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)
- Skeleton Man
- Iron Sunrise
- Agent Of Change
- The Undressed Art
- Watch Your Mouth
- Medici Money
- Almost French
- By Order Of The President
- Les Halles Cookbook
- Refactoring To Patterns
- O Chip e o Caleidoscópio
- Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells
- Specimen Days
- Flashman
- The Gastronomical Me
- Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd)
- Singularity Sky
- Great Movies II
- Lost Worlds
- Song for Eloise
- By The Light of the Study Lamp
- Faithful
- The Ornament of the World
- Working Effectively With Legacy Code
- The Complete New Yorker
- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
- Beyond Bullet Points
- The Rabbi's Cat
- Pal Joey
- March
- Cabala
- Stable Strategies
- Robert Frost
- The Quarry
- Blue at the Mizzen
- The Polysyllabic Spree
- The Bear Went Over The Mountain
- On Food and Cooking
- The Knight
- 1776
- Da Vinci Code
- Antwerp
- On Beauty
- Conflict of Honors
- Locked Rooms
- Fingersmith
- Mind Game
- Middlesex
- Drawing from Life
- Ruby in the Smoke
- Year's Best SF 10
- The Perfectionist
- Soul of a Chef
- Don't Make Me Think
- Never Let Me Go
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.