Per my annual tradition (c.f., 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005) it’s time to look back on all the books I read this year and pick out my favorite and and least favorite.
The Stats
My total reading volume took a big dip this year, as I’m at 46 books –way down from the 65 I read in 2008. The main reasons for this are a) I wasn’t specifically doing a “52 books in 52 weeks challenge” as I was in 08, and b) I listened to a lot of podcasts this year, which crowded out some audiobooks.
- Total books: 46
- Total pages: 14,906*
- Average book length: 331 pages**
- Paper books: 19
- Audio books: 27
- Fiction books: 24
- Fantasy: 11 (mostly Terry Prattchett)
- Science fiction: 7
- Other Fiction: 5
- Horror: 1
- Nonfiction books: 22
- Other nonfiction: 7
- Science: 6
- Business: 6
- Biography: 3
*If you convert the length of the audiobooks to page counts by looking at their paper counterparts
**Same story
That seems like a pretty balanced spread to me. As usual, individual reviews can be found here.
Best Book I Read in 20009
Some good books this year. I enjoyed Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide because it was another solid popular science book around the science of human decision making, but it felt a little close to my favorite pick from 2008, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. I also found myself really enjoying Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, which took Kipling’s The Jungle Book as a starting point and told you a story about a little orphan boy lovingly raised by the supernatural inhabitants of a rural graveyard.
In the end, though, I decided you can’t go wrong with a classic, and chose Frank Herbert’s Dune as my favorite book from 2009. It’s got a lot of the tropes from fantasy AND science fiction, but it presents them in such a way that it’s fresh and interesting, not to mention an epic storyline full of battles and giant worms. Thoroughly entertaining stuff, and I’m at a bit of a loss to explain why I haven’t gone on to read more of the Dune books. I shall resolve to do so in 2010.
Worst Book I read in 2009
Why is it that I always have stronger contenders for this than the best books? I could barely get through Jack Kerouac’s On the Road despite its stature as a classic. Garth Nix’s Sabriel about a young necromancer trying to save her father squandered an interesting premise on poor writing and bland characters, but I have to cut it some slack for being a young adult book. And David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle tries to retell Shakesphere’s Hamlet with a young boy and a dog breeding business in Wisconsin, and while it’s really terrible in so many ways it just barely gets eeked out by another entry.
Martin Lindstrom’s Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy and the New Science of Desire takes that honor. Lindstrom is an advertising mogul of some kind, and he’s so breathlessly eager to tell you about this SUPER new science that HE has created that will explain why we buy. The problem is that the author only knows how to write like an advertising man, not a scientist or even a competent distiller of other scientific research. He slings nonsensical terms around like advertising jingles and generally adopts a pompous, hyperbolic tone that’s not far off from what you’d expect in a late night informercial for a stain removal spray.
So, what about you all? What’s your best and worst of 2009?
I’m glad I read your review of Edgar Sawtelle, my mother-in-law just gave it to me last week raving about it. I’ll probably skip it and quietly give it back to her in a month.
Yeah, I thought it was pretty terrible.
I read so few books now that I pretty much save myself for the titles I’ve been waiting for. That makes it hard for me to be very disappointed, I go into things with a desire to like a book … and so I do.
Thinking really really hard, the worst book for me would have to be the one I never finished, Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things (usually really dig NG). I couldn’t finish it because many of the short stories were disturbing and bordering on the horrific and I oogied out (technical term). I’m not fully anti-horror, but in my later years I’m not as immune to it as I had been.
Best book for me was the final book of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn Trilogy. I started reading the trilogy to get a feel for Sanderson’s writing as he’ll be finishing up Robert Jordan’s series. I wanted to know how he thinks and start to learn his voice. As we know, it is hard to do much surprising in fantasy. So many plots and devices and whatnot have been fleshed out in similar ways over and over. Some of Sanderson’s details through the trilogy were predictable like this, but I also found myself surprised by the ultimate resolution. I’ve never been a harsh critic and because of that one perhaps shouldn’t be too moved by what I like. But I *liked* this.