Tuesday, January 01, 2013

2012: The Year In Books

As is traditional, a look back at my reading for 2012.

I'm not going to say how many books I acquired in 2012. I did a quick calculation, and the number I got was shocking even to me. Suffice it to say that I fell off the wagon, big-time, thanks to a shopping spree at Powell's, several library sales (including the deadly "bag of books for five bucks" one), and the should-have-been-predictable fact that deciding I'd wait until the new year to reinstate the book-buying quota resulted in out-of-control book-addict me desperately trying to acquire as many books as possible before the end of the year. Oy.

But never mind that. Let's talk about books read. I finished 145 of them this year, including a couple of re-reads. You can see the list here, with the re-reads, a couple of Harry Potter books, at the top. That's fewer than in the last couple of years, and a surprisingly large number of them, at least towards the beginning of the year, were compilations of bite-sized knowledge read in small chunks while I was sitting in quarantine with the kitten.

Here's the traditional list of Best Books I Read This Year, based on the ratings I gave them when I finished them:

Fiction:

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow
This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper
Matched by Allie Condie
Man in the Woods by Scott Spencer
Doc by Mary Doria Russell
The Middleman: The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse by Javier Grillo-Marxuach
Planetary Vol. 4: Spacetime Archaeology by Warren Ellis
Five Children and It by E. Nesbit
Locke & Key Volume 5: Clockworks by Joe Hill
The Miniature Wife and Other Stories by Manuel Gonzales

Non-Fiction:

Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins
The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World by Michelle Goldberg
Uncompromised: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of an Arab American Patriot in the CIA by Nada Prouty
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich
Lethal Warriors: When the New Band of Brothers Came Home by David Phillipps


There's probably some interesting pattern there, but I don't think I'm going to try to analyze it.

4 comments:

  1. Happy New Year!
    Glad to see there's some Warren Ellis in there. Loved Planetary...

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    1. I do like Warren Ellis, and should really read more of his stuff. Planetary itself too a little while to hook me, but when it did, it hooked me good, so I was really glad I stayed with it.

      Happy New Year!

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  2. Planetary's definitely one of my favorite Ellis works, and one I keep thinking I should revisit, now that I can theoretically get it all at once, not in the oft-delayed monthly version. I didn't love his first novel, Crooked Little Vein, but the trailer for Gun Machine looks very interesting.

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    1. Crooked Little Vein has been sitting on my wishlist for ages, so I'm sorry to hear you didn't love it. I hadn't really heard anything about Gun Machine, but that trailer certainly is intriguing.

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