In 2013, my goal is to read 25,000 pages by year's end. I measure progress in pages, rather than titles, to avoid any bias toward shorter books. Here's what I read in April:
- Chief Justice - Ed Cray
- Justice Brennan - Seth Stern
- Thurgood Marshall - Juan Williams
- The Outpost - Jake Tapper
- Immortality - Milan Kundera
Pages Read: 2,441
Year-to-Date: 12,111
In 2013, my goal is to read 25,000 pages by year's end. I measure progress in pages, rather than titles, to avoid any bias toward shorter books. Here's what I read in March:
- Scorpions - Noah Feldman
- Benediction - Kent Haruf
- In Spite of the Gods - Edward Luce
- Hugo Black - Roger Newman
- Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name - Vendela Vida
- King Leopold's Ghost - Adam Hochschild
- Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
- Wild Bill - Bruce Allen Murphy
- Where'd You Go, Bernadette - Maria Semple
Pages Read: 3,649
Year-to-Date: 9,670
In 2013, my goal is to read 25,000 pages by year's end. I measure progress in pages, rather than titles, to avoid any bias toward shorter books. Here's what I read in February:
- The Little Book of Common Sense Investing - John Bogle
- The Elements of Investing - Burton Malkiel
- A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
- Family Matters - Rohinton Mistry
- Such a Long Journey - Rohinton Mistry
- Learned Hand - Gerald Gunther
- The Risk Pool - Richard Russo
- The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
Pages Read: 3,264
Year-to-Date: 6,021
In 2013, my goal is to read 25,000 pages by year's end. I measure progress in pages, rather than titles, to avoid any bias toward shorter books. Here's what I read in January:
- Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima
- Runaway Horses - Yukio Mishima
- The Temple of Dawn - Yukio Mishima
- The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima
- Louis D. Brandeis - Melvin Urofsky
- Baltasar and Blimunda - Jose Saramago
- The Stone Raft - Jose Saramago
Pages Read: 2,757
Year-to-Date: 2,757
Since I embarked on my Great Books Project ten (!) years ago, my life has been enhanced in immeasurable ways by a renewed devotion to reading. Well, not entirely immeasurable, since I have kept track of every book I have read since 2003 (679 through 2012).
In 2012, my goal was to read 25,000 pages. The year was a success, and the quantifiable nature of the endeavor continues to make it easier to motivate myself and to track progress.
I soared past the 25,000 page goal in 2012 and managed to hit 30,000 pages for the first time since I was in the Army, though only a sprint through ten books in December got me past that milestone, though at times I felt I was pursuing my reading at the expense of other worthy endeavors. As such, I am going to avoid the temptation of increasing the goal this year, and will repeat the pledge of the past two years:
I will read 25,000 pages in 2013.
Here's to another wonderful year of reading!
At the start of 2012, I set a goal to read 25,000 pages by year's end:
In 2011, my goal was to read 25,000 pages. The year was a success, and the quantifiable nature of the endeavor continues to make it easier to motivate myself and to track progress.I surpassed the 25,000 page goal by several thousand pages, though at times I felt I was pursuing my reading at the expense of other worthy endeavors. As such, I am going to avoid the temptation of increasing the goal this year, and will repeat last year's pledge.
Here's what I read in 2012:
Despite choosing not to increase the goal, I far surpassed it, finishing the year having read 68 books totaling 30,391 pages, or just under 450 pages per book. After a fiction-heavy 2010, and a nonfiction-heavy 2011, I found a bit of balance this past year. Of the 68 books I read, 36 were fiction or poetry and 32 were nonfiction, with the latter concentrated particularly in U.S. and world history.
Amongst the 32 nonfiction titles I read in 2012, the best were a pair of biographies by Jean Edward Smith about two of America's finest general/presidents: Grant and Eisenhower in War and Peace. Both men are almost universally admired for their military careers, but Smith persuasively makes the case that their presidencies, and Grant's in particular, are generally underrated.
Just behind Smith's books on my list of favorites were a pair of psychology texts: Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, which examined the way our minds work (and the contrast with how we think they work) and Susan Cain's Quiet, which explored the characteristics and qualities of introversion in our modern society.
On the fiction side, I finally got around to re-reading Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, yet another of those books that I disliked when forced to read it in high school but now appreciate its brilliance. It was particularly interesting to read this alongside The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson's fascinating narrative history of the Great Migration.
Amongst more recent fiction, I finished my tour of David Mitchell's novels with Cloud Atlas, which was every bit as good as folks have been telling me (even if I still slightly prefer The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), and I also was profoundly moved by Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which appears to have produced greatly divided opinion.
I managed to avoid any truly unpleasant reading experiences this year, but if I had to pick out a couple of less gratifying reads I would pick Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, which I found to be all style and little substance, and Marjorie Kowalski Cole's Correcting the Landscape, which was the only selection I did not enjoy amongst the published winners of the Bellwether Prize; the most recent, Naomi Benaron's Running the Rift, was the best.
All in all, another wonderful year in reading.
In 2012, my goal is to read 25,000 pages by year's end. I measure progress in pages, rather than titles, to avoid any bias toward shorter books. Here's what I read in December:
- Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese
- The Middlesteins - Jami Attenberg
- Africa - John Reader
- The Snowball - Alice Schroeder
- Quiet - Susan Cain
- The Wizard of Lies - Diana Henriques
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
- Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely
- Clarence Darrow - John Farrell
- Sweet Tooth - Ian McEwan
Pages Read: 4,362
Year-to-Date: 30,391
In 2012, my goal is to read 25,000 pages by year's end. I measure progress in pages, rather than titles, to avoid any bias toward shorter books. Here's what I read in November:
- The Spectator Bird - Wallace Stegner
- The Forever War - Dexter Filkins
- Last Lion - Peter Canellos
- Game Change - John Heilemann
- Howards End - E.M. Forster
- The Round House - Louise Erdrich
- Telegraph Avenue - Michael Chabon
Pages Read: 2,503
Year-to-Date: 26,029
In 2012, my goal is to read 25,000 pages by year's end. I measure progress in pages, rather than titles, to avoid any bias toward shorter books. Here's what I read in October:
- Mudbound - Hillary Jordan
- The House of Morgan - Ron Chernow
- Titan - Ron Chernow
- The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
- Mr. Sammler's Planet - Saul Bellow
Pages Read: 2,339
Year-to-Date: 23,526
In 2012, my goal is to read 25,000 pages by year's end. I measure progress in pages, rather than titles, to avoid any bias toward shorter books. Here's what I read in September:
- Running the Rift - Naomi Benaron
- Eisenhower in War and Peace - Jean Edward Smith
- The Warmth of Other Suns - Isabel Wilkerson
- Walking with the Wind - John Lewis
- Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
- The Great Bridge - David McCullough
Pages Read: 3,096
Year-to-Date: 21,187
