Reading 2005
End-of-year cleanup continues. Today, I added the agent that gathers all the books I read in calendar 2005. (I need an agent because the individual book pages are organized by season: Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer.)
The agent tells me I read 55 books this year, compared with 58 last year and 60 in 2003. Better, it gathers them all to reunite in one big virtual bedside pile, the better to think back upon a year of reading. (Tinderbox does the counting for me, so if I finish The Medici Money this week, the count will be updated automatically)
- Da Vinci Code
- Specimen Days
- Song for Eloise
- By Order Of The President
- The Rabbi's Cat
- Beyond Bullet Points
- The Polysyllabic Spree
- Soul of a Chef
- The Gastronomical Me
- Skeleton Man
- Middlesex
- Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd)
- Never Let Me Go
- Fingersmith
- Robert Frost
- Pal Joey
- March
- Cabala
- Stable Strategies
- Blue at the Mizzen
- The Quarry
- Working Effectively With Legacy Code
- The Ornament of the World
- Year's Best SF 10
- On Beauty
- By The Light of the Study Lamp
- Don't Make Me Think
- The Knight
- Locked Rooms
- Refactoring To Patterns
- 1776
- Faithful
- Singularity Sky
- Flashman
- Conflict of Honors
- Almost French
- The Bear Went Over The Mountain
- The Perfectionist
- Great Movies II
- Medici Money
- Agent Of Change
- Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells
- Drawing from Life
- The Complete New Yorker
- O Chip e o Caleidoscópio
- Iron Sunrise
- The Undressed Art
- Les Halles Cookbook
- On Food and Cooking
- Watch Your Mouth
- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
- Antwerp
- Lost Worlds
- Mind Game
- Ruby in the Smoke
This is one reason it's a good idea to have two notebooks -- a paper book that's always available, and a permanent journal (or Tinderbox) in which you can keep, preserve, and analyze everything. Reading and using your journal is as important as keeping it.
A reference book I wanted to write about shows up in this list. So does a book in Portuguese, a language that is Greek to me; it happens to include a translation of one of my essays and so I blogged it. This isn't rocket science: every aspect of your journal need not be exactly right. There will be no test afterward.