I've actually been reading a bit, just not remembering to blog them afterwards. The former is probably more surprising right now.

For my class with Nancy Pearl I need to read books in multiple genres. I read my first the week before last, the mystery. I'd never read Agatha Christie so I checked Murder on the Orient Express out of the library and read it. I was actually somewhat underwhelmed but am not entirely sure why. I think part of my frustration was due to the fact that there was NO way I could have guessed the solution to the mystery. I realize that isn't the point of reading mysteries, but it still bothered me. The second genre I needed to read was science fiction so I ended up grabbing Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds off of the shelf. It was much more satisfying. I really liked the idea of a religion spread by virus (not meme, virus).

In between those two books were four others I read but failed to mention here: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Bart Kosko's Nanotime, Lee Stringer's Grand Central Winter, and Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum's Unshelved. The Garcia Marquez book was slim and probably would offend many people (by the subject matter). I was neither offended nor overwhelmed. If you want to read him, read One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love and Other Demons instead. Nanotime was a SF novel dealing with terrorist, the Middle East, and peak oil (published before 9/11). Lee Stringer's Grand Central Winter is a memoir of his time as a homeless drug addict. Unshelved is a collection of the web comic. Wacky hijinks in a library.
posted by kristin at 10:11 PM

I got a Barnes & Noble gift certificate for Christmas and just received the books it bought:

Foop! by Chris Genoa
The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami
I am the Clay by Chaim Potok
The Book of Lights by Chaim Potok
Davita's Harp by Chaim Potok
Cadillac Desert by Marc Resiner
Longitudes and Attitudes by Thomas Friedman
posted by kristin at 5:04 PM

Is anyone surprised I went to Powells while I was in Portland? You shouldn't be. :)

I was fairly restrained and only bought four books:

Martin Amis - Einstein's Monsters
David Callahan - The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
Dodie Smith - I Capture the Castle
Daniel Alarcon - War By Candlelight
posted by kristin at 10:36 AM

Some books take me a long time (for me) to get through, even though I like them, and I don't always know why. Molly Ivins' Who Let the Dogs In? was one of those slow-going books for me. It's a series of essays, mostly political, collected from many years of her writings about politics. This was the second collection of hers that I've read, but I've read her columns sporadically online. I can't say I agree with everything she says, but they're worth reading (even when they make me really pissed off).
posted by kristin at 10:30 AM

First three books of the year:

Like Shaking Hands with God by Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer. The book is short, simply transcripts of two interviews between Vonnegut and Stringer (and a moderator whose name I've forgotten). I've read all of Vonnegut's books, but haven't read Stringer's. I may need to check it out.

Terry Pratchett's Strata was not standard Pratchett. I say that because it was SF, not fantasy, and not one of the Discworld books (but was obviously part of the inspiration for them). His writing has improved in the intervening years, but I had some fun with this one.

John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces was a rare reread for me. It was January's choice for my book group. It had been years since I read it last, so I was up for a reread. Oddly I found that I didn't like it nearly as much as I had remembered liking it last time. Individual incidents were still quite funny and memorable. The characters were well-drawn, but I didn't find them particularly sympathetic. (Pathetic would be an accurate assessment though).

Jonathan Carroll's blog had a pertinent post this week:

"I know many people have favorite books or movies that they revisit again and again over the years, always drawing new pleasures or perspectives from them. Not me. I've now laid down the law with myself that with very few exceptions, I am not allowed to re-read books I once loved or movies that long ago and far away sent me into a swoon. Too often for me, going back to a once loved book (or film) is like looking up an old girlfriend and going out on a date. The experience is almost invariably a disaster. When the first James Bond film DR.NO came out in the early 60's, I thought it was about the coolest film I'd ever seen. I watched it again for the first time in decades the other night and everything about it is either goofy, ridiculous, or dull. But I knew that was going to happen as soon as I put the dvd into the machine. Why couldn't I have just left my boy's memory of James Bond alone?"
posted by kristin at 9:10 PM

meme from librarian.net:

number of books read in 2005: 134
number of books read in 2004: 106
number of books read in 2003: 154
number of books read in 2002: 129
number of books read in 2001: 130
number of books read in 2000: 120

for 2005 --
average read per month: 11.2
average read per week: 2.6
number read in worst month: 9 (September)
number read in best month: 15 (October)
percentage by male authors: 78%
percentage by female authors: 22%
fiction as percentage of total: 65%
non-fiction as percentage of total: 35%
percentage of total liked: 111
percentage of total ambivalent: 22
percentage of total disliked: 2

The liked/ambivalen/disliked counts are approximate since I'm trying to remember what I thought of all the books I liked. There were others that would have fallen into the disliked catagory had I finished them.
posted by kristin at 6:18 PM