Year In Review: *Ugh*, *Meh*, *Sigh*

37 out of 60.

Half. About half. Half full? Half empty?

More like half-assed.

Yeah...this reading year did not go as I imagined/planned, and that's what I get for planning in the first place --- life always points, laughs, and switches up on you.

At the beginning of the year I felt a bit confident that I could build upon my reading goals, something I've been steadily doing for the past four years, adding more books to the count and challenging myself to read more, and this year was the most I had dedicated myself to do. 60 books I was going to read and relish in for 2018 and I was going to write all the reviews, but...disappointingly I overreached, the words didn't flow, and I only got half-way in terms of my goal, GoodReads' Reading Challenge meter mocking me the entire way.

*long frustrated sigh*

So what happened? As I said, life happened and laughed at me, disrupting things, but something felt 'off' about my reading pattern in general all year long.

Should I blame the books themselves? In a way. I will say I ran into some speed bumps with a few of them and got stuck in a couple of reading ruts to where some of my choices wouldn't hold my attention for long (save for the late Kevyn Aucoin's iconic Making Faces or Lisa Eldridge's Face Paint cause oooh pretty pictures and makeup!). Also this year was a bit trying for personal reasons (hold that thought...) so my mind was kind of elsewhere. I don't know, this year I just didn't really love most of what I read, which is a strange situation for me to be in. I enjoyed a bunch of books, no doubt, but I wasn't enraptured as so few allowed me to get lost within their worlds. There were a handful of books that when I finished I looked at them and went: "why weren't you better?" others I was "meh" on, some I was re-configuring the ending in my head due to being unsatisfied with what was written (looking at you Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen). A chosen few got some eyebrow raises and left impressions on me, thus it wasn't all a trash heap. So, yeah, this year was a mixed bag.

Though this blog is in its fawn stages, and I'm allowing it to wobble on its new legs for a little while, I'm just not pleased that for it's grand debut, that I'm not keeping up with my reading goals or scribbling out reviews at a steady pace. ← And note that this criticism is the Virgo in me --- we are annoyingly hard on ourselves.

With all my frustrated sighs and ughs, I'm looking forward to a fresh new year and a fresh batch of books to read, relish in, and review. This blog is shaping up to be nice little nook for me, and with a new year brings new possibilities and challenges so hopefully 2019 will be paved with pages that will invite me right in and words to guide me along the way.

But! in the meantime let's go backwards a bit and revisit my favorites and fails of 2018!

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Aretha Franklin's homegoing was a complete circus of odd to me.

Eight long hours where a bevy of questionable men made it a mission at the pulpits to scream about Idiot Orange In Chief and other random non-Aretha related topics. Eight long hours that occupied a mixed bag of performances that (to me) failed to stir the soul, where the corpse changed costumes four times, a minister groped a pop star, who wore club gear to a funeral, that led to a former president to ogle at her...*exasperated long sigh* Eight long hours that seemed removed from its honoree, and a complete affront to a woman who was a musical legend, a deity diva whose soundtrack called and responded to a generation. From the onset, the whole affair almost seemed designed as if nobody knew who Aretha Franklin truly was.

Then again, Aretha seemed to want it that way.

This is something author David Ritz points out in the introduction for Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin, the struggle he had at getting Aretha to tell her side of the story when he wrote an early biography of hers. She was not interested, that is, unless it was on her terms. Fine. Yet, the woman loved to fabricate, spin her own fairy tales, convince herself of the what-could-be, so anything coming out of her mouth outside of singing came to be taken with showers of salt. Her protection of herself in controlling her own narrative may seem laudable. As a woman of color, not too often we're given carte blanche to our own narrative, but it does do a disservice because we never do know who the real Aretha is. This book doesn't exactly skirt from that either.