High Anxiety

Building a TBR List was supposed to be fun

Before we begin…

Do you make a TBR list for every new year or do you carry over whatever running list you’ve been keeping? How do books find their way on to your list of books “To Be Read?”

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Anticipation, Anxiety, Fear, then… Hope, and (Possibly) a New Annual Ritual 

Gifted with an unexpected set of open days over the New Year’s weekend, I decided to use them to follow up on my plan to be more intentional about reading in the coming year. At first, I felt giddy with the sense of possibility as I always do when I walk into a library or a bookstore. Then anxiety rushed in. 

I looked over various lists I’ve been keeping over the years, the books you all have been reading and recommending over the past year, and titles that intrigued me as I learned about them from bookish folks I enjoy hanging out with online and in real life. I wanted to read them all. I knew there were others waiting in the coming weeks for me to discover or rediscover them. Anticipation gave way to that unmistakable tightness in my chest as I thought about all the books I wanted to read, might never read, might feel stupid if I didn’t read because everyone else loved them so much. I had a severe case of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). 

Me after trying to build my TBR list

The exercise of making a target book list for the year, something I’ve never done before, was supposed to be fun, not anxiety-inducing. Then it hit me: the list itself wasn’t the problem. It was that making the list forced me to confront my monkey brain that wants to swing from idea to idea, grab book after book, and stuff it into my consciousness while reaching for yet another. I had to confront, too, the opposite forces working within me: the yearning to push myself into genres, voices, and subjects that are new and important and the desire to sink into worlds that promise comfort or amusement. Mostly I had to confront the idea that I have limited time for books and for the rest of my life not one day of which is guaranteed to me. 

In other words, my anxiety was not about the books (which reminds me of this hysterical video “It’s Not About the Nail” which has nothing to do with books and everything to do with my easily-distracted monkey mind). I was simply in the throes of every-day, garden-variety fear of death. The act of writing a forward-looking list of books, the things I love less than my people and my dogs but more than just about everything else, reminded me that I’ll never do all the things I want to do, see all I want to see, understand everything I want to understand. Choosing one course means turning away from another. Oliver Burkeman reminded me and thousands of other readers of this in his book, 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life – but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever…”Any finite life – even the best one you could possibly imagine – is therefore a matter of continuously waving goodbye to possibility.” - Oliver Burkeman, 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. 

I knew this. We all know this. Yet the reminder always comes with a pang. I felt that pang acutely when I came upon that quote in Burkeman’s book last year along with many others I jotted down and saved for when I was sure to forget the obvious. I shared “4000 Weeks” with you last year and then, apparently, forgot about some of its more important ideas. I took a little break from my evolving TBR list to re-read some of my notes. I remember appreciating this book so much because there were no productivity hacks, only a calm steady reminder that our time is limited and, what’s more, we don’t really know when our time will be up. Our mortality is with us always. Our challenge is to make peace with that and live the life we have as well as we can. 

Making my TBR list for 2023 became a kind of proxy for the deeper thinking that I need and want to do about the life I am trying to build for myself, even now, as I head further into what is, if I’m lucky, “the last third” of my life. I’ve spent a lot of the first two thirds battering myself for not being all the things I wanted to be as a mother, a writer, a friend, a reader, a daughter, a sister, a useful person in a complicated and often scary world. I have, as Burkeman described in his book, spent a lot of that time trying to impose a kind of order and control based on the idea that if I just managed my time well enough I could be all those things at once to everyone all the time. I often failed to consider how much of what brought me to this point was outside my control. My focus was on a constantly moving endpoint, a future I’d never reach. I want to spend more of my days experiencing what Burkeman calls “deep time, that sense of timeless time which depends on forgetting abstract and plunging back into the vividness of reality instead.” 

Once I understood this, making this list of books began to feel hopeful and, oddly, calming. It was a little like spending time with myself, reflecting on where I’ve been, where I want to go, what I’ve learned so far. Knowing that my list contains too many books to read in one year no longer stopped me from listing them; each choice was an opportunity to reflect on why it was important to me and to consider its value in the life I want to keep building in the time that I have. I will not confuse the plan - which lays out my aspirations  – with a yardstick to measure my progress. I look forward to encountering the books I’ve listed or the ones that come my way from other sources. I will try very hard to apply what I’m gaining from this process to the rest of my life. There are a few things that will help me build the kind of life I want and many things that could lead me away from it. I will try equally hard to live deeply no matter what happens. 

