Lists of books read by year.
2021
| Author | Title |
|---|---|
| Kurt Vonnegut | Breakfast of Champions |
| Bill Bryson | A short history of nearly everything |
| Chris / Melissa Bruntlett | Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives |
| Haruki Murakami | Kafka on the shore |
| J.D. Salinger | Raise High The Roof Beams / Seymour, An Introduction |
| Yuval Noah Harari | Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind* |
| Rachel Cusk | Outline |
| John Steinbeck | The Grapes of Wrath |
| Andrew Loomis | Figure drawing for all it's worth |
| Andrew Loomis | Drawing the head and Hands |
| J.R.R. Tolkien | The Return of the King |
| Edward Snowden | Permanent Record* |
| Noam Chomsky | Who Rules the World* |
| Jenny Odell | How to do nothing* |
| Michelle Alexander | The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the age of colorblindness* |
| Ernest R. Norling | Perspective Made Easy |
I didn't read as much as I would have liked in 2021. Anything marked with a *
was an audiobook. This list is sorted most recent to earlier in the year. I
really enjoyed reading A short history of nearly everything which I managed to
finally finish while in Montreal. I started off the year with a lot of
non-fiction audio books which I listened to while in Toronto, while drawing in
the mornings and evenings. I think that they pretty quickly depressed me and I
needed to return to fiction after that.
I read quite a bit of art instruction books - drawing really was my main focus for a good part of the year.
2505 pages over 10 books.
2020
3664 Pages over 13 books, mostly novels.
| Author | Title |
|---|---|
| Donna Tart | The Secret History |
| Moebius | Edena |
| Albert Camus | L'etranger |
| Eden Robinson | Son of a Trickster |
| George Orwell | 1984 |
| George Saunders | Lincoln in the Bardo |
| J.R.R. Tolkien | The Fellowship of the Ring |
| Robin Diangelo | White Fragility |
| Zachary Tellman | Elements of Clojure |
| John Hodgeman | Medallion Status |
| John Steinbeck | Cannery Row |
| John Steinbeck | East of Eden |
| Haruki Murakami | What I Talk About When I Talk About Running |
| Larry Gonick & Tim Kasser | Hyper-Capitalism |
2019
4190 pages over 11 books, mostly novels.
| Author | Title |
|---|---|
| Haruki Murakami | The Wind Up Bird Chronicles |
| Johnathan Safran Foer | Eating Animals |
| Jenny Hval | Paradise Rot |
| Warren Ellis | Gun Machine |
| Octavia Butler | Dawn |
| Stephen King | On Writing |
| Haruki Murakami | A Wild Sheep Chase |
| Haruki Murakami | Hear The Wind Sing |
| Margaret Atwood | Oryx And Crake |
| Haruki Murakami | 1Q84 |
| Neil Gaiman | Norse Mythology |
Organization
I organize my reading lists, notes, rating and thoughts on books in a single
file using Org Modeº. What you are reading right now is just a headline in the
very same document: books.org. The file is rather large, containing headlines
"To Read", "Reading" and "Read". When I start a new book I (try to remember to)
capture the metadata about it using org-capture to fill in these properties:
:PROPERTIES: :author: George Orwell :title: 1984 :pages: 328 :page: 328 :date_started: [2020-08-18 Tue 17:40] :date_completed: [2020-09-08 Tue] :genre: Dystopian :type: Novel :rating: 9 :STATUS: complete :END:
These properties can then be turned into a table using Emacs, or filtered through using sparse-trees to.
At the top of this file there is an in-buffer-settings for determining column view:
,#+COLUMNS: %25AUTHOR(author) %25TITLE(title) %PAGES(pages) %RATING(rating) %TYPE(type) %DATE_STARTED(date_started) %DATE_COMPLETED(date_completed)
This enables creating an org block for tabulating books over time for the READ/READING sections:
#+BEGIN: columnview :id local :skip-empty-rows t #+END
Rather than post all my notes on each book (as some are empty, some are quite full, and some are personal) I've decided to summarize my reading lists into tables as above.