-up reading there isn’t! I kind of dread catching up with old friends right now, because the concise summary of what’s been going on with me includes: oh, well, my boyfriend (partner? God, I hate that term, it’s so accurate yet so erasing) that I grew up with, that I got through my early 20s with, and I broke up OH and! there was a few months there where I thought my father would never be allowed back in the country but LOOKEE over Christmas we found out that maybe he’ll be allowed back in for more visits?

It’s kind of easier just to say that I had a “serious breakup and my father got deported”, even though I wince at the drama of that phrasing. It’s even easier to avoid talking about it, to not email old friends to catch up, to hope that eventually the news will be old and maybe dear God they’ll have heard about it from my Twitter account?

Anyway, Gmail says that I emailed books to my Kindle 29 other times, and Verso (who are the BEST and give you DRM free ebooks with every paper book purchase GO BUY THINGS FROM THEM) says that I bought and emailed 14 books to my Kindle, and I prolly read at least 15 paper books, and well, yeah what didn’t I read in 2015?

I traveled a lot in 2015. I counted, after I heard that Lisa had urged Allison to do so, and I spent 133 nights away from home. I took one of the longest airplane flights in the world from NYC to Johannesberg, direct, to go to Cape Town, to give a not-practiced-enough way-too-technical-to-be-interesting talk about databases at a pretty fun conference. I went to North Carolina a few times, to be with my mom after my dad had left, to see my sister graduate high school, to see D before we parted ways. I went to SF a few times, once for a conference where I gave a way-more-practiced-yet-still-too-technical-talk to an audience of DBAs, once illadvisedly, and one more time because dammit, what are you even supposed to do in this life but see your friends. (I went a few other places too.)

Anyway, I’m trying to read a bit more deliberately this coming year. I’m still struggling a bit, to be honest, but there’s a lot of things I need to learn and I need to make time for things that aren’t pure escapism. I’m starting to think of myself as an American citizen…you know, a disenfranchised one. I make this joke (I’m sure all of you have heard me make it), that there’s a long-ass history of disenfranchised Americans! It’s more American than having privilege! Still grappling with this a lot, and I have a long reading list to help me with it. Let me know if you want to talk about these things–I would love that.

I made a lot of space in my life in 2015. Breaking up with D, and, separately of that, simply not being in a long distance relationship, stepping down from organizing !!Con, making the decision to not speak at conferences outside of NYC this coming year….yeah, I feel good about this. I’m a little bit more confident about how to spend my time at work (I got promoted!), and I’m hoping that the confluence of all these things will make the space that I need to think & read & write about the issues I’ve been grappling with for a long time. Honestly, I suspect I’ve made more space than that can fill–not sure what else is gonna go in there!