This year I read 41 books, short of my 50 book minimum goal; nevertheless, I did much better than my disappointing 27 books last year.

I wrote about 40 of them. I didn’t really see the point in writing about The Christmas Carol since it’s the freaking Christmas Carol. Everyone knows the story of the greedy old miser Mr Scrooge who changes his ways and learns the true meaning of Christmas thanks to the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. The themes are fairly obvious: being stingy with money and cold-hearted towards family and the needy is bad, being kind and open-hearted and giving to others in need is good and beneficial to society, not to mention it improves individual happiness. You can’t take all that money with you, so if you’re super rich there is no point in hoarding it. For any lazy students out there who rely on my site to do their homework there are like a billion decent movie versions of the story, you can even watch one with muppets (or you can just read the two sentence summary that I just wrote).

Since I started keeping track of my books in 2006:

  • I’m averaging 50.6 books per a year.
  •  My lowest year was 27 books in 2010.
  • My highest year was 73 books in 2008.

1. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (link)
2. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (link)
3. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (link)
4. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster (link)
5. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster (link)
6. Howard’s End by E. M. Forster (link)
7. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (link)
8. Bone 1: Out from Boneville by Jeff Smith (link)
9. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (link)
10. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence (link)
11. Bone 2: The Great Cow Race by Jeff Smith (link)
12. Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti (link)
13. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (link)
14. World War One British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, and Others (link)
15. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (link)
16. White Noise by Don DeLillo (link)
17. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain (link)
18. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (link)
19. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (link)
20. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (link)
21. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (link)
22. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (link)
23. The Trial by Franz Kafka (link)
24. The Brother Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (link)
25. A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin (link)
26. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (link)
27. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (link)
28. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri (link)
29. The Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri (link)
30. The Paradiso by Dante Alighieri (link)
31. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (link)
32. Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes (link)
33. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (link)
34. The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret (link)
35. The Poetry of Petrarch translated by David Young (link)
36. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe and translated by Catherine Hutter (link)
37. Beware of God by Shalom Auslander (link)
38. The Prelude by William Wordsworth (link)
39. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens (link)
40. The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories by Etgar Keret (link)
41. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Goals for Next Year

I started a new full-time job this year and it cut into reading time. I also find lately, perhaps due to fatigue from being split too many directions, that I don’t always enjoy posting on the blog anymore. I think many of my posts come off as hasty and not as detailed as in the past, reflecting this dissatisfaction and weariness. One possibility for next year is to switch to a capsule response format like the one I did above for A Christmas Carol (no more than three to four sentences), with an occasional more detailed post for books that particularly moved me. Then again, maybe I’ll change nothing and do exactly what I have always done on this blog. We’ll see. Despite my stated recent apathy towards book posts I am considering adding movie reviews again to the blog.

Next year I would like to read all the novels of Charles Dickens that I haven’t read yet, read more poetry (particularly more of the Romantics), add movie reviews back onto the site, and get back into trying to improve my knowledge of the major discoveries of science, which I attempted and stopping doing due to time constraints.