The Final Tally, 2009 Book List

Tougher year than I thought. “Development of Freedom” stalled me for a month. When Laura left for Walla Walla, I couldn’t bring myself to read much of anything (well, except back issues of some magazines). Found my groove there for a while with the fiction. Most important (recent) book of the year: “Half the Sky.” Favorite new (to me) authors:
Niffenegger, Attwood, Suskind.

For 2010 I had to do some bookshelf clearing, anyone interested in a copy of “Learning GNU Emacs (2nd Edition)? How about “lex & yacc?”

• Angler, (Gellman 2008) – 1/4/2009
• Hot, Flat and Crowded, (Friedman 2008) – 1/14/2009
• When You Are Engulfed in Flames (Sedaris 2009) – 1/21/2009
• How Fiction Works (Wood 2009) – 1/26/2009
• Imperial Life in the Emerald City, inside Iraq’s green zone (Chandrasekaran 2006) – 1/28/2009
• McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (Vol 25 2007)
• The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, (Suskind 2008) – 2/7/2009
• The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (Pinker 2007) – 2/22/2009
• Tribes (Godin 2008) 2/23/2009
• The elephant, the tiger, and the cellphone: reflections on India, the emerging 21st century power (Tharoor 2007) – 2/28/2009
• The Encore Effect: how to achieve remarkable performance in anything you do (Sanborn 2008) – 2/28/2009
• The Other (Kapuściński 2008) – 2/28/2009
• Beyond Bullshit: Straight-Talk at Work (Culbert 2008) – 3/2
• The Age of Heretics (Kleiner 2008) – 3/9
• The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (Friedman 2005) – 3/19
• Planet India (Kamdar 2007) – 3/25
• The 21st Century Economy (Epping 2009) – 3/25
• In Defense of Food (Pollan 2008) – 3/27
• The Cost of Living (Roy 1999) – 3/31
• Lexus and the Olive Tree (Friedman 2000) – 4/6
• The God of Small Things (Roy 1997) – 4/12
• Development as Fredom (Sen 1999) – 4/3
• Heat, Bill Buford
• In The Graveyard of Empires, Seth G. Jones
• Under The Banner of Heaven, John Krakauer
• Muhammad, Karen Armstrong
• One to Nine, Hodges
• In Pursuit of Elegance, Matt May
• That Old Cape Magic, Richard Russo
• The Time Traveller’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
• Oryx and Crake, Margaret Attwood
• Lake of the Woods, Tim O’Brien
• The Shipping News, E . Annie Proulx
• Busted, Edmund Andrews
• The Hour I First Believed, Wally Lamb.
• The Elements of Style, Strunk and White
• The Genius Machine, Gerald Sindell
• Catching the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort
• Hanibal Rising
• The Handmaid’s Tail, Margaret Attwood
• Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Thomas E. Ricks
• The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11, Ron Suskind
• The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
• The Life of Pi, Yann Martel
• A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
• The Year of the Flood, Margaret Attwood
• Her Fearful Symetry, Audrey Niffenegger
• Indignation, Phillip Roth
• American Pastoral, Phillip Roth
• Half the Sky, Nicholoas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
• Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
• Giliead, Marilynne Robinson
• The Help, Kathryn Stockett
• Coranado, Denis Lehane
• The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
• The Plot Against America
• The Girl Who Played With Fire
• What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, Malcolm Gladwell
• A Change in Altitude, Anita Shreve
• Book of clouds
• 100 Days of Solitude
• The brief wonderous life of Oscar Wao

Amazon Recommendations Considered Harmful

With apologies to the GOTO statement, the recomendation below is truly harmful.

PAT CONROY ?!?!!?!

The flanking books I can see, but Pat Conroy? I admit that I once read “Prince of Tides,” but I was on vacation at a house with a limited library. Pat Conroy v. Danielle Steele; Conroy wins that one.

But how did Amazon find out? A less than discreet relative perhaps….

