Category: reading
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2024 Tournament of Books: Play-in round
For the first time, I’ve made the effort to try to read all the Tournament of Books entries before the tournament starts instead of relying on dumb luck to let me have read perhaps two or three. Having done this, I’ve decided to do my own parallel judging (I’ve been filling out my brackets as…
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My favorite reads of 2023
2023 saw me returning to a more typical year of reading, with the vast majority of my reading being fiction again. I also ended up having a bit more reading time than usual so my total book count for the year was 124 books. The full list of books is available at GoodReads. My favorite…
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My favorite reads of 2022 (now with charts and graphs!)
2022 was an atypical year for reading for me largely because it turned out that 67% of the 103¹ books I’ve read this year were research for the novel, which, among other things, meant that my numbers got skewed in interesting ways, like the fact that only 29.5% of the books were fiction (compared to…
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Ceci n’est pas Graham Greene—a mystery solved
About four months ago, I stumbled across a picture which was incorrectly identified as being Graham Greene. I recently had someone (via Hacker News, of all places) identify the mystery individual as Artur Lundqvist, a member of the Swedish academy. Now, this is especially ironic given Greene’s storied history with his non-receipt of the Nobel…
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My favorite reads of 2021
I’m going to do something a bit different this year. Much less on the numbers other than the top line of 85¹ books read this year with 50.1% by women and 38.6% by non-white authors. I’ve been a bit better about finding time to read without my commute by “L” to give me the time…
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Wait, What?
I’ve grown accustomed to odd things popping out in my Goodreads recommendations, but this is a weird one: Because I’ve begun reading Stephanie (Stephen at the time of publication) Burt’s Close Calls with Nonsense, Goodreads has recommended not one, but two books about Jeffrey Dahmer. There’s no index in the book, but a glimpse over the…
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2020 in reading
2020 was, of course, a strange year. My reading habits were severely disrupted when I lost my 60–90 minutes a day of commute time on the “L” which had in previous years been a bastion of protected reading time. Like last year, I aimed to read 100 books and, like last year, I fell short,…
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2019 in reading
I had set a goal for 2019 of reading 100 books and nearly made it with 95 books. I’ll aim again this year. My favorite reads for the year, in alphabetical order, were: Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath The Best American Essays 2019 edited by Rebecca Solnit and Robert Atwan…
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2018 in reading
I’ve noticed that over the past few years, the number of books I’ve read each year has been in steady decline. This year I read just 67 books (which, I suppose is still a fair amount). My favorite reads for the year, in alphabetical order, were: Best American Short Stories 2018 edited by Roxane Gay and…