All The Books I Finished in 2011
A little background: This year was Neil Gaiman's 10th blogging anniversary. To note the anniversary, he spent a week or so re-running blog entries from the past 10 years, according to popular demand, or interesting request, or whatever system he used to take reader suggestions and turn them into blog rerun decisions. Unfortunately, I can't find the entry (either in rerun or original) that inspired this list of mine, so I'm going to have to summarize it from memory.
The subject was something about the publishing industry, though I can't remember quite which aspect was under discussion. But Neil, or someone Neil quoted on his blog, pointed out that people don't buy very many books these days, and provided the statistic that the average man reads only four books per year, and the average woman nine. (I'm pretty sure those were the numbers, but this was back in February and I could easily have gotten them wrong.) The point was something about how hard it is to get people to read and buy books in this atmosphere. But what I thought was, "Surely I read more books than that in a year." A natural assumption, given what a huge reader I've been my whole life. It would be surprising if I didn't read more books than the average person.
But then I tried to prove that claim to myself, by counting the books that I'd read that year. Well, the year was still young, but I hadn't read very many books at all by that point in time. And thinking back to a year before then... I just couldn't remember how many books I'd read. I couldn't prove my claim to myself.
Clearly, the thing to do was to keep track of every book I read this year, so that at the end of the year I'd have a definite number that I could compare to the average. So that's what I did.
But then there was another problem! Like many readers, I've usually got several books in various stages of being read at any one time. If I read 95% of a book last year, is it really fair to count it as one I read this year? Conversely, is it fair to not count a book at all just because I read part of it in one year and the rest in a different year? I think The Lord of The Rings took me like five years to get through. Well, in that case you can count each of the six books that make it up, but you get my point. It's hard to figure out how much reading of a book in a particular year is necessary in order to count that book as being read in that year.
I decided that I would go by the date that I finish a given book. That way, all the books I read partway in previous years and finished this year count for this year. All the books I read partway this year and will finish in subsequent years will count for those years. Overall it should work out fairly: If I read a lot in a given year, I'm likely to finish more books than if I don't read very much that year.
So it doesn't matter if I read all but one page in 2010, as long as there was something left for me to finish in 2011, and I did, then the book went on this list.
I finished 16 books this year. Here they are:
Follies of Science by Eic Dregni & Jonathan Dregni
Agatha H and the Airship City by Phil & Kaja Foglio
Embassytown by China Miéville
One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde
The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett
Better Than Life by Grant Naylor
Earth (The Book) by Jon Stewart et al.
Dispatches From Wondermark Manor by David Malki !
The City & The City by China Miéville
Sunny Ella by Sally Zybert
Protector by Larry Niven
Beowulf’s Children by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, & Steven Barnes
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
The Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, & Steven Barnes
That Is All by John Hodgman
Passage by Connie Willis
The list is roughly in chronological order according to when I finished each book.
Of course, for each of these books there are lots of things I can say, and there are interesting stories I can tell about my experience with most of them. If you want to ask me about any of them, feel free. But right now, I'm going to talk about The Rules for this list.
The Rules
This is a list of the prose books of considerable length that I finished in 2011.
"Prose books" includes both fiction and nonfiction, anything consisting largely of text on a page. Comics do not count even if they are comics with lots of text. I just ran into too many issues trying to determine criteria for including a comic on the list, and the only sensible solution was to not include any comics at all. This decision does not reflect my opinion of or respect for comics as a medium.
"Considerable length" means "takes more than an hour or so to read." It's too hard to keep track of shorter books, and it doesn't make sense to include children's storybooks with lengthy novels. Since the purpose of this list was to count the books I read, I didn't want to allow for artificial inflation of that figure. So children's books and other short books are out.
Also, textbooks and other books I read for school are excluded from the list. Most of the time I don't read a whole textbook anyway. And I'm past the point in my schooling where I'm taking literature classes, so there aren't any novels that I've read recently because they were part of a curriculum. (An engineering major with two AP English tests under her belt doesn't have to take a single literature class in college.)
