It's January first, so I can tally up my 2011 reading. I expected to find that it had been pretty light this year--it feels like for most of December I didn't even have a book going. I told David, "I've read all the books!" I just haven't happened across anything that grabbed my attention.
Still, I read quite a bit: 230 books in all. Last year I read 201. Both of these numbers are down from all the other years since 2006, when I started my nifty little spreadsheet. I had been reading around 300 books a year. I guess I've been slacking off since Yehva learned to walk and began requiring constant supervision.
That 230 doesn't count 55 books I started and didn't finish. I sometimes write a very short comment about a book, just a few words, and I find it fun looking at my comments for the books I abandoned: "What a blowhard!" "Nothing new here." "Very interesting but a long article would have sufficed." "Piece of crap." "Such bad writing." "Remembered that I tried to read this before and hated it then, too." "Apparently I was not actually in the mood for a 600-page biography of Ronald Reagan."
I read a lot of genre fiction this year that I didn't give my highest grade to but that I flagged as "recommended"--which usually means, "You'd like it if you like that kind of thing." All of Anne Perry's William Monk mysteries fell into this category (and, yes, I read all 17 of them, in order, because I am like that), as well as Lisa Lutz's hilarious Spellman series, which I highly recommend if you need a frothy something for an afternoon at the beach or next to the fire.
There were also a couple of science fiction books in this category, though I didn't read a lot of sci-fi this year. David and I were talking the other day about the amount of mental energy it can take to get into a meaty science fiction novel, especially the kind where the author drops you into a universe and doesn't explain anything, just leaves you to figure it all out as you go along. The point of our conversation was that neither of us has had the mental energy lately. But I liked Greg Bear's Hull Zero Three, and David and I both liked James Corey's Leviathan Wakes. George R.R. Martin blurbed it as a "kickass space opera," and if there's one thing I like, it's a kickass space opera. I pretty much like anything with people living on icy asteroids in a colonized solar system or in big ships slowly traversing the vast reaches of space.
In non-fiction, I flagged a handful of books that didn't rise to greatness but that I thought were good reads, including Rapture Ready: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, which I found thoughtful and sympathetic and appreciated for its avoidance of the obvious cheap jokes; The End of the Obesity Epidemic, which was surprising in not being polemical but instead takes a careful and soberingly critical look at the biases and assumptions of all sides in the current debate. Not a great book to read if you're looking for someone to validate your own point of view (whatever that might be) but very thought-provoking. And Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture was the best book I've read on that topic.
Next I'll tackle the very short list of books I gave my highest rating to. But I slept late this morning and haven't fed the parrots yet, so it will have to wait awhile.
