It used to be my practice to post a year-end review of books, but for the past two years I have been posting monthly (/semimonthly) summaries of recent reading, and I never wrote a 2005 review. If I recall correctly, there was a one month old child in the house at the time.
Errata: Some time during the past year I read A Room with a View by E. M. Forster, but it got left out somehow.
So, in the past year I made a concerted effort to read some forty-one books. Four of these were nonfiction, the rest fiction. Of the fiction, I abandoned or otherwise failed to finish four books, those four being:
* Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
* Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
* Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer
* JR by William Gaddis
There is a fair chance that I will eventually resume reading Dostoevsky or Gaddis, but no chance that I will finish the Willis or Sawyer volumes.
Out of all the fiction, I would say about eight of the books were of literary quality. The rest were fluff, but enjoyable fluff.
Best fiction of the year: Gateway by Frederik Pohl. Written in 1976, still a good read, and it motivated me to read several other books by Pohl.
Worst fiction of the year: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I have my doubts that Hosseini actually wrote the book, more likely there was an uncredited ghost writer/team of editors behind this.
Well, time to get back to reading. Currently working on: Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit.
Posted by B Rickman at January 8, 2007 06:30 PM