In 2015 I read forty four books. This is six shy of the fifty books that I pledged to myself that I would read. The list is below:
Submergence - J.M. Ledgard |
Giraffe - J.M. Ledgard |
Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut |
The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan |
Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie |
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Wolf |
Crow Fair - Thomas McGuane |
And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie |
Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
The Old Gringo -- Carlos Fuentes |
Anthem -- Ayn Rand |
Missoula -- John Krakauer |
The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros |
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad |
Nothing's Impossible - Lorraine Monroe |
The Possession - Annie Ernaux |
The Awakening - Kate Chopin |
Beacon 23 - Hugh Howey |
Injured Reserves - DC Bourune |
The Emperor of all Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee |
Flatland - Edwin Abbott Abbott |
In the Orchard, the Swallows - Peter Hobbs |
Genius, The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick |
Einstein: His Life and Universe - Walter Isaacson |
Leonardo's Brain: Understanding Da Vinci's Creative Genius - Leonard Shlain |
Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri |
Into the Woods - Bill Bryson |
Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov |
Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro |
The Trial - Franz Kafka |
The Girl from Krakow - Alex Rosenberg |
The Hundred Year Flood - Matthew Salesses |
The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins |
Uncle Tungsten - Oliver Sacks |
Secret Adversary - Agatha Christie |
Blindsided - Jay Giles |
A Princess of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs |
The Crystal Crypt - Philip K. Dick |
The Scarlet Plague - Jack London |
The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan |
My Man Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse |
Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome |
The Next 100 Years - George Freidman |
So, I've failed my resolution to read 50 books in a year. My most ardent fans will remember that this marks the second consecutive year I have failed to meet the same resolution. I'm not too upset about it, overall. Of course I would have loved to have met my goal. But let's face facts: I read a lot more than most people do, and some of these books were pretty amazing. It's funny now, glancing back through the list. I think more about the circumstances surrounding the reading than the actual content of the book. Of course, some plot shines through, some characters cling, but the first memory is almost always where I was and what I was doing while reading it.
There was a big chunk of these books read during the summer on my motorcycle road trip. I downloaded a big chunk of them to my Kindle and just blasted through them, one after the other, late at night, tucked away in my dark tent, listening to the engine of my nearby Honda slowly tick away as it cooled down.
I remember being frightened, bruised, and exhausted, reading The Emperor of All Maladies in the backwoods of the the Arapho National Forest. I had just blown out my front tire and crashed, and I was miles from the nearest gas station. But I remember reading that book and thinking about cancer and the history of cancer research, and I was taken away from that situation and completely transported to a world of malignant cells and radiation treatment and surgical margins. That book helped me to forget myself for a few hours, and this happened with almost every book I read this year. Books can transport you, and that is what makes them so great. That is what, in my opinion, make authors such powerful people.
The best book I read this year was probably a tie between The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes (dark, haunting, beautiful) and Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (irreverant and honest).
My resolution for the new year will be to write (and publish to this blog) one piece of short fiction every month.
Here's a photograph I took near Montauk Point Lighthouse.
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