Octavia Butler changed speculative fiction with her path-breaking novels, including the best-selling novel Kindred, which has been adapted for television and as a graphic novel. She was born on June 22, 1947, and would be 77 today if she were still with us.
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Throughout her career, Butler won multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, taught regularly at the Clarion Writers Workshop, received a MacArthur Fellowship, and even has an asteroid named after her.
While I can’t tell you when I first learned of Octavia Butler, I first read one of her books in the 2010s. I was on a mission to read classic science fiction. After working my way through some Asimov, Heinlein, and Bradbury, I found a digital audio copy of Fledgling through my library.
I’ve consumed a lot of vampire stories in my life, both written and visual, but Fledglingremains one of my absolute favorites. Rather than being evil villains, Butler’s vampires live symbiotically with humans. I love the way she reimagines vampire mythology and humanizes these creatures we normally see as monsters.
Kindred, Butler’s only other standalone novel, is her most well-known book. It is a haunting portrayal of what people will do to survive and an ode to the resilience of Black Americans. I rarely feel that a book should be required reading for everyone. But Kindred is one of the few that I strongly believe every adult in America should read at least once.
I still have a lot of Octavia Butler to read. My next novel will be Parable of the Sower, the first book in the duology pictured above. I picked up the box set from 7 Stories Press back in January, and today is the perfect day to start reading it.
Interested in picking up one of Octavia Butler’s novels? I’ve put together a list of her novels:
I know a million people post Illumicrate unboxing videos and photos, but I recently got my first box, so I couldn’t resist. Especially because a spot for the monthly Illumicrate box opened up for me on the same day my federal student loans were discharged through the PSLF program!
(In case you’re not familiar with Illumicrate, it’s a monthly subscription box that includes a speculative novel and other book-themed items.)
The theme for March is “Fantasea.” I’ll cut right to the chase: I love everything that came in this box! I haven’t had a chance to read the book (Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan), but it has kelpies and sea dragons, so I’m sold.
This gorgeous edition of Fathomfolk absolutely blew me away. Beautiful books is a big part of the reason I joined the Illumicrate waiting list, but the photos I saw didn’t prepare me for how exquisite this book is.
From the endpapers to the case art to the foiled dust jacket to the sprayed edges, this book is a work of art. It’s so pretty I can hardly stand it. The case art shown in the photo above is by Danlin Zhang.
Other Bookish Items
The Fantasea box came with four additional items: a mythical sea creatures book pot, a Fathomfolk-themed plant pot, and a kraken-themed book jacket, and transparent sticky notes.
All four items are pretty spectacular, but the two pots are my favorite. I love house plants, and have about a dozen cuttings waiting for pots right now. The plant pot has a kelpie on it, and will definitely get a place of honor somewhere among my other house plants.
Apparently there’s a whole series of ceramic book-shaped pots. I can easily see this becoming my next obsession. Prices on the secondary market seem high, but honestly, these things are so cool it’s kind of understandable.
The book jacket will be useful for keeping the corners of hardcovers nice and crisp while traveling (or even just carrying books around the house). And one can never have enough sticky notes! Never! I was surprised at how easy it is to write on these with a regular old ball point pen. I can definitely see myself using them to take notes while I read.
I’m already looking forward to next month’s box. In the meantime, I’ll be curled up on my couch with a mug of tea and this gorgeous copy of Fathomfolk!
A neon sign in the window at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, WA. I should have asked them where they got it when I was there, because I want one.
The traditional number-of-books-read-based reading goal is meaningless as a measure of how much you actually read in a year. There. I said it.
On the surface, this kind of reading goal seems like a useful way to encourage more reading. And for some people, it does. For others, it’s nothing but a source of stress. The Goodreads Challenge isn’t supposed to be a competition. But far too many people turn it into one and make others feel bad about how many books they did or did not read.
And what counts as a book, anyway? A novel like War and Peace, certainly. What about a picture book? Does that count? What about an issue of a literary magazine? A graphic novel? A poetry chapbook? What about an omnibus that collects several novels together in one volume? Is that one book, or multiple?
Most people would agree that picture books, poetry collections, and graphic novels are books, but these books are likely to be significantly shorter than many novels. Something like a literary magazine is technically not a “book” because it’s a periodical, but many issues of lit mags are just as long as many novels.
Is it “cheating” to read ten Dr. Seuss books on December 31 because you’re ten books short of your goal? If you read and track single issues of comics, is counting those toward “books read” a cop out? Should you just log the collected edition instead?
It was these questions, along with my growing concerns over the way Amazon uses Goodreads data and the way the site has “enabled the weaponization of displeasure,”* that led me to stop using Goodreads partway into 2021.
Goodbye, Goodreads
Tracking my reading had become a chore that I didn’t look forward to. More than that, the reading challenge made reading itself feel like a chore—something I had to do instead of something I enjoyed doing.
I’m far from the first person who’s felt like this. In an article for Book Riot from 2019, Stacey Megally describes how the Goodreads Reading Challenge stressed her out and sucked the joy out of reading. She asked, “When did I start prioritizing hitting a number over blissfully wandering inside a story—new or old—that I love?”
