r o b o t m i n i o n

2010: The Year in Books

I've been using the Kindle (and occasionally the Kindle app on the iPhone and iPad) to read since April of 2009. Other than cook books and knitting books, I have not bought or read any paper books since then. Last January I noticed the trend that since I had started using my Kindle, the amount I was reading increased quite a bit. I use Goodreads to keep track of what I read, so I was able to actually see the pattern emerge. Since 2010 was the first full year of exclusively, electronic reading, I decided to take a closer look at the trends of the past year. A lot of my friends have received Kindles for Christmas this year, so I hope this will be interesting to them.

Overall findings:

Number of books read in 2010: 48

This was interesting because my goal was 50 books for 2010. I almost made it. I'm sure if I had read less 600+ pagers and more smaller books, I would have met the goal, but this was reading purely for pleasure.

Total number of pages read: 20922 (Caveat: probably approximate and according to Goodreads)

Total amount of money spent on Kindle books: $457.88

My husband was particularly interested in this figure. Prior to purchasing the Kindle (a present from him) I was primarily a library patron. This is because I don't feel the need to own books, once I've read them and also because we live in a row house and space is at a premium. When we moved here from Columbus, I was disappointed by Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library. That might not be fair, because Columbus Metropolitan Library is continuously rated as one of the best in the country, and since early 2009, Enoch Pratt has made some very significant improvements like implementing vacation holds in their online system (though their renewal policy is still draconian).

I typically try to buy books at the $9.99 price point or below (though that has gotten more and more difficult), but as you can see from some of my purchases, there are times that instant gratification gets the best of me.

Most expensive book purchased: $15.37 A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks (Purchased just before we left for London because I wanted to read it while we were there and it had just come out. My Kindle isn't the global model. This was one of the top ten books I read last year, so I'm still happy with the purchase, though the price had gone down by the time we returned to the states.)

Least expensive book(s): $0 The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Steig Larsson and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

I read the first two Larsson books and found out that the final book had already come out in Europe and that it wouldn't be available in the US until May. What a stupid business decision Knopf. I would have gladly paid for the book had it been available. I didn't feel particularly guilty about downloading this from one of the many sites it was available from because Larsson unfortunately never lived to see the success of his best-selling novels and according to multiple articles online, the profits from his books are going to his family against his wishes, rather than his long-time partner who helped him create the books.

I read The Hunger Games last January and couldn't wait to get my hands on the sequel. The Hunger Games was being hugely hyped on Amazon at the time and is a very engrossing read. I was disappointed to see that I would have to wait months for Catching Fire to be available as a Kindle download. Did the publisher (Scholastic) really think that one through? Again, I would have been happy to shell out money to read the book on my Kindle, if only it was available. I reserved Catching Fire from the library, actually checked it out and then downloaded the PDF to my Kindle. While I'm not sure that was exactly the most ethical thing I could have done, my conscious felt better.

Here's the complete spreadsheet tracking my 2010 reading, in case anyone cares.

 

Books I've Read, Part 1

A lot of people know that I love to read. I've decided to do a few posts about my reading material from 2010, but I thought I'd start with the viral BBC 100 books post. It was fun to take a close look at the list. Although I think I'm pretty well read, some of you may be shocked to find out that I've never read Jane Erye or Atonement.

 

 

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.

 

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

 

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

 

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

 

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)

 

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

 

6 The Bible

 

7 Wuthering Heights

 

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

 

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (read the first book)

 

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

 

11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

 

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

 

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

 

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

 

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

 

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

 

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

 

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

 

19 The Time Travellers Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

 

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

 

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

 

22 The Great Gatsby  F Scott Fitzgerald

 

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

 

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

 

25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

 

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

 

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 

28 Grapes of Wrath –  John Steinbeck

 

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

 

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

 

31 Anna Karenina –Leo Tolstoy

 

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

 

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (read first 3 books)

 

34 Emma – Jane Austen

 

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

 

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis  

 

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

 

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere

 

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Willaim Golden

 

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

 

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

 

42 The Da Vinci Code - dan brown

 

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabrial Garcia Marquez

 

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

 

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

 

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

 

47 Far from the Madding Crowd  - Thomas Hardy

 

48 The Handmaids Tale - Margaret Atwood

 

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

 

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

 

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martell

 

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

 

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

 

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

 

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

 

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

 

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

 

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

 

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

 

60 Love in the time of Cholera - Gabriel garcia Marquez

 

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

 

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

 

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

 

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

 

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

 

66 On the Road - Jack Kerouac

 

 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

 

 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

 

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

 

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville  

 

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

 

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker  

 

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson

 

74 Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson

 

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

 

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

 

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

 

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

 

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

 

80 Possession - AS Byatt

 

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

 

82 Cloud Atlas - Charles Mitchell

 

83 The Colour Purple - Alice Walker

 

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

 

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

 

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

 

87 Charlotte's Web - EB White

 

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

 

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle  

 

90 The Faraway Tree collection - Enid Blyton

 

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

 

92 The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint Exupery

 

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

 

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

 

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

 

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

 

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

 

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

 

99 Charlie & the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

 

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

 

Book Fair

I haven't been updating my reading list because I've been reading such crap lately. You could classify it squarely as "Escapist," because I've been reading a lot to avoid thinking about work when I'm not actually at work. Also to avoid thinking about my thesis which has a lot to do with work. The good news is that while my library card may still be warm from all of the use it's gotten in the last month or two my wallet isn't any lighter.

