Books Read - 2007
Last year I set a goal of reading 100 books, roughly two books per week. Though a quantity-based goal risks a distorting emphasis on shorter, easier books, I wanted to ensure that my busier schedule did not become an excuse for not reading.
It was during the summer before my second year in law school that I rediscovered my passion for reading. In 2004, the first full year of my Great Books Project, I read 89 books, including several doorstops like The Lord of the Rings, David Copperfield, and Crime & Punishment. Not too shabby, and more than I've been able to read since. After all, 2004 was the only year since my project began in which I was a student from January to December. I managed 69 books in 2005, the year I graduated, and just 52 books in 2006, my first year of full-time employment.
Last year, while falling short of my century goal, I managed to read 81 books. While this did include the Harry Potter novels and a few other children's books, I also finally got around to The Iliad, Beloved, and The Adventures of Augie March.
On the fiction side, the highlights of my reading in 2007 were Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From, and especially Jose Saramago's Blindness. Among the nonfiction, the best were Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, and Alan Taylor's American Colonies. The only real disappointment was Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, a poor follow-up to his brilliant The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
We are now, of course, nearly two months into 2008. I again aim to read 100 books by the end of the year, and things have started pretty well. Thus far I have finished 15 books in seven weeks:
- Eventide - Kent Haruf
- Passionate Sage - Joseph Ellis
- The Assassins' Gate - George Packer
- Benjamin Franklin - Edmund Morgan
- The Survivor - John Harris
- Atonement - Ian McEwan
- The Tie That Binds - Kent Haruf
- The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan
- The Immortal Bartfuss - Aharon Appelfeld
- Cobra II - Michael Gordon
- Fiasco - Thomas Ricks
- In the Company of Soldiers - Rick Atkinson
- State of Denial - Bob Woodward
- Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse
- The Sweet Hereafter - Russell Banks
My favorites so far are Ian McEwan's Atonement, read so that I could see the movie (which I have not done yet), and George Packer's The Assassins' Gate, easily the best of the five Iraq-related books on the list. 15 down, 85 to go. That's a lot of good books.
