My Book Life, Revisited

Back in July I let you know of my resolution to read, during 2006, an average of one book per week. At the time I was already six books behind schedule but I was confident that I was going to manage it. Now though, with just two weeks of the year to go and my count at 40, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to make it, but I’m fairly satisfied nonetheless.

There’s certainly going to be a lot of time over the next two weeks to catch up as I’ll be on holiday, but at best, I think that count isn’t going to get any higher than 43 or 44. Could I read 12 books in the next 14 days? Well, maybe, but I think that rushing to completion would miss the point of the resolution so I’m going to take it easy.

I tried to expand my horizons and not limit myself to specific genres or authors, though as I’ll mention later there were some writers who sat very well with me, and I’ve begun busily collecting their entire works. The (practically) final list contains a mixture of English and translations, a mixture of old classics and new, a mixture of fact and fiction.

I’m glad I made the effort. I’ve made a few discoveries: I discovered I really like the works of Joyce Cary, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway and Italo Calvino, and so those authors appear more than once in my list. I discovered that a couple of books that I’ve been carrying around with me for nearly ten years, always planning on reading, turned out to be pretty poor — that would be Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley (which felt very dated with all its ’90s talk of a virtual reality version of the internet) and Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman by Walter M. Miller (which I didn’t even manage to finish). I discovered that I am not going to be a Buddhist, which is probably one of the more important decisions of the year, even if it didn’t result in a major change of lifestyle.

My list of read books appears below, and I’ll update it at the end of the year with the final count. Surprisingly, with the exception of Fairyland and the books on Buddhism, there isn’t a single book in the list that I wouldn’t recommend. While some were liked far more than others, everything had something to offer, everything was read from cover to cover except for the second Leibowitz novel, and also some German detective story that I can’t even remember the title of that was discarded because the translation had Asian characters speaking as if the translator was Kenny Everett.

I’m going to be taking a break from Joeblade for the next two weeks, so the next update will be in 2007. I’m not actually going to be away from the internet — as if! — but I’m sure we all have better things, and more important things, to be getting along with until the misery of January hits us full on. So, I’ll take this opportunity to wish you all a merry Christmas, a happy new year, and I’ll see you on the flip-side.

That list in full

1. Life: An Enigma, a Precious Jewel by Daisaku Ikeda
2. If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell
3. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller
4. Chip Kidd: Bk. 1 (Chip Kidd) by Chip Kidd
5. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
6. Penguin by Design by Phil Baines
7. If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino
8. Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutierréz
9. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
10. Generation Debt by Anya Kamentz
11. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
12. A Year in the Life of TheManWhoFellAsleep by Greg Stekelman
13. Don’t Make Me Think! by Steve Krug
14. Herself Surprised by Joyce Cary
15. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
16. The Best of McSweeney’s, edited by Dave Eggers
17. I Am 8-Bit by John M. Gibson
18. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
19. David Bowie: Fame, Sound and Vision by Nick Stevenson
20. Erasure by Percival Everett
21. Buddha in Your Mirror by Woody Hochswender, Greg Martin, and Ted Morino
22. To Be a Pilgrim by Joyce Cary
23. JPod by Douglas Coupland
24. Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner by Paul M. Sammon
25. The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary
26. The Prestige by Christopher Priest
27. Jack Faust by Michael Swanwick
28. Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley
29. Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon by Dean Bakopoulos
30. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
31. Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
32. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa and Richard Zenith
33. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
34. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
35. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
36. Drown by Junot Diaz
37. A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene
38. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
39. Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
40. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
41. V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

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