(ps. Check out the review snippet from Wapo in the second image)

And now I know, I won’t make it to one hundred

I starred the year with the goal of reading 100 books. A couple of dense, lengthy ones in Q1 and Q2 combined with a slow two months in early summer, and I stand at 43. Far behind last year’s pace.

I’d have to averge 4.5 books per week to make it to 100. Time to reset. I’m going for 75. 2.5 books a week, any recommendations?

The 2009 Book List…

Haven’t updated this since April, so of course my notes are a mess. Here’s the whole list, 2009 Q1-Q3;

1. Angler, (Gellman 2008) – 1/4/2009
2. Hot, Flat and Crowded, (Friedman 2008) – 1/14/2009
3. When You Are Engulfed in Flames (Sedaris 2009) – 1/21/2009
4. How Fiction Works (Wood 2009) – 1/26/2009
5. Imperial Life in the Emerald City, inside Iraq’s green zone (Chandrasekaran 2006) – 1/28/2009
6. McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (Vol 25 2007)
7. The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, (Suskind 2008) – 2/7/2009
8. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (Pinker 2007) – 2/22/2009
9. Tribes (Godin 2008) 2/23/2009
10. The elephant, the tiger, and the cellphone: reflections on India, the emerging 21st century power (Tharoor 2007) – 2/28/2009
11. The Encore Effect: how to achieve remarkable performance in anything you do (Sanborn 2008) – 2/28/2009
12. The Other (Kapuściński 2008) – 2/28/2009
13. Beyond Bullshit: Straight-Talk at Work (Culbert 2008) – 3/2
14. The Age of Heretics (Kleiner 2008) – 3/9
15. The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (Friedman 2005) – 3/19
16. Planet India (Kamdar 2007) – 3/25
17. The 21st Century Economy (Epping 2009) – 3/25
18. In Defense of Food (Pollan 2008) – 3/27
19. The Cost of Living (Roy 1999) – 3/31
20. Lexus and the Olive Tree (Friedman 2000) – 4/6
21. The God of Small Things (Roy 1997) – 4/12
22. Development as Fredom (Sen 1999) – 4/3
23. Heat, Bill Buford
24. In The Graveyard of Empires, Seth G. Jones
25. Under The Banner of Heaven, John Krakauer
26. Muhammad, Karen Armstrong
27. One to Nine, Hodges
28. In Pursuit of Elegance, Matt May
29. That Old Cape Magic, Richard Russo
30. The Time Traveller’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
31. Oryx and Crake, Margaret Attwood
32. Lake of the Woods, Tim O’Brien
33. The Shipping News, E . Annie Proulx
34. Busted, Edmund Andrews
35. The Hour I First Believed, Wally Lamb.
36. The Elements of Style, Strunk and White
37. The Genius Machine, Gerald Sindell
38. Catching the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort
39. Hanibal Rising
40. The Handmaid’s Tail, Margaret Attwood
41. Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Thomas E. Ricks
42. The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11, Ron Suskind
43. The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
44. The Life of Pi, Yann Martel
45. A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
46. The Year of the Flood, Margaret Attwood
47. Her Fearful Symetry, Audrey Niffenegger
48. Indignation, Phillip Roth
49. American Pastoral, Phillip Roth
50. Half the Sky, Nicholoas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
51. Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
52. Giliead, Marilynne Robinson
53. The Help, Kathryn Stockett

Reading List (2009) – April

Title, (Author Last Name, Date of Publication) – Date Completed

1. Lexus and the Olive Tree (Friedman 2000) – 4/6
2. The God of Small Things (Roy 1997) – 4/12
3. Development as Fredom (Sen 1999) – 4/30

Page count for March: 1,095 (36.50/day)

The list of books read in 2008 struggled its way to 66, I’m aiming for 100 in 2009.

2009 totals: 21 books, 6,254 pages, 52.12/day, on pace for 63 books, behind 12 books–OUCH.

The Amartya Sen book killed me, it started to take away my will to read anything…. Oh and baseball season started.

Reading List (2009) – March

From the list below I would highly recommend: Pollan’s In Defense of Food and Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.

