schemingreader

Book Meme 2013

This is my fifth year doing scoradh's fabulous book meme. I think she abandoned it a long time ago! I like taking an inventory of my reading. It makes me feel like I've done something with my year, even when I haven't accomplished much, like this year.) Is it still a meme if I'm the only one who does it? Not if you do it, too.

(If you like, you may read my 2012 Book Meme, 2011 Book Meme, 2010 Book Meme and 2009 Book Meme. )

How many books read in 2013?
As usual, I'm not totally sure. I have posted a list of 40 books here, with links to the few reviews I put on LJ/DW. I started to record my reading under my real name on GoodReads, since my friends who know me under my real name on FB seem (very slightly) more inclined to discuss books. But only slightly.

Fiction/Non-Fiction ratio?
33:7. I think this is because I didn't count anything I didn't actually finish, this year.

Male/Female authors?
21 male, 18 female. Last year I had at least one author who didn't identify on the gender binary, but this year, everyone's pretty much quiet on that issue.

A few other stats about my reading choices

These are the ones I added to the original meme. I think.

Though I have never undertaken the "50 Books By People of Color" challenge, I do try to get recs for books by underrepresented (either in society or in my own reading) racial and ethnic minorities. This year I read seven books by authors of color in their entirety. (I read more articles and segments of books in this category.)

Two of the non-fiction books I read were memoirs. This is always an ambiguous category. A lot of fiction has autobiographical elements, and even some academic writing includes personal reflection. I counted Maira Kalman's diary comic as a memoir, and I don't know if everyone would say that.

I never know whether to include books I read out loud to someone else in my list. As my kid gets to be a better reader, I read smaller fractions of books out loud to him. We did read the Matt Fraction Iron Man books together.

Favorite books read?
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah
Atkinson, Kate. Life After Life
Foer, Jonathan. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Ullman, Ellen, By Blood

Again this year, I found it hard to finish books. Sometimes I found it hard to open them. Any book that provoked me to read it, that compelled me to finish it, or that brought me an emotional reaction, was my favorite. I laughed out loud at the blog posts in Americanah, I was totally swept up in Life After Life--brilliant time travel plot, I love time travel. I had never read Foer before and I cried a lot at Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and I'm still fascinated with By Blood.

Least favorite?

King, Laurie R. The Beekeeper's Apprentice (Mary Russell, #1)
Mitchell, David. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Shapiro, B.A. The Art Forger
Murakami, Haruki. 1Q84

Mary Russell is an embarrassing Mary Sue. Jacob de Zoet explores the same themes as Cloud Atlas, but with the addition of a superfluously racist Satanist cult. Which is contrasted to unambiguously good Christianity. Oh please. The Art Forger wasn't a bad book, but it did not live up to its hype in any way. Protagonist again too much of a Mary Sue, even though the author wanted to use her to explore human fallibility.

1Q84 became really frustrating when I realized it was going to resolve from a very funky, experimental parallel reality plot with weird, Bruno Schulz, Kafka and Chekov references, to a very stupid, sexist romance. It was too late to stop reading by that point.

Oldest book read?

Nearly everything I read this year was very new. That's unusual. I guess Barbara Pym's An Academic Question—it was published in 1986, but made up of drafts of an earlier, unpublished novel.

Newest?

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon came out this year. I guess so did Americanah. Both have a lot of insight about race in the US, from very different perspectives.

Longest book title?

Alexander, William. 52 Loaves: One Man's Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and a Perfect Crust

Shortest title?
Grossman, Austin. You.

How many re-reads?

I usually don't count rereads. I guess Maira Kalman's And the Pursuit of Happiness was sort of a reread, since I'd read the comics in the New York Times Magazine online.

Most books read by one author this year?
Three by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I think I also read a lot of Matt Fraction comics this year, but I didn't know whether to count them or when I'd originally read them.

Any in translation?

Jansson, Tove. The True Deceiver
Murakami, Haruki. 1Q84
Tatsumi, Yoshihiro. A Drifting Life

How many of this year's books were from the library?

All but one.

Book that most changed my perspective:

Some of the books that changed my perspective were non-fiction books that I didn't list because I only read part of them. Of the books here, probably What's Wrong with Fat?--which I didn't expect, because I've read so much about fat politics. It was very well done. The books set in Nigeria and in Japan were important for this, too. I've read a lot of books from Japan in the past, and never understood the mutual influence of Russian and Eastern European literature until these two books.


Favorite character:

Oskar Schell from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Renee Montoya from Gotham Central and maybe everyone from Phonogram.

Favorite scene:

I wish I had kept track of this. Probably the scene where the protagonist discovers the library under the lighthouse in Hicksville. Yeah, it's giving me a chill just to think of it, because—the underground library under a lighthouse. That's too wonderful.

Favorite quote:

What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.

― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Also:

...it's like reading a detailed report from a small planet light-years away from this world I'm living in. I can picture all the scenes described and understand them. It's described very vividly, minutely, even. But I can't connect the scenes in that book with where I am now. We are physically too far apart. I'll be reading it, and I find myself having to go back and reread the same passage over again.

-- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 (One of the protagonists is describing reading Proust, but I felt like it described reading Murakami!)

Most inspirational in terms of own writing?

Meh. Nothing was inspiring. In fact, I had an idea for a book and after reading the Kolata book, I feel like it's all already been done. But maybe not. I'm going to keep picking at it to see if maybe I'll go somewhere with it.

How many you'd actually read again?

Really not sure! There were many I liked a lot. Probably By Blood and Extremely Loud and Unbearably Close, and of course I'll probably have to reread a lot of the non-fiction for work.