Month: January 2025

2024: The Year in Podcasts

While I’ve always loved having a documentation of the books I’m reading, podcasts have been a notable force shaping my consciousness for years. This year I want to capture the listens in a post, a bookmark of sorts, that I can look back on and remember a texture of this year.

And, while it doesn’t need to be said, I will make it visible that books and podcasts (easily tracked, measured) were not the main weather system of my year. I spent 5 juicy hours each month in four gatherings with my story/somatics community, plus many more hours interacting on our loamy Mighty Network. (The Loam is a large part of my year.) Ayla Nereo albums were the only music that accompanied me on my drive east. A blessed Fairy Friendship with nearly-daily Marco Polos. The Mountain Lion. The story of Root Living. Relationships with the more-than-human world. Connection with my widest, most loving self (also, The Great Mother). Etc. Read more

2024: The Year in Books

Update on March 2, 2025: I recently learned of StoryGraphs, an alternative to Goodreads, and that Goodreads is owned by Amazon! StoryGraphs was founded and built by Nadia Odunayo, a Black British woman who slowly brought her vision to life. Her platform lets you import from Goodreads, and I like the specificity of recs (one feature, for example: you can filter to avoid books with specific content, which is slick!).

I made a profile on StoryGraphs and will be using that in 2025 to document my reading. Check it out for yourself and see what you think!

 

Here’s what I read in 2024 on Goodreads.

Since joining the site, I have participated in their “Reading Challenge” each year, where you select a numerical amount in January that you want to read by the end of the year, as I like keeping a record of what I read. I’d have to look back to see at what point I stopped sharing the total # of books read here; the number is irrelevant to me.

While this has been my view for a while, last year I selected “1” as my 2024 Reading Challenge goal on this website, to more closely represent this Inner Truth: it’s about the experience, not the measuring of the experience.

As in, person A could read 30 books this year, and each is a slog that they force themself to finish. This takes a lot of effort (as there wasn’t delight in the process), draining life-force and using up life-hours the person could have been enjoying something they actually like.

Person B could read 20 books this year, 15 books that some part of them thinks they “should” read, in order to be perceived a certain way by others. And 5 books required by some certificate or education degree, chosen by an institution or singular teacher.

Person C could read 5 books this year, each juicy and life-giving. Those 5 could be read in exactly Right Timing, reaching for the book exactly when it feels aligned, going at the pace that feels right in their body, being completely in the experience of reading while reading, (not finishing to finish). You get the idea.

A measurement of one piece of an experience does not tell us the whole experience. Read more