Here's a partial list of the extremely fluffy books I've read:
The Da Vinci Code
The Rule of Four
Good in Bed
The Devil Wears Prada
And I have the newish Anna Wintour biography waiting for me at the library

Less fluffy books include:
Cryptomicon (again, because I'd forgotten what happened)
Body of Secrets
Bowling Alone
The Creative Class (again)
Bird by Bird

There's more, but I can't remember them all right now.

I actually left Angels and Demons in the hotel room in Amsterdam with a note written in it to say that "it wasn't very good, but it's a quick read and would probably do if you needed something to read while waiting for buses or trains." Dan Brown can spin a decent, fast-paced plot, but his writing is horrendous.

The best was that when we went to the pool on Labor Day (to relax after a two-wedding weekend!) the boy's brother saw me reading The Devil Wears Prada and asked me if it was about "social and economic injustice in the fashion industry?" Someone is giving me way too much credit.

The Baroque Cycle

Last night, I finally finished The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. The series was a very satisfying read, but the last book was a little anti-climactic after the first two.

My very first semester in college, I took a weird little Honors course on Picaresque literature throughout history. I think it was one of the rare college courses where I probably read every single line of every single book. Some of the work and subsequant movies we were required to gather and watch once a week have stayed wioth me and become a sort of cultural touchstone. The movie version of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum and Warren Beatty in Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Thomas Mann's The Confessions of Felix Krull. These I can remember so much more vividly than most of what I'm supposed to be turning into my thesis literature review.

The picaresque Jack Shaftoe/Eliza portions of the book then were so much more obvious fun than the rest. I didn't really notice that until the last book either. Its just in the last book, there's so much Trial of the Pyx/Issac Newton action that everytime Jack or Eliza show up, the book seemed to go that. much. faster.

Now I feel like I have to go back and re-read Cryptonomicon. I can only remember bits and pieces of it, but I remember it being very good when I read it about four years ago. I hope that the Baroque Cycle doesn't fade that quickly.

Literary Map

Randy Cohen, aka "The Ethicist" from the New York Times, is putting together a literary map of New York. What a fantastic idea.

I remember walking around Manhattan and stumbling onto streets that I remembered from books I've read over the years. Even now, as I'm finishing up Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle Trilogy, I find myself wanting to go back to London because the city is so vivid (early 1700's London) in the books.

From the Times:

READERS ARE INVITED to submit the address of the home (or office or hangout) of a character from a novel, story, children's book or poem that is set in Manhattan. Include the title and author and the sentence or two (with page number) that provides the clue to the location. Send to The New York Times Book Review, 229 West 43rd Street, New York, N.Y., 10036, Attention: Bookmap; or e-mail to bookmap@nytimes.com. Entries are due by Wednesday, May 11. The Literary Map of Manhattan will appear in the Book Review on June 5, the Summer Reading issue, and on the Web at nytimes.com. Of course authors are encouraged to reveal the home addresses of their characters.

It would be great if they did this with a Google Maps-like satellite toggle so that you could zoom in close and get a feel for what the blocks look like. Or maybe some sort of hover for historical pictures of the area.

 

The Long Emergency

Last night we went to see James Howard Kunstler speak about his new book "The Long Emergency" in a very packed Knowlton auditorium. Kunstler was a good speaker — by which I mean he was good at being funny while delivering a lecture about the impending collapse of our society.

Kunstler's very much a critic of suburban sprawl and has extrapolated his own sort of Bowling Alone-esque theory on the collapse of society at large as indicated by unfriendly  architecture and the zoning failure of the suburbs. That's not really anything new and it's pretty close to what I believe myself. It's why I ran screaming to NYC as soon as I was out of high school and it's why I live in one of the great urban neighborhoods in the mid-west.

Kunstler's new book is all about the impending energy crisis and what will happen to the US when we finally run out of oil. Or at least get close enough to running out of oil that buying Hummers stops being a tax break. Kunstler says that the big cities will retract, people will become more dependent on agriculture and agricultural animals, and that there will be a lot of "economic losers," and those losers will be the basis for some ugly politics of fear. One might argue that's already occurring...(cough, cough, issue one in Ohio...cough cough).

My question for Kunstler is about his time line. He clearly (maybe even a little gleefully) thinks that this will happen in his lifetime and since he's no spring chicken, that means my lifetime. How long does it take for an empire to fall? How long until the Long Emergency?