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a year in books II
Total number of books I read in 2003: 62 (full list)
Novels / novellas : 19
Collections of poetry: 15
Collections of short stories: 8
Books on science / technology (including narrative technologies) : 6
Books on religion : 3 (4 if you include Ecclesiastes)
Graphic novels / cartoon anthologies : 3
Books of literary or cultural criticism : 2
Authors I read in 2003 who have written at least one book I read prior to 2003: 15 (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lyn Hejinian, G. B. Trudeau, Neal Stephenson, Douglas Coupland, Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Sterling, J.G. Ballard, Don DeLillo, Margeurite Duras, William Gibson, Grant Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Lorrie Moore, Stephen Johnson)
Books I read in 2003 that I read at least once prior to 2003: 1 (Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash)
Even though I have the geek's deep love of list-making, I think the variety in this year's list of books makes it impossible to come up with a meaningful scheme of ranking them. That said, every single page of Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End, Lorrie Moore's Birds of America, and Barrett Watten's Plasma / Paralleles / "X" amazed me in some fashion or another. The enormous sheaf of Rem Koolhaas' Mutations contained about 100 pages that excited me more than almost anything else I read all year and wins bonus points for being the book that most pushed the boundaries of quote-unquote "the book." And, although they differ in almost every other meaningful way, Michael Warner's The Trouble With Normal and Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in The Bicameral Mind each argued an unpopular point of view with a spectacular audacity that made them equivalent pleasures.
Last note: counting up the number of books one reads in a year inevitably leads one to morbidly contemplate how many more one will probably read in his or her lifetime. (If I continue reading at this year's rate until I'm 75 years old I end up getting to read about 2,700 more.) Some, like Dan Hill, lament the inevitably dinky size of the calculated number, others, like Darren Bauler, wonder whether the number shouldn't be even smaller. |
Thursday, January 08, 2004
5:32 PM
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