My reading list: 2007-2012

Back when I was on livejournal, I took up what was characterized as the 50 Book challenge, wherein you read 50 books in one year. I started this in 2007, having probably read a total of one or two books in their entirety in 2006, since I had a habit of reading half a book, putting it down and never finishing it. I completed it by November, promptly stopped reading for a month and went back at it in January 2008.

It's now ceased to be anything out of the ordinary for me, and I've done it rather easily more often than not. I felt like I'd done a particularly good job this year, having already finished 13 books, despite the fact that one of them is the 2012 Baseball America Prospect Handbook, which usually takes a month to read. This year, it took a trip to Turkey. And toss in the fact that I'm reading what has to be the longest book I've read in terms of words (The Power Broker by Robert Caro, which clocks in over 1100 pages, but more than that, is a large sized book with small print. There are probably 10,000 more words in it than in any of the other tomes I've slogged through).

Sometime last year, I went through all the lists I'd kept for the prior years and put together a list spanning all of the books I've read since I embarked on what used to seem like a gargantuan task. Now it turns out that I read because I like it and because I have loads of books, because I kept buying them even when I didn't read.  If you're interested, here's the link to the list: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G8fq4FAjAQLnYpCxuNT97bTaEJoGDmlHp1sV4Oupis8/edit

At the end of that list, you'll find all the lists for the individual years.

For 2012, thus far, as I've said, I've gotten through 13 books: 

January (5)

When March Went Mad by Seth Davis
College Humor: The Website: The Book by the writers of Collegehumor.com
The Great Typo Hunt by Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson
The Book of Drugs by Mike Doughty
The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford

February (8)
Bottom of the 33rd by Dan Barry
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover
Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
D.C. Noir edited by George Pelecanos
2012 Baseball America Prospect Handbook edited by the editors of Baseball America
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
How to Archer by Sterling Archer

I considered 13 an auspicious start. Then I looked at the prior lists. Uh, not so much. In fact, it's barely above the median (and below the mean).

In comparison, through February in past years:

2007: 24 (thank you, Ian Fleming!)

2008: 9 (I literally worked around the clock for all of February and was in our New York office from 8 a.m. until midnight to 3 a.m. every day for two weeks and was working 9 a.m. until midnight in my office the rest of the month). 2 books is impressive for that month, really.

2009: 12

2010: 12 (one of these was From Here to Eternity, though, so that was responsible for tying up most of those months).

2011: 9 (I moved to DC and started a new job on January 30 where I then proceeded to work all the time I wasn't looking at houses, so I have a few excuses)