It's a crisp, lovely evening at my in-laws' house in Arizona, and I've suddenly realized my 2018 reading challenge begins tomorrow! Because 2018 begins tomorrow! Happy New Year, beloveds!
2018 will be my third year with a reading challenge, my second year of that challenge being largely Book Riot's #ReadHarder, and my second year committing to #ReadFewerWhiteDudes, too. Some of the prompts this year lined right up with books I have been trying to read, which is v nice. It also, though, had way more comic/graphic novel and mystery/crime prompts than I am interested in, so I just decided to shrug off a few of those.
I noticed that some geniuses I follow on the internet (Hanif Abdurraqib, Eve Ewing, Clint Smith, Kaveh Akbar, and Danez Smith) are writers and poets, and so I am going to read their new work. I don't read enough poetry, in general, so I googled around for weeks, trying to find a 2018 poetry reading challenge to throw in the mix. The League of Canadian Poets had a 2017 challenge, but I have not found a 2018 update, so I just snagged a few of their #LCPchallenge prompts. This is my 2018 Reading Challenge, and I can do what I want. Glad we cleared that up.
In my theological reading, I can always do better to prioritize marginalized and minoritized voices, and I'm lacking in queer theology by queer folks; because God loves me, an ELCA colleague has written and compiled a bunch of theology by trans folks for publication in 2018. You, too, can pre-order Transforming. Thanks, Austen!
Additionally, Jonathan and I are heading to Europe for our honeymoon this summer (woohoo!) and someone (Ashley Ford?) once recommended reading fiction set where you're going as a way to get excited, so I picked novels set in the Italian Riviera and in Lyon, France in anticipation of the parts of our trip we'll spend in those regions.
2018 is going to be a year of all sorts of things, and joyous reading is going to be chief among them, for me.
What are you reading this year? Please tell me all about it. Send me a link to your list, if you have one.
BOOKS, Y'ALL!