When I made the decision to abandon my reading challenge in 2021, I felt relieved. I felt free. Suddenly it didn’t matter how I tracked my comic reading or whether I read Narwhal and Jelly for the fifth time.
Only, it had never mattered. I only thought it did because of an arbitrary, ill-defined goal I set for myself out of some misguided notion that I should because I am a Book Person, and that’s what Book People do.
A sidewalk painting is in front of a Barnes & Noble in Pittsburgh, PA.
Goals can be motivating as long as they are achievable and realistic. Most people I know who set reading goals do so because they want to read more, or maintain their current level of reading. Others set goals to expand their horizons or learn more about a certain topic. Basing your reading goals on the number of books you read doesn’t necessarily translate into reading more or expanding your reading horizons.
That doesn’t mean we have to abandon reading goals altogether. Here are some alternatives that may help you get the results you want.
Alternate Reading Goal #1: Habit Tracking
This sounds so simple, but if you aren’t satisfied with how often you read, the only way to read more is to, well, make the time to read more. So ff you want to read more, set a time-based goal or a habit goal.
Two options for this are to read for a certain amount of time each day or week (one of those timer bookmarks they make for kids might be useful here) or to create a habit goal where you aim to read on a certain number of days every week (or month, or year).
I have both a habit goal and a time based goal. I strive to read for at least twenty minutes every day. Most days, I exceed that. Some days, I barely hit it. Other days, the only reading I do is listening to an audiobook while I fall asleep.
I don’t use a timer, because for me the point is not to be perfect or exact. The point is to encourage myself to carve out a little time each day for my favorite leisure activity. I do use the Finch self care app to track my reading days.
This hybrid habit/time-based goal helps me reduce mindless scrolling and keep reading as a focus in my life.
Alternate Reading Goal #2: Read Outside Your Comfort Zone
If you want to read outside your comfort zone, try joining a prompt-based reading challenge.
Prompt-based reading challenges ask you to read books that meet certain criteria. “Read a book by a trans author” is one example of a prompt. Book Riot’s Read Harder challenge is the most popular prompt-based challenge, but there are many, many more.
General challenges like Book Riot’s and Popsugar’s will ask you to read books from many different genres, different formats, and with a wide range of criteria. Seasonal challenges and book bingo challenges also abound.
These smaller, more focused options may be a better fit if you have more time during some seasons than others or want to focus on a specific genre. Instagram is a great place to find these. I also detailed a few challenges that work well for speculative fiction in this post.
If you can’t find a challenge that meets your needs, you can always create one yourself from scratch or cobble together a list of prompts from multiple challenges. Don’t forget to check in with your local library; many public libraries also host their own reading challenges beyond the traditional summer reading!
Alternate Reading Goal #3: A TBR Goal
If you want to focus on reading books you already own or have wanted to read forever but never get around to, set a TBR-based goal.
On the surface, this kind of goal may seem similar to the type of number-based challenges I wrote this post to push back against. But it doesn’t have to be!
The bottom two shelves in this photo are my TBR shelves. The top shelf holds my writing books, some of which I have also not yet read. I won’t get through all of these this year, but I’ll get through some of them!
There are a number of ways to approach a TBR-based goal that don’t involve setting yourself an arbitrary number of books to read in a given time period. For example, you could set aside three months where you commit to only reading books on your TBR shelf (whether that is a physical or digital shelf is irrelevant).
Or, you could commit to reading three books (or two, or one) from your list for every book you pick up that wasn’t on your list. You could write down the names of all the books on your TBR shelf on pieces of paper and put them in a jar, then pull one to determine your next read.
Bribery Works, Too
A goal (or rule, I suppose) I’ve used in the past is that if I want to buy a new book, I have to read two books I already own but haven’t read yet. I do set some exceptions for this rule, mostly for new books in series I want to snag first printings of. It’s been a few years since I’ve done this, but it’s worked well to motivate me to finally read books that have been sitting unread for years.
It’s also a nice way to curb excessive book spending and a great time to assess whether or not I’m ever actually going to read the Umberto Eco book I’ve been lugging around since high school and still haven’t read (maybe this is the year?).
This year, my TBR-based goal is to read at least one book from my physical TBR pile each month. Small or large doesn’t matter, and reading two books from the TBR pile in January doesn’t excuse me from having to read one in February! If I manage to stick to this, I should be able to knock off at least twelve books from my TBR while still allowing myself freedom to read other things that interest me.
Conclusion
Reading you do for pleasure and leisure should never be a chore. It should enrich your life, give you an escape from actual chores, and teach you more about yourself and the world. Your reading goal should help you with that, not make you feel bad about yourself.
Perhaps setting a number-based reading goal works for you. If you find yourself dreading opening Goodreads so you don’t see how far behind you are in your reading challenge, maybe it’s time to try something different.
I’ve only listed three alternative options here, but there are so many more—number of pages, spine widths all measured together, colors that appear on the cover. I’m sure you can find something that inspires you to read more and read further without stressing you out.
* From “Let’s Rescue Book Lovers From This Online Hellscape” by Maris Kreizman in the New York Times
What are your reading goals for 2024? Share them with me on Instagram and Bluesky!