Title, (Author Last Name, Date of Publication) – Date Completed

1. Beyond Bullshit: Straight-Talk at Work (Culbert 2008) – 3/2
2. The Age of Heretics (Kleiner 2008) – 3/9
3. The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (Friedman 2005) – 3/19
4. Planet India (Kamdar 2007) – 3/25
5. The 21st Century Economy (Epping 2009) – 3/25
6. In Defense of Food (Pollan 2008) – 3/27
7. The Cost of Living (Roy 1999) – 3/31

Page count for March: 1,545 (49.84/day)

The list of books read in 2008 struggled its way to 66, I’m aiming for 100 in 2009.

2009 totals: 19 books, 5,159 pages, 57.32/day, on pace for 76 books, behind 6 books.

Reading List – 2009 (February)

Title, (Author Last Name, Date of Publication) – Date Completed

1. The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, (Suskind 2008) – 2/7/2009
2. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (Pinker 2007) – 2/22/2009
3. Tribes (Godin 2008) 2/23/2009
4. The elephant, the tiger, and the cellphone: reflections on India, the emerging 21st century power (Tharoor 2007) – 2/28/2009
5. The Encore Effect: how to achieve remarkable performance in anything you do (Sanborn 2008) – 2/28/2009
6. The Other (Kapuściński 2008) – 2/28/2009

Page count for February: 1,697 (60.61/day)

The list of books read in 2008 struggled its way to 66, I’m aiming for 100 in 2009. That Stephen Pinker book did me in this month, 634 end notes; took me 2 weeks to ingest it all.

2009 totals: 12 books, 3,614 pages, 61.25/day, on pace for 72 books, behind: 4 2/3 books. (If I’m seriously considering reading Don Quiotxe, I’m in big trouble on the 100 books front….)

(And yes, I did a power surge yesterday to finish the month with > 3 books so it wouldn’t look too lame.)

Updated: Forgot I read Seth Godin’s “Tribes”

Reading List – 2009 (January)

Title, (Author Last Name, Date of Publication) – Date Completed

1. Angler, (Gellman 2008) – 1/4/2009
2. Hot, Flat and Crowded, (Friedman 2008) – 1/14/2009
3. When You Are Engulfed in Flames (Sedaris 2009) – 1/21/2009
4. How Fiction Works (Wood 2009) – 1/26/2009
5. Imperial Life in the Emerald City, inside Iraq’s green zone (Chandrasekaran 2006) – 1/28/2009
6. McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (Vol 25 2007)

Page count for January: 1,917 (61.84/day)

The list of books read in 2008 struggled its way to 66, I’m aiming for 100 in 2009.

I read more books in 2008 than George W. Bush

It wasn’t even close. I creamed “turd-blossom” too. As Karl “turd-blossom” Rove reports in the December 26th Wall Street Journal article, “Bush is a Book Lover,” the president read 40 books this year to Rove’s 65. Below is my list (so far).

aside: if you know grep and keep your books in Facebook’s iRead/weRead, you might have noted there’s no export feature. Copy and past the text (not html source) of each page of results in your “my reads” listing. Then find/replace “^\[(.*)\]$” with a blank line. Strip all blank lines, and you’ll have a list that you can work with.

Full list, after the break.

Book links

Book linking policy

I do link to an Amazon affiliate store.

If you purchase a book through that link, Amazon throws me a few coins

I’m open to the idea of making money but I want to give you choices if you don’t like that idea. This is how book links work on this site

• If it is a book that I’ve read and recommend, the main title entry will is linked to a the book’s page in an Amazon affiliate store that I have set up.
• If the title appears in the WorldCat database, I link to it after the title with a [wc] link.
• If the book has a dedicated web site for further discussion or community building I link to it with: [site]
• If the book does not appear in WorldCat and there’s no dedicated book site, I’ll link to the author’s blog, homepage, etc.
• If I can’t find any good secondary link, to complement the link to my Amazon store I link to a Google search on the title