At the end of 2008 I discovered that President Bush typically reads something like 80-90 books each year. I found that rather surprising and wondered if I was coming anywhere close. I decided to keep a reading list for 2009 to find out. I sorta stopped bothering around Feburary, so I’ve had to look back at my library checkouts, Amazon.com purchases, etc. to compile the list below. I count 44 books — not as many as I might have guessed, and less than one per week, though I’ve probably forgotten a few.
There’s no doubt a lot of my reading time is spent online these days. It’s a rare day that I don’t consume numerous blog posts as well as articles from NY Times, Slate.com, Ars Technica, and wherever Slashdot and Google News point me. Still, I feel like I should pick up the pace a bit in 2010. There’s nothing quite like a good book; plus, how can I be a proper elitist liberal if I’m only reading half as much as George W. Bush?
(+ is decent, ++ is good, +++ is great. Any book that turns out to be less than ‘decent’ I didn’t bother to finish or include on this list.)
++ Ender in Exile
+ Be the Dog
+++ The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
++ The Last Lecture
++ Trick or Treatment?
+ Go Ask Alice
+++ Little Common Sense Book of Investing
++ Into Thin Air
+ The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
++ Looking for Calvin and Hobbes
+++ Manifold Space (re-read)
+ A friendly letter to skeptics and atheists: Why God is good and faith isn’t evil
+ Enough: True measures of money, business, and life
++ Only Begotten Daughter
+ The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting go of the old ways of thinking to unleash a new prosperity
+ The Total Money Makeover
+++ The Intelligent Investor
+ The Smartest 401K Book You’ll Ever Read
++ The Boglehead’s Guide to Investing
+++ The Sparrow (re-read)
+ A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing
+ Gotcha Capitalism: How hidden fees rip you off every day, and what you can do about it
++ Children of God
++ Elantris
+++ Slaughterhouse Five
+ Light and Optics
+ The Last Colony
+ God’s Problem: How the Bible fails to answer our most important question — why we suffer
+++ When You Are Engulfed in Flames
+ Your Pregnancy for the Father-to-be
++ Buddhism without Beliefs
+ Agent to the Stars
+ Second Coming of Steve Jobs
+ Star Wars Outbound Flight
++ How We Believe (re-read)
+++ Raising Freethinkers
+++ Parenting Beyond Belief
++ How to Live on Mars
++ The Three Trillion Dollar War
+ On Being Certain: Believing you are right even when you’re not
++ The Currents of Space
+++ I, Robot
++ The Conservative Soul: How we lost it, how to get it back
+++ The Birth Partner
Scott
