Book Summary and Goals

Now that I've caught up on all the reviews from the books I read in 2009, I thought I'd give a little summary.

I didn't really set any specific reading goals for myself in 2009, although I knew I wanted to do more reading. I did, however, want to keep track of the number of books that I read, so you probably saw that I kept track of my stats at the end of each blog post that reviewed a book. I finished the year having read 44 books (I'm counting that last one, even though I technically didn't finish it until January 1st). After reading The Stand as my third book in 2009, I decided I should also keep track of the number of pages I read, since there's a pretty big difference between reading a book that's 180 pages and one that's over 1200 pages! I finished the year having read 15,668 pages! That gives me an average of 356 pages per book. (Granted, every book has different sized pages and different font sizes...but I'm willing to ignore that for the sake of my sanity.)

I do keep track of all of my books on Goodreads, where I can give books up to 5 stars. I realized that I only gave 5 star ratings to four books this year: The Stand by Stephen King, and Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, and Voyager by Diana Gabaldon (the first three books in the Outlander series). Those were also by far the longest books I read this year. I wonder if that says something about the books I like...

My least favorite book this year was On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It's the only book I gave a one-star rating. I noticed that I gave out lots of 3 star ratings...which is a little disappointing. Of the books I gave 4 stars, my favorites were Moloka'i by Alan Brennert, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein, and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

I've been thinking about setting some reading goals for 2010. I want to set a goal of 48 books for the year (4 books a month sounds doable to me), but I do need to remember that I won't have nearly as much down-time this year (since I'll be working full-time all year...no more "stay at home wife" time for me!). So...we'll see what happens.

I've also been trying to come up with a list of books that I'd really like to read this year. I have my "to read" list on Goodreads, and I do already have 140 books on there! So within the next week or so, I think I'll go through and prioritize that list. Right now, a book goes to the top of the list whenever I add it. I know that I want to re-read Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but I might try to do that closer to the end of the year (since The Hobbit movie will be coming out next year). I also definitely want to read more of the classics that I have somehow missed over the years...like Middlemarch by George Eliot, The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.

If you have any book recommendations for me, please feel free to leave a comment!

Recent Reads

One of my goals this year is to read more books just for the fun of it. The sad part about being an English teacher is that I often get so busy I don't have time to read what I want to read; all I read is what I assign to my students. I started off on the right foot by reading Water for Elephants on our honeymoon. It was pretty good, and definitely a different story, but for all the rave reviews, I was expecting something more. Since then, I've been averaging a little over a book a month, which is a huge improvement for me!

However, I'm starting to notice a trend in my book choices. Most of them are depressing! I think that people have died in all but one of the books I've read since January. I actually read two books over spring break. The first was A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. As the title suggests, this is an autobiographical account of the wars in Sierra Leone. The author was 12 when war reached his village, and he was eventually "recruited" to become a soldier. He vividly describes some of the torture and death that he witnessed (and even inflicted) during this time.

After that, I read A Thousand Splendid Suns, the most recent book by Khaled Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner. The book was absolutely gripping. It's set almost entirely in Afghanistan, beginning in 1970s and finishing in more-or-less modern day. The main characters of the book are women, which is a very interesting perspective to see. However, these women are rejected by society, see their families die, are forced to marry and then are beaten, verbally abused, and raped by their husbands. The book also gives an Afghani view of the political scene in this country, including the rise and "governing" of the Taliban.

The question now becomes...what to read next? The next books that I have easily available to me are John Krakauer's Into Thin Air (a story of climbing Mt. Everest...where people die) and Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey (the stories of five people who die when a rope bridge breaks and sends them plunging into a gulf). Any suggestions for some lighter reading? Maybe I need to go back to Sophie Kinsella for a little chick-lit. (By the way...her latest, Remember Me?, is really good!)