new years and books
Over Xmas & New Years, I was away from computer a fair bit and I actually got some reading done. It was fantastic. So, not really a New Yrs resolution or anything, but just by happenstance, I was reading more, and even better, got back on the novel horse, and am chugging along through Chapter 8 of the new one (that’s about half-way done the whole thing, roughly). Feels good.
Patrick posted this about books he read in 2006 (well done); and Julien plans to read 52 - a book a week - in 2007. So I am going to jump in and join the fray.
I tried doing the book-a-week thing in 2005, I think, and got stalled. That always happens. Well, I shall try again this year. Maybe we can have a weekly support-group meeting.
Normally my reading modus is one novel and one non-fiction book at the same time. For the record, here are the last 5 books I have read, with the following star ratings:
*** to be stored on my top shelf, to the left of my desk
** please return after you are done with it
* satisfactory
ZERO a book I did not like
***Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow
*The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (explanation for my rating coming here soon)
**A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
***Notes on a Catastrophe, by Elizabeth Kolbert
**The Upside of Down, by Thomas Homer-Dixon
(I note that I have been very lucky with these last reads … ususally I don’t have so many 2/3-stars to give out)
And here is my reading plan for the next little while, subject to change of course:
Fiction:
-Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami
-Lullabies for Little Criminals, by Montrealer Heather O’Neil (really looking forward to this one)
-Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon
-Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevski
-Slow Man, by JM Coetzee
-A Complicated Kindness, by Miriam Toews
-The Time in Between, David Bergen
Non-Fiction:
-Programming the Universe, by Seth Lloyd
-The Wealth of Networks, by Yochai Benkler
-The Human Touch, Michael Frayne
-The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
-America at the Crossroads, by Francis Fukayama
-Hubris, by Michael Iskoff and David Corn
-The Prince of the Marshes, by Rory Stewart
I think I need to throw some candy in there to get through it all. And that gets me to mid-April, roughly.
hello! i’ve stumbled-upon the librivox site and am very excited about it!! awesome, good on you, dude! i’m looking thru and reading what i can to get a better idea of how it works and such. project gutenberg is one of my favorite sites! i’ve a journal, Debra’s Dose, which is an extension of Debra’s Daily Dose (an earlier AOL journal). this is great, i’ll be sure to visit and read often, and i might even end up reading for librivox, thanks for putting this out there and for organizing and getting it going!! kudos to you, have a great weekend, grins, debra
Comment by Debra — January 4, 2007 @ 7:41 pm
thanks debra, do you have a URL? I like dose sites.
Comment by hugh — January 4, 2007 @ 8:18 pm