His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Last year I blogged pretty regularly about my reading, which was at least interesting to do if not to read. This year, due to some technical problems, time constraints, and a general pall of laziness, I did not keep up with it at all. I did read and I kept my database updated, but I never managed to finish a blog update. Maybe I’ve been saving up until now.
The amount I was able to read was low this year – mainly because there were a few months there when I was commuting by car, and that really cut in to my reading time. Here’s a graph:
You can clearly make out a sharp decline in reading from late May to October that corresponds to my altered commute. I originally set my goal at 120 books with an average length of 330 pages, but I ended up reading only 86 books with a 316-page average length.
While I’m not very happy with how much I read this year, I am happy, with what I read. I read 33 of Asimov’s books this year, leaving me with only 10 more to go until I’ve read all of his first 100. Unfortunately, those last 10 are pretty hard to find and regularly sell for between $70 and $200 each! I’ll try to buy one every month or two during the next year until it becomes too difficult and/or expensive to continue, at which point I’ll just start on the next 100.
I also worked on my goal of reading more of the “classics”. This year, I’ve read: The Wealth of Nations, A Moveable Feast, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, both Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics, The Great Gatsby, Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, To Kill a Mockingbird, Naked Lunch and Dante’s Divine Comedy. That’s 10 great works, and I hope to do better next year.
As for everything else, I read quite a selection of different types of books, from technical books to spy thrillers, literary criticism to humorous autobiographies. This is mainly an effect of my impatience with sameness, and if I have it available, I will always try to read something different from what I’ve read recently, and I try to keep my shelves stocked with a wide variety of reading material for that purpose.
I didn’t read any really bad books this year, amazingly; the worst was probably Joanna Russ’s Picnic on Paradise, but that was just something cheap I picked up one afternoon because I’d left my real book at home that day, and it wasn’t terrible as much as just a faddy book that hasn’t aged well.
In fact, I read a lot of really good stuff this year, in addition to those already mentioned. I read two by Nabokov, both new to me and both thoughtful gifts. I read a lot of classic crime fiction, by Fleming, Christie and Francis, and some excellent modern hard SF by Jack McDevitt. I took my first real foray into reading autobiography, with universal good result. Reading-wise, I’m very happy with 2010.
Here’s the full book list for this year:
- Isaac Asimov – Nine Tomorrows – 1-8-10 (224pp)
- Ken Schwaber – Agile Project Management with Scrum – 1-11-10 (163pp)
- Dick Francis – Knockdown – 1-19-10 (292pp)
- Isaac Asimov – I, Robot – 1-26-10 (224pp)
- Adam Smith – The Wealth of Nations – 1-29-10 (1155pp)
- Vladimir Nabokov – Speak, Memory – 2-5-10 (316pp)
- Isaac Asimov – Inside the Atom – 2-6-10 (185pp)
- Dick Francis – Dead Heat – 2-8-10 (404pp)
- Isaac Asimov – Understanding Physics – 2-19-10 (768pp)
- Alvin Toffler – Future Shock – 2-27-10 (505pp)
- Isaac Asimov – Words on the Map – 3-4-10 (274pp)
- Michael Williams – Arcady – 3-6-10 (442pp)
- Isaac Asimov – Nightfall and Other Stories – 3-7-10 (350pp)
- Ernest Hemingway – A Movable Feast – 3-9-10 (211pp)
- Isaac Asimov – The Bloodstream – 3-13-10 (212pp)
- Michael Williams – Allamanda – 3-19-10 (436pp)
- Isaac Asimov – The End of Eternity – 3-21-10 (255pp)
- Alice Sebold – The Lovely Bones – 3-22-10 (328pp)
- Isaac Asimov – The Genetic Code – 3-24-10 (187pp)
- Lewis Thomas – The Lives of a Cell – 3-26-10 (153pp)
- Isaac Asimov – Atom – 3-30-10 (319pp)
- Ken Kesey – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – 4-7-10 (281pp)
