Another year of reading, this one not as avidly as I'd have preferred. My arbitrary target had been set at fifty books — a nice, appealing number. I came up ten titles shy. In my defense, distractions were abundant last year, beginning with a long period of intransigence marked by the coming and going of several cellmates, each requiring adjustments and compromise, distractions that interfered with my reading. Then there were the added impediments: work, writing, the sometimes herculean effort of maintaining something like a social life, the onus of legal matters, the tragedy of sleep — and the excuses continue, some of them legitimate.
I'd like to think that this list would have been longer but for the librarians' abiding habit of passing over a preponderance of my requests when they place orders. Given the year I've had, however, it's likely even Thomas Pynchon couldn't have helped matters.
Unlike my original reading list, this one lists the books in chronological order, beginning February 2008.
* * * * *
E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
Daniel Tammet, Born on a Blue Day
Jess Walter, The Zero
John Bice, A 21st Century Rationalist in Medieval America
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Joel R. Primack & Nancy Ellen Abrams, The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos
Eric Lane & Michael Oreskes, The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved Our Country and Why It Can Again
Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road
Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
Stephen Kuusisto, Eavesdropping: A Life by Ear
Neil Gaiman, Stardust
Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive While Others Die
Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas?
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule
Julian Paul Keenan with Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. & Dean Falk, The Face in the Mirror: How We Know Who We Are
Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
John Updike, Seek My Face
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley • The Winter of Our Discontent
Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
Evelyn Waugh, The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh
Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Ken Wells, Meely LaBauve
John Steinbeck, The Pearl
Dan Chaon, You Remind Me of Me
Michael Benanav, Men of Salt: Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of White Gold
Peter Adolphsen, Machine
Paul Auster, Travels in the Scriptorium
Gary Marcus, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
Marco Pierre White with Pierre Strauss, The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef
Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener
Diane Ackerman, The Zookeeper's Wife
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Húrin
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Andrew Michaels, The Optimists
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art
Joseph Heller, Portrait of an Artist, As an Old Man
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge