The year is up, and although I didn’t meet my goal of 52, I am still happy with the time I managed to devote to reading. A few major life shifts happened in the end of 2009, and I allowed myself to fall behind. I probably could have found a few more days to sit down and hammer through a few short books, but the goal was to have reading retake its place in the forefront of my activities rather than just trying to meet a goal. I’m satisfied that I’ve done that, which is why I’ve gone with a more ambitious goal in the new year. The full 2009 list is here. The 2010 list is here.
A few stats from 2009:
46 books read
1 non-fiction
10 Canadian
16 published after 2005
9 published before I was born
6 read in a single day (1 day for each)
16 more than 400 pages
16,750 pages (approx, and with font size variations not taken into account)
Top Five Books:
1. The Tin Drum, Günter Grass, 1959 (739p)
2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz, 2007 (352p)
3. You Shall Know Our Velocity!, David Eggers, 2003 (416p)
4. Galore, Michael Crummy, 2009 (333p)
5. Blue Boy, Rakesh Satyal, 2009 (268p)
Books that most influenced me as a writer:
1. You Shall Know Our Velocity!, David Eggers, 2003 (416p)
2. Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon, 1995 (368p)
3. Black Swan Green, David Mitchell, 2006 (293p)
4. Finnie Walsh, Stephen Galloway, 2000 (208p)
5. Blow-Up, and Other Stories, Julio Cortázar, 1967 (277p)
Strangest (but still great) reads:
1. The Magus, John Fowles, 1965 (668p)
2. House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski, 2000 (656p)
E-Books read on a screen:
1. The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown, 2009 (528p)
2. Little Brother, Cory Doctorow, 2009 (384p)
3. Makers, Cory Doctorow, 2009 (416p)
Poorly written books I read because I started the series as a teenager and felt I should finish after I found the second to last in the series in a hotel in Chile:
1. Phantom, Terry Goodkind, 2006 (673p)
2. Confessor, Terry Goodkind, 2008 (608p)
Did you read anything great in 2009? Have a reading list of your own to share? Post it in the comments.
So glad you read and liked (or, well, were influenced by — I guess you didn’t say whether you liked it) Black Swan Green. That was the book I was reading as we started TWS and one of my top books of 2008.
I read 37 books in 2009, and was not as inspired as I was by my choices in 2008, but the stand-outs this year were:
Dave Eggers – What is the What (oral history novel)
Zoe Heller – What was she thinking? (fiction – I also read her new novel, The Believers, this year, but it wasn’t as seductive and sly)
Derek Jensen – Resistance (environmental/social justice nonfiction, 2nd volume in a pair called Endgame)
Marilynne Robinson – Gilead
Today I read my first book of 2010: David Carr’s Year of the Gun. I recommend it! I think it is a very interesting book to read as a writer: Carr is a NYTimes journalist, and he turns his journalistic skills on his own past as a crack addict.
I’ve read all of David Mitchell’s books now, and although I think Cloud Atlas was his best, I was happy to see a stylistic departure in Black Swan Green. I really enjoyed it.
I had forgotten that I wanted to buy What is the What on an Amazon gift certificate I recieved. Thanks for the reminder!