Tag: book log summary

The best book I read this year was Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff. Much as I enjoyed it, it took me forever.

The copy I read is printed and physically huge, so I didn’t carry it around with me; I had it by my bed. But it’s also an intellectually challenging book that requires concentration. So I didn’t really want to read it at bedtime. It sat there for months, until I made it a priority to sit down and get through it.

The truth is, my reading habits have changed. After I moved from Singapore to China near the end of 2022, I read fewer books overall, as part of the associated swath of lifestyle changes, and a larger proportion of my reading was ebooks in 2023 and 2024. I brought plenty of printed books with me, and I still can (and do) buy printed books in English (in China and when visiting the US), but I lost the habit of carrying a paper book around, and the habit of reading just before lights out. I almost stopped reading paper books in favor of ebooks: in 2024, I read 9 printed books out of 45 total.

In 2024 especially, I took advantage of free public domain ebooks after realizing that I was buying cheap ebooks even though I don’t much like the idea of buying ebooks at all—and I know darn well I shouldn’t be buying ANY books just because they’re a bargain price! So now my goal (again, still) is to try to do a better job following the last-in-first-out rule I made that I’ve been struggling with for a while.

See below for a complete list, book cover thumbnails, and thoughts on the quantity, length, format, and content of the books I read in 2024.

Continue reading Books I read in 2024

From 1999 to 2024, I have read at least one book over 1,000 pages every year.*

*Except 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2020 (?!).

According to my records, the longest books in those years were:

• 2015 – Gone with the Wind (862 pages)
• 2017 – Roots (899 pages)
• 2018 – The Annotated Malay Archipelago (761 pages)
• 2020 – Don Quixote (768 pages)

Caveats to the caveats: My copy of Gone with the Wind was printed really dense. Other copies (including the first edition) were more than 1,000 pages. Don Quixote is also often if not usually more than 1,000 pages in English. So I think these two still qualify me as having followed my “rule” of reading at least one 1,000-page book every year.

Roots and The Annotated Malay Archipelago really don’t qualify, though… What happened in 2017 and 2018?

What happened was, my local book group leader decided we would read The Dream of the Red Chamber! I read the five-volume Penguin version translated by Hawkes and Minford, titled The Story of the Stone, from October 26, 2017 to January 14,  2018.

Vol. 1 – 540 pages
Vol. 2 – 601 pages
Vol. 3 – 637 pages
Vol. 4 – 398 pages
Vol. 5 – 383 pages

Total 2,559 pages!

That’s more than equivalent to two 1,000-page books, so I’m going to count The Story of the Stone as my long book for both 2017 and 2018.

So, if granted a little flexibility, I can actually rather truthfully say:

From 1999 to 2024, I actually have read at least one book over 1,000 pages every year!

Or we can say that since there are more than 26 doorstoppers on the list, the average is more than one per year anyway. (Whatever! Much books! Very reading! Such wow!)

See below for the list of all the 1,000-page books (by year and by genre) and some comments.

Continue reading 26 Years of Doorstoppers

The best book I read in 2023 was Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. I liked it because it offers a lot of insight into politics, religion, culture, and human psychology.

The runner up was The Crowd, by Gustave Le Bon, which I liked for the same reason!

I only read 27 books in 2023, approximately one every two weeks. For comparison, I read 45 books in 2022, and I think that was the lowest total since I started keeping track in 1999. The truth is, I moved to China in December 2022 and started a new job at the beginning of 2023, so all my routines got turned upside down. Also, I was pretty slow getting through the four-volume Journey to the West, which was not to my taste.

Of the books I read this year, 10 were ebooks that I read on my phone or kindle, and 17 were printed books.

Of the 10 ebooks, 2 were free public domain ebooks, 1 was free on Amazon because the author decided to give it away, and 7 were purchased.

Of the 17 printed books, 2 were bought by my office, 12 were books I already owned, 2 were bought new, and 1 was bought used.

See below for notes on the content of this year’s books.

Continue reading Books I read in 2023

For “best book of 2022”, I choose Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks.

(It’s actually the end of 2024 now, so I don’t remember all 45 of the books I read in 2022 well enough to do a fair comparison. I’m choosing this one by Sacks because it’s always a pleasure to read his stuff, and I hadn’t read this one before.)

Other books I really enjoyed in 2022, according to the annotations in my log, include all six of Jane Austen’s novels, Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, the entire Dragonwatch series by Brandon Mull, and Never Split the Difference by Chriss Voss with Tahl Raz.

See below for a complete list, book cover thumbnails, and thoughts on the quantity, format, and content of the books I read in 2024.

Continue reading Books I read in 2022