about me

 

a very late "year in reading" report: 2010 Tonight, I realized I never tallied up my reading from 2010. It's a good tradition for me, dating back all the way to 2004, and I regretted not doing it in 2010. So. Better late than never, I suppose. By my count I read 29 books in 2010, up a bit from my 2009 low of 23. Fiction: six novels, most of them quite good. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Lush Life by Richard Price, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee, Dune by Frank Herbert (a re-read), and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Graphic novels: 12 in total. 2010 represented the end of my big comics splurge which began in 2008. I read a bunch of graphic novels in the beginning of the year but my interest in them finally began to wane after I consumed all six volumes of the (delightful) Scott Pilgrim series in the summer. Memoirs and assorted nonfiction: 9 in total, including Primo Levi's harrowing classic Survival in Auschwitz, Michael Pollan's impassioned polemic In Defense of Food, and A Very Bad Wizard, a great collection of Tamler Sommers' interviews with philosophers, which I enjoyed enough to think that it might be the best book I read all year. Books I'd read before and re-read this year were Frank Herbert's Dune (which I hadn't read since childhood) and the old Bloom County Babylon anthology (which I hadn't read since adolescence). Authors I revisited in 2010—who wrote books I read for the first time in 2010, but also wrote books that I read prior to 2010—Leo Tolstoy and Warren Ellis may have been the only ones there. Mark Millar on a technicality: Civil War is the only bound graphic novel I've read by him, but I read his recent run on books like Fantastic Four in periodical form before this year. Previous years: 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Labels: book_commentary

Saturday, September 17, 2011 9:44 PM   Comments: Post a Comment