- Isaac Asimov – The Clock We Live On – 4-8-10 (158pp)
- Vladimir Nabokov – The Original of Laura – 4-9-10 (278pp)
- William C. Boyd – Races and People – 4-11-10 (189pp)
- Alton Brown – I’m Just Here For More Food – 4-13-10 (335pp)
- Isaac Asimov – Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright – 4-15-10 (221pp)
- Ariana Franklin – Mistress of the Art of Death – 4-17-10 (384pp)
- Isaac Asimov – The Twelve Frights of Christmas – 4-21-10 (263pp)
- Robert Masello – Robert’s Rules of Writing – 4-22-10 (224pp)
- Isaac Asimov – Banquets of the Black Widowers – 4-25-10 (223pp)
- Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi – Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build – 4-26-10 (406pp)
- Shalom Auslander – Foreskin’s Lament – 4-28-10 (310pp)
- Isaac Asimov – Far as Human Eye Could See – 5-1-10 (302pp)
- Dick Francis – Twice Shy – 5-3-10 (344pp)
- Isaac Asimov – Nightfall – 5-5-10 (339pp)
- Lewis Thomas – The Medusa and the Snail – 5-8-10 (175pp)
- Isaac Asimov – A Short History of Biology – 5-11-10 (182pp)
- David A. Price – The Pixar Touch – 5-13-10 (308pp)
- Isaac Asimov – The World of Carbon – 5-15-10 (178pp)
- Aristotle – Ethics – 6-4-10 (383pp)
- Isaac Asimov – The Rest of the Robots – 6-5-10 (223pp)
- Dick Francis – Bonecrack – 6-6-10 (222pp)
- Isaac Asimov – Of Time, Space, and Other Things – 6-9-10 (223pp)
- F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby – 6-15-10 (159pp)
- Isaac Asimov – The Dark Ages – 6-19-10 (256pp)
- Ian Fleming – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – 6-19-10 (190pp)
- Stephen H. Dole – Planets for Man – 6-23-10 (242pp)
- Kathy Reichs – Bones to Ashes – 6-26-10 (310pp)
- Dan Abnett – Ravenor – The Omnibus – 7-10-10 (891pp)
- Isaac Asimov – The Double Planet – 7-11-10 (159pp)
- David Hume – An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding – 7-16-10 (131pp)
- Isaac Asimov – Through a Glass, Clearly – 7-17-10 (124pp)
- Agatha Christie – Five Complete Miss Marple Novels – 7-29-10 (650pp)
- Isaac Asimov – The Hugo Winners — Volumes I & II – 8-9-10 (849pp)
- Ian Fleming – The Man with the Golden Gun – 8-11-10 (182pp)
- Terry M. Johnson – Growing Up Riparian – 8-16-10 (208pp)
- Isaac Asimov – Words from History – 8-20-10 (265pp)
- Alberto Manguel – A Reader on Reading – 9-3-10 (308pp)
- Isaac Asimov – The Hugo Winners — Volume 3 – 9-13-10 (603pp)
- Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird – 9-18-10 (284pp)
- Isaac Asimov – Soviet Science Fiction – 9-22-10 (189pp)
- Jennifer Traig – Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood – 9-25-10 (246pp)
- Isaac Asimov – Tomorrow’s Children – 10-2-10 (431pp)
- William Seward Burroughs – Naked Lunch – 10-12-10 (299pp)
- Isaac Asimov – More Soviet Science Fiction – 10-15-10 (190pp)
- James D. Watson – The Double Helix – 10-19-10 (143pp)
- Isaac Asimov – Quick and Easy Math – 10-20-10 (180pp)
- Jack McDevitt – Deepsix – 10-24-10 (508pp)
- Joanna Russ – Picnic on Paradise – 10-30-10 (157pp)
- Isaac Asimov – Is Anyone There? – 11-2-10 (320pp)
- Jack McDevitt – Chindi – 11-5-10 (511pp)
- Isaac Asimov – To the Ends of the Universe – 11-6-10 (141pp)
- Jack McDevitt – Omega – 11-10-10 (493pp)
- Johannes Mario Simmel – The Berlin Connection – 11-15-10 (512pp)
- Jack McDevitt – Odyssey – 11-19-10 (423pp)
- Isaac Asimov – The Near East – 11-22-10 (277pp)
- Jack McDevitt – Cauldron – 11-24-10 (351pp)
- Philip K. Dick – Counter Clock World – 11-29-10 (218pp)
- Bernard Jaffe – Michelson and the Speed of Light – 12-1-10 (197pp)
- Dick Francis – 10 LB. Penalty – 12-3-10 (306pp)
- Robert A. Heinlein – Friday – 12-9-10 (357pp)
- Aristotle – Politics – 12-17-10 (320pp)
- William King – Ragnar’s Claw – 12-22-10 (266pp)
- Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy – 12-25-10 (492pp)
- David Gerrold – Jumping Off the Planet – 12-27-10 (281pp)
Next year, I’m going to go back to the goal of 120, 330-page books. The book length part might be hard to keep up, but now that I’m back on the bus, I think I’ll be able to read the books.
Consider this in lieu of a new year’s post.