2009: In Review

The stats are finalized: it was a recession year. I would quip about it ... but then you reach a certain age and etc, etc. I keep statistics on the number of books I read in a year - I've kept them now for 5 years. How did 2009 rate? Not badly. I averaged around 3.6 books a month, down from last year's 3.8, but up from other years. The total was 43 titles, and did I enjoy reading them? I did.

Analysis? The last year of residency? College exams? Who knows - I read only a third of the titles during the first half of the year. Perhaps there's nothing more insightful to say than that more of my time is now my own, again.

High Points of 2009's Reading:

Jack Vance's Lyonesse Trilogy, that I read compulsively and considered driving through the night to Hornby Island just to pick up the final volume; my introduction to the poetry of W.H. Auden; re-reading Haruki Murakami's first short story collection in translation, The Elephant Vanishes - imagine your favorite meal, at your favorite restaurant, on a perfect day... In a world with few clear favorites, Murakami Haruki is and has been for many years now my favorite author in any language. I also had a powerful experience with Dante's Inferno.

Low Points of 2009's Reading:

James Tiptree Jr.'s Star Songs of an Old Primate: aside from the solid SF pulp in "Your Haploid Heart," the collection itself was a major disappointment - I'd forgotten how repulsive I find "Houston, Houston Do You Read?" The disappointment comes of regarding Tiptree's other work, like Tales of the Quintana Roo so highly. Also, Zelazny's The Dream Master was drab and uninteresting with the least sympathetic main character I can imagine.

2009's Interesting Reads:

Richard Lewontin's wonderful prose, and even more important ideas in It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions; also Victoria Freeman's astounding genealogical opus Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America. Thor Heyerdahl's seminal adventure diary The Kon-Tiki Expidition was marvelous and transporting, and leaves you feeling hopelessly melancholy that the world he describes vanished before you were born - a world in which people receive telegrams that read "Sailing home-made balsa raft from Peru to Micronesia, stop. Are you coming?" And last but not least, how long has it been since you read early Robert Frost, say A Boy's Will, aloud? Too long. That's the answer.

Up or down on the graph, 2009 was a good year of reading.