If you want to check out the list I’ve got so far, here you go: Betsy’s (Aspirational) Reading List 2023.  Feel free to comment on it or recommend anything you think I should be thinking about. Who knows? You may know better than I do what I should be reading this year. I can tell you that this one reflects an attempt to include more work by Indigenous writers, LGBTQ+ authors, authors of color, books recommended by this community, books recommended by my fellow #Bookstackers, fiction by Korean authors, fiction by Italian writers that is both translated and in the original Italian. I will be reading certain San Diego authors so I can share them with you. I have two monster books on there that I promised myself I would try to read before I die: Ulyssess and Don Quixote. I hope to do at least one of them. I have it in mind to try to revisit George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf. In two cases I have listed modern takes on older novels and plan to read both the new and the old. There are more works of nonfiction and memoir in this list than I expected. Finally: I’m looking for good examples of Sherlock Holmes stories written by others. 

I’ve never had a New Year’s ritual but I’m thinking of making the building of my yearly TBR list into one, a chance to encounter my hopes and fears and then grounding myself as I step into whatever time remains. 

Do you have a ritual you use to launch yourself into the New Year?

Two Links to Attract Your Own “Monkey Mind”

Weird Old Bookfinder came to me from my new friends at Mastadon ( look me up at @eg_marro@masthead.social). If you are looking for the obscure or just looking for a way to waste a little time on something fun, check it out. For example, I typed in “New Hampshire,” and this popped up. 

We All Die Alone is NOT a downer. In fact, I am still laughing. This gem of a short film was directed by Jonathan Hammond, two-time Emmy winner who lives, writes, and directs in San Diego. Written by Hammon and Ryan Roach, the film opens with two gangs and a hapless mediator which lead quickly to a standoff complicated by the bodily needs, libidos, and quirks of those holding the guns. Will love survive? Will bladders pop? What happens when killers just want a little more outside their jobs? Click below to find out. 

#Bookstackers News

The Wednesday before Christmas I introduced you to the #Bookstackers, a group of which I’m a proud member. As you put together your list of reads for the coming year, check out the “Queer Your Year” reading challenge from Laura Sackton of Books and Bakes. Mike from Books on GIF answers the question we always want to know: What’s in your book stack?

Queer Your Year. Laura Sackton of Books and Bakes launches 2023 with a fun reading challenge that not only provides some excellent reading suggestions but awards prizes every month to those who participate. You’ll find 48 different prompts to help you find books you may have missed otherwise and even if you only read one of the books for one of the prompts, you still have multiple chances to win. Learn more by clicking below.

Volume 2, No. 52: Introducing the 2023 Queer Your Year Challenge!

What’s in your book stack?

Sometimes one stack isn’t enough. The twin stacks rising beside the bed of Mike from Books on GIF were built with love and care from many sources. Here’s the provenance of these books with some sources you may or may not already know. 

“ Here's what's in Books on GIF's stack, which recently had to be split in two because it was getting too tall. Some books are new. Many have been here for years. It's primarily a mix of new and second-hand books impulse-purchased at independent bookstores across Brooklyn ("Dune Messiah" at Unnameable Books) and Manhattan ("City of Night" at Strand Book Store). Others were acquired through subscriptions to indie publishers like Two Dollar Radio ("The Gloaming" and the three books below it) and Fitzcarraldo Editions (the ones with the solid blue covers, I'm obsessed with that design). "Kismet," "That's Debatable" and "My Life of Crime" were bought at author events. "The Little Friend" was snagged at a library sale in Montauk. "The Color Purple" and "The Ballad of the Sad Café" were ordered via this amazing Etsy store. The Cookie Mueller book and "Stamped From the Beginning" came from Bookshop.org. "Lee & Elaine" and "A Grain of Wheat" came from thrift stores via Amazon.”

Share us your book stack

Got a stack of books growing somewhere in your house? Snap a picture and send it in along with a few words about how that stack came to be built, your hopes and dreams for it, or what it makes you feel when you cast your eye over those spines. 

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That’s it for the first week of Spark in 2023. And of course, always let me know how you are and what you’re reading. If there’s an idea, book, or question you’d like to see in an upcoming issue of Spark, let us know!

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Ciao for now. 

Gratefully,

Betsy

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through on any of the books mentioned here and make a purchase.

P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…Flashback to the the early days of 2016 when so much seemed possible and the sky was winking at us

Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”

What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.

Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone  -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed. 

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