literary nadir

It's hard to believe that in all of 2018, in an entire year that once again contained twelve months full of approximately 30 days each, I managed to read all of three books.  Three as in 3.  Three as in one every four months.  Three as in approximately zero.  It's pathetic.

I still like to read, and read a lot, but when I travel for work, when I sit on an airplane where I have the time, I tend to read magazines.  The other day I took The God of Small Things to India – as appropriate a book for the trip as there can be – but brought it back unopened.  The Economist was interesting, though, and Bohemian Rhapsody spectacular.

Anyway, here's what I read in 2018:

• I bought La Uruguaya by Pedro Mairal twice: once by chance in Oviedo when I strolled through town after a long conference and then with much difficulty online when I lost the first copy on my trip to Salt Lake a month later.  Not much of a contest, but this was my book of the year.  A bored writer with more dirty secrets than he lets on takes the Buquebus from Buenos Aires to Montevideo to pick up the dollars that his books earned him abroad.  And what's with the girl he met at a writers' workshop a few months earlier?  A quick and enjoyable read even with my limited grasp of Spanish.
• Anything by John McPhee is worth buying.  He can turn weeks of seeming immobility into gripping stories.  In Draft No. 4 he expounds a bit on the process.
• The only thing that I recall from The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017 by Laura Furman (Ed.) is that the woman selling me the book at the wonderful Kepler's Books near near Stanford was excited the 2018 issue was only weeks from being published.  There's not a single story I remember.

2019, despite the mishap on the way to India, shapes up better than last year.  I've already finished two books.  It can only get better.