I highly recommend reading at the local diner while you wait for your omelette and hash browns. (Also, this book is fantastic.)

It’s impossible for me not to capture my 30th year through the 30 books I read. Time felt as though it passed in chapter increments. I didn’t read every book at the same pace, of course. Like time itself, some read faster, and some read slower. I am at the mercy of the plot, the prose, the genre, the subject matter—whatever it may be. To some degree, the book decides how quickly you read it. I like that it’s not all in my control.

When I reflect on my first year of a new decade, I think not only of the worlds both fictional and real in the books I read, but also each of the places I pored over the pages. There was Leesa Cross-Smith’s lyrical novel Half-Blown Rose, which I read while flying around Europe on our honeymoon, just as the book’s protagonist Vincent traveled around Europe, rediscovering herself amid ruptures in her life back home. Reading Red, White & Royal Blue in Washington, D.C., a choice that felt cornily appropriate. Finishing T Kira Madden’s haunting, searing memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, at the local vegan restaurant this fall as mist fell outside, a foreboding reminder (when you live in the Midwest, anyway) that it would soon become snow.

Shoutout to this bookmark for getting me through it all.

Even as I kept my focus on reading 30 books for my 30th year (and I am nothing if not competitive with myself), I found it easier to slow down, to exist, to just be, at the pace of whatever book I was reading. My first book of the year, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, set that standard perfectly. It’s the kind of book you don’t want to read more than a chapter of in one sitting (although the chapters read more like vignettes). Rich with description, scenery, and reverence for the planet, the book is a beautiful blend of personal narrative, nature writing, and exploration of Indigenous ways of being, it reads like a devotional (the queer author and astrologer Jeanna Kadlec brilliantly described it as such in a tweet after starting Braiding Sweetgrass).

The book, again, decides how quickly you read it, to some degree; the reader is at its direction. And frankly, I trust that the book I’m reading at any given moment knows better than me anyway, knows what I need from it at that moment. I’ve struggled since law school to conceptualize and verbalize what hobbies are, and what hobbies I enjoy, in the way that focusing nearly all of your energy for multiple years on one thing can do to you. But, 30 books later, I can once again say that reading is a hobby, a ritual almost, for me. And that feels a lot like coming home, finally. Coming home to myself once again, in year 30 and now into year 31 and beyond.