Want to know what happens when I combine a lengthy vacation with our “empty nest”? It means I read more books than in any year since I started keeping track in 1976. This year I read 147 books, compared to the prior record of 127 last year. And although the number may be somewhat squishy, that added up to nearly 46,000 pages.
What is perhaps most noticeable is the huge increase in e-books. Last year I read 18, 14 percent of the year’s total. This year I read 55, a 205 percent increase. Of course, this only means I’m keeping up with current trends. There were more than 32,000 e-books checked out from the local library, a 657 percent increase over last year, and more e-books were checked out in December than in all of 2010. This also is reflected in the fact I checked out fewer “real” books from the library this year (32) than last (45).
In looking more specifically at 2011, the results are proportionately very close to what they were last year:
Books Read: 147
Pages Read: 45,909
- Average Pages per Book: 312.3
- Average Pages per Day: 125.78
- Average Number of Days per Book: 2.5
- Longest Book: 944 pages (1Q84, Haruki Murakami)
- Shortest Book: 96 pages (What’s to Become of the Boy?: Or, Something to Do with Books, Heinrich Böll, and Coming Unglued: Six Stories About Things Falling Apart
Fiction: 74 (50.3 percent)
- Translated Fiction: 22 (19 fiction — 26 percent of the fiction– and three nonfiction)
- Languages: German (6), French (3), Japanese (3), Spanish (3), Italian (2), Albanian (1), Arabic (1), Danish (1), Portuguese (1), Russian (1)
- Science Fiction: 11
- Short Stories: 7
Non-fiction: 67 (45.6 percent)
- History: 13 (19.4 percent of nonfiction)
- Autobiography/Memoirs/: 12
- Biography: 9
Humor: 5
Review Copies Read: 36 (24.5 percent)
Books Reviewed: 37
Ebooks Read: 55 (37.4 percent)
I am simply a “book drunkard.” Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.
L.M. Montgomery, The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. 1: 1889-1910
I am impressed you can get this done. As a conservative who thinks I am open-minded, I aspire to almost as often as I read conservative sources to also read liberal sources. This includes reading books by noted liberals.
Another way I can be broad-minded would be to read what liberals read and enjoy. I cant ask you to review every book but was wondering if you could give a thumbs up or down and maybe a one sentence comment.
A side note: I would love your recommended lists of:
1) 10 books to read that explains the liberal mind/philosophy.
2) 10 books you have most enjoyed.
1) I don’t read a lot of political books any more. In fact, my list of “influential” books over the last decade or so includes two that don’t really deal directly with political liberalism: Howard Zinn’s superlative A People’s History of the United States and Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation.
More in the advocacy camp, I would suggest Ted Rall’s Wake Up, You’re Liberal!, Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country? and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. I’ll let others figure out why three of those four are written by humorists/satirists.
2)That probably is my list of Desert Island Books.