BookFinder.com Journal

I’ve been keeping an online reading list for several years now. Here’s my annual summary, inspired by Jessamyn West’s annual end-of-year reading indexes.

number of books read in 2007: 120
number of books read in 2006: 103
number of books read in 2005: 103
number of books read in 2004: 80
number of books read in 2003: 100
number of books read in 2002: 103
number of books read in 2001: 124
average read per month: 10
average read per week: 2.3
number read in worst month: 7 (May, August)
number read in best month: 13 (September)
percentage by male authors: 76%
percentage by female authors: 24%
fiction as percentage of total: 35%
non-fiction as percentage of total: 65%
percentage of total disliked: 9%
percentage of total ambivalent or sorta-liked: 47%
percentage of total actively enjoyed: 44%

Some of the fiction I enjoyed reading this year includes Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy, Charles Burns’ Black Hole, Ian McDonald’s River of Gods, and Michael Chabon’s Werewolves in Their Youth and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

My favorite nonfiction finds included books on food and agriculture (The Way We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason, The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel), environmental economics (Heat by George Monbiot, Cradle to Cradle by McDonough and Braungart), and history, both evolutionary (The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins) and contemporary (The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, India After Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha).

I’ve been reading more books this year than last, but that came at the expense of periodicals; I’ve got magazines galore and three copies of Granta sitting unread on my shelf. I’m hoping to rebalance my reading time in the year ahead.

[Now reading Alentejo Blue by Monica Ali]