Okay, so I think this is going to be my New Year's tradition from now on. I look forward to reading lots more books in 2012, and a year from now I'll tell you what they were!
That is, if we all survive Ragnarok.
Happy New Year!
The subject was something about the publishing industry, though I can't remember quite which aspect was under discussion. But Neil, or someone Neil quoted on his blog, pointed out that people don't buy very many books these days, and provided the statistic that the average man reads only four books per year, and the average woman nine. (I'm pretty sure those were the numbers, but this was back in February and I could easily have gotten them wrong.) The point was something about how hard it is to get people to read and buy books in this atmosphere. But what I thought was, "Surely I read more books than that in a year." A natural assumption, given what a huge reader I've been my whole life. It would be surprising if I didn't read more books than the average person.
But then I tried to prove that claim to myself, by counting the books that I'd read that year. Well, the year was still young, but I hadn't read very many books at all by that point in time. And thinking back to a year before then... I just couldn't remember how many books I'd read. I couldn't prove my claim to myself.
Clearly, the thing to do was to keep track of every book I read this year, so that at the end of the year I'd have a definite number that I could compare to the average. So that's what I did.
But then there was another problem! Like many readers, I've usually got several books in various stages of being read at any one time. If I read 95% of a book last year, is it really fair to count it as one I read this year? Conversely, is it fair to not count a book at all just because I read part of it in one year and the rest in a different year? I think The Lord of The Rings took me like five years to get through. Well, in that case you can count each of the six books that make it up, but you get my point. It's hard to figure out how much reading of a book in a particular year is necessary in order to count that book as being read in that year.
I decided that I would go by the date that I finish a given book. That way, all the books I read partway in previous years and finished this year count for this year. All the books I read partway this year and will finish in subsequent years will count for those years. Overall it should work out fairly: If I read a lot in a given year, I'm likely to finish more books than if I don't read very much that year.
So it doesn't matter if I read all but one page in 2010, as long as there was something left for me to finish in 2011, and I did, then the book went on this list.
I finished 16 books this year. Here they are:
Follies of Science by Eic Dregni & Jonathan Dregni
Agatha H and the Airship City by Phil & Kaja Foglio
Embassytown by China Miéville
One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde
The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett
Better Than Life by Grant Naylor
Earth (The Book) by Jon Stewart et al.
Dispatches From Wondermark Manor by David Malki !
The City & The City by China Miéville
Sunny Ella by Sally Zybert
Protector by Larry Niven
Beowulf’s Children by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, & Steven Barnes
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
The Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, & Steven Barnes
That Is All by John Hodgman
Passage by Connie Willis
The list is roughly in chronological order according to when I finished each book.
Of course, for each of these books there are lots of things I can say, and there are interesting stories I can tell about my experience with most of them. If you want to ask me about any of them, feel free. But right now, I'm going to talk about The Rules for this list.
The Rules
This is a list of the prose books of considerable length that I finished in 2011.
"Prose books" includes both fiction and nonfiction, anything consisting largely of text on a page. Comics do not count even if they are comics with lots of text. I just ran into too many issues trying to determine criteria for including a comic on the list, and the only sensible solution was to not include any comics at all. This decision does not reflect my opinion of or respect for comics as a medium.
"Considerable length" means "takes more than an hour or so to read." It's too hard to keep track of shorter books, and it doesn't make sense to include children's storybooks with lengthy novels. Since the purpose of this list was to count the books I read, I didn't want to allow for artificial inflation of that figure. So children's books and other short books are out.
Also, textbooks and other books I read for school are excluded from the list. Most of the time I don't read a whole textbook anyway. And I'm past the point in my schooling where I'm taking literature classes, so there aren't any novels that I've read recently because they were part of a curriculum. (An engineering major with two AP English tests under her belt doesn't have to take a single literature class in college.)
Okay, so I think this is going to be my New Year's tradition from now on. I look forward to reading lots more books in 2012, and a year from now I'll tell you what they were!
That is, if we all survive Ragnarok.
Happy New Year!