Tuesday, January 11, 2011

2010 Year in Review

I cannot believe that 2010 went by so quickly. At the beginning of 2010 I decided to read a little more deliberately. While I did not achieve all my goals I did make significant progress and had a good reading year over all, especially as it included some really great books.

My five favorite books from 2010:

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

It was very hard to narrow it down to only five, especially since I really loved all of my honorable mentions below. It didn't make any sense to me however to pick 11 favorites since I only read 26 books this year. I guess it goes to show that I had a very successful reading year at least in terms of quality!

Honorable Mention:
Shriek
The Other City
New York Trilogy
A Wild Sheep Chase
Brasyl
Housekeeper and the Professor

Reading Achievements for 2010:
I read twenty six books, which does not compare to most book bloggers but I am quite happy with that number as it is one more than last year and I expected to have read less as it was an especially hectic year for work and life. Of the ten books that I intended to read in 2010 I managed to read half of them, which isn't bad. Of the seven that I had on my shelves that I intended to read for challenges I only read three of them. Indeed, I didn't do very well with Challenges in 2010. I completed the Sci Fi Experience (3 books read), Once Upon A Time (4 books read), RIP (1 book read) and Japanese Literature (1 book read) but dropped out of the Speculative Fiction Challenge and Mind Voyages. I did manage to read two books related to art (The Savage Garden and My Name is Red) and one book about books (The Man Who Loved Books Too Much). I am way behind in writing reviews and need to get better about that, especially since my main goal in having this blog is to replace my physical reading diary.

Statistics:
Although some of the books could fall into more than one category for the purposes of this list I only assigned one category for each book.
Nonfiction - 2
Science Fiction - 3
Horror - 0
Fantasy - 4
Mystery - 3
Literary - 9
Thriller - 3
Other - 1
Female authors - 5
Male authors - 21
New to me authors - 15
Audiobooks - 10
Ebooks - 4

I was surprised that I listened to more audio books than ebooks but since my husband has returned my Kindle to me I bet that ebooks will increase in 2011.

2 comments:

Bellezza said...

A Wild Sheep Chase was one of my favorite reads of 2010 as well. How can it not be, written by Haruki Murakmi?

Moo said...

I love Murakami! And I really struggled with whether or not to include A Wild Sheep Chase in my top five - how could a Murakami not be in the top five! But upon reflection, while I really enjoyed A Wild Sheep Chase, it was not my favorite Murakami read to date and I simply was not as excited about it as the ones in my top five. I am debating what to read next of Murakami and am thinking of Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World.