The Year in Books - 2008

While one day is pretty much indistinguishable from any other out here in the desert, my calendar tells me it is December 31. With another year over, it's time to take a look at how I did with my Great Books Project. This year I set a goal of reading at least 100 books, and I am excited to be able to say I met that goal with room to spare:

  1. Eventide - Kent Haruf
  2. Passionate Sage - Joseph Ellis
  3. The Assassins' Gate - George Packer
  4. Benjamin Franklin - Edmund Morgan
  5. The Survivor - John Harris
  6. Atonement - Ian McEwan
  7. The Tie That Binds - Kent Haruf
  8. The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan
  9. The Immortal Bartfuss - Aharon Appelfeld
  10. Cobra II - Michael Gordon
  11. Fiasco - Thomas Ricks
  12. In the Company of Soldiers - Rick Atkinson
  13. State of Denial - Bob Woodward
  14. Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse
  15. The Sweet Hereafter - Russell Banks
  16. Out Stealing Horses - Per Petterson
  17. His Illegal Self - Peter Carey
  18. Mere Christianity - C.S. Lewis
  19. Ray in Reverse - Daniel Wallace
  20. Badenheim 1939 - Aharon Appelfeld
  21. Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
  22. The History of Love - Nicole Krauss
  23. In the Wake - Per Petterson
  24. Lincoln - Richard Carwardine
  25. Supreme Conflict - Jan Crawford Greenburg
  26. The Lake - Yasunari Kawabata
  27. Nickel and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich
  28. A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
  29. Isaac Newton - James Gleick
  30. The Assault on Reason - Al Gore
  31. The Nine - Jeffrey Toobin
  32. House of the Sleeping Beauties - Yasunari Kawabata
  33. The Ice Storm - Rick Moody
  34. Harry, Revised - Mark Sarvas
  35. Justice For All - Jim Newton
  36. Becoming Justice Blackmun - Linda Greenhouse
  37. Drown - Junot Diaz
  38. The Child in Time - Ian McEwan
  39. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
  40. The New Face of War - Bruce Berkowitz
  41. Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri
  42. Ancient Greece - Thomas Martin
  43. Obsessive Genius - Barbara Goldsmith
  44. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
  45. A Separate Peace - John Knowles
  46. The Bill of Rights - Akhil Amar
  47. Go Tell It on the Mountain - James Baldwin
  48. Polio - David Oshinsky
  49. March - Geraldine Brooks
  50. The Chosen - Chaim Potok
  51. Billy Budd - Herman Melville
  52. The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
  53. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
  54. Dracula - Bram Stoker
  55. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
  56. Tartuffe and Other Plays - Moliere
  57. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
  58. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin - Gordon Wood
  59. Companero - Jorge Castaneda
  60. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
  61. Girls of Riyadh - Rajaa Alsanea
  62. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
  63. The Sea - John Banville
  64. A History of Modern Japan - Andrew Gordon
  65. Russia - Philip Longworth
  66. The Cold War - John Lewis Gaddis
  67. Peace Like a River - Leif Enger
  68. Promised Land, Crusader State - Walter McDougall
  69. Polk - Walter Borneman
  70. Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
  71. The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
  72. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
  73. 1948 - Benny Morris
  74. Crescent & Star - Stephen Kinzer
  75. The American Plague - Molly Crosby
  76. The Demon Under the Microscope - Thomas Hager
  77. Crossing to Safety - Wallace Stegner
  78. First Snow on Fuji - Yasunari Kawabata
  79. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle - David Wroblewski
  80. The Winds of Change - Eugene Linden
  81. The World According to Garp - John Irving
  82. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
  83. The Story of Britain - Rebecca Fraser
  84. The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
  85. Reason - Robert Reich
  86. Bad Money - Kevin Phillips
  87. The Trillion Dollar Meltdown - Charles Morris
  88. The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama
  89. What's the Matter With Kansas? - Thomas Frank
  90. The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
  91. De Niro's Game - Rawi Hage
  92. The Conscience of a Liberal - Paul Krugman
  93. To Siberia - Per Petterson
  94. Supercapitalism - Robert Reich
  95. A Mercy - Toni Morrison
  96. Seize the Day - Saul Bellow
  97. The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides
  98. Einstein - Walter Isaacson
  99. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
  100. The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan
  101. 1812 - Walter Borneman
  102. When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro
  103. Charming Billy - Alice McDermott
  104. Last Orders - Graham Swift
  105. A Leap in the Dark - John Ferling

There was a slight lean toward fiction, with 59 books versus 46 nonfiction. Partially due to the quantitative nature of my reading goal, there was also a lean toward shorter books, with just over half running 300 pages or less. I'll be correcting for that in 2009.

Not every book was worthy of my time. The biggest fiction disappointments were Yasunari Kawabata's The Lake, which is one of his lesser known works for a reason, and Daniel Wallace's Ray in Reverse, which didn't hold a candle to his previous book, Big Fish. I also found two works of nonfiction noteworthy in their awfulness. Rick Atkinson's In the Company of Soldiers was basically a travelogue of hobnobbing with generals in Iraq; it is almost impossible to believe he is also the author of the widely-acclaimed An Army at Dawn and The Face of Battle. Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed was a presumptuous and condescending attempt to assuage what apparently passes for a conscience in her world.

But most of what I read was pretty good. On the fiction side, my favorite book read this year was Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's remarkable meditation on faith and family. Other strong recommendations include Ian McEwan's Atonement, James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety.

Amongst the nonfiction books I read in 2008, the President-elect's The Audacity of Hope topped the list. I read it just a few days before the election, and it accomplished the impossible task of making me even more proud to cast my vote for him. Of the several books I read on Iraq early in the year, George Packer's The Assassins' Gate was unquestionably the best. I also highly recommend Paul Krugman's The Conscious of a Liberal, and John Ferling's political history of the American Revolution and the early Republic, A Leap in the Dark, which I finished this very morning and will be posting about over the next several days.

All in all, a great year in reading. Tomorrow I'll set some new goals.

Gabriel | December 31, 2008 | Permalink