My goal for 2019 was to read 12 books. I made it to 10. I’m still counting that as a win.
Two of the books I read were in Spanish, which naturally not being my first language takes me a lot longer to get through given that I have to think more (what does that phrase mean again?) or spend time interrupting my reading flow by looking up things that make absolutely no sense to me. I’m fortunate to have a patient wife who is happy to indulge the list of phrases I bring to the breakfast table during these times.
Looking back at last year’s post, I see that I had additionally set as a vague plan to alternate between two English books and one Spanish one. Dear reader, I did not do that. And if I had, I would have read maybe five books the whole year. So let’s set out a more reasonable goal for 2020: 14 books overall, at least three of them in Spanish. I already have a few Spanish ones on my shelf I’m excited to read so no problems there. I’ll start with a few English ones to get my momentum going and see if I can actually hit my overall target this year.
2019 was an especially busy year for me and I’m hopeful 2020 will slow down enough for me to slow down too.
Without further ado, the 2019 list:
–Slim by Diego Enrique Osorno (Spanish)
–The Theory of Almost Everything by Salvatore Pane
–Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
–Babbitt by Lewis Sinclair
–La Mala Hora by Gabriel García Márquez (Spanish)
–The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck
–Dark Age by Pierce Brown
–Movies and other things by Shea Serrano
–Educated by Tara Westover
–Mr. Vertigo by Paul Auster
You may notice there are no links to posts about any of the books. I meant to do them, but after the third book sat in a stack at just the time life got the busiest, I gave myself the freedom to not sweat that in 2019. I don’t promise to do all of them in 2020, but I think I can get back to writing something about most of them.
Statistically, here’s how the year stacked up with the others since I began tracking in 2008:
As you can see, pretty much down across the board. Though I must say I was surprised that 2019 had basically the same number of books as the two prior years. I had completely forgotten I didn’t read as many those years either and feel slightly better about my latest effort.
I said I considered 10 a win against a goal of 12. That is due to the fact that the two Spanish books I read took me 71 and 60 days to read. My historical average is 23 days, so if you made those a typical English book, I would have had the time to read more than three additional books.
The average 2019 book was 346 pages. The longest was Dark Age at 752 pages and the shortest was La Mala Hora at 224. Slim took me the longest to read (71 days) while I blew through Movies and other things in 15 days
Usually I give some sort of “If you read five” and “Five maybe I would skip” but since the overall pool here is not huge, let’s do three and two.
Three I absolutely recommend you read:
-Unaccustomed Earth: Lahiri’s collection of short stories is so so so so enjoyable with the right mix of humor and touching human moments and you should not miss it.
-Dark Age: I’ll keep putting the latest Red Rising book here until Pierce Brown stops writing them. They are absurdly loud and wonderfully escapist dramas in space and also double as useful weapons if you’re ever attacked by a bear.
-The Theory of Almost Everything: A sci-fi book with secret labs and time traveling and young people figuring out life while trying to save the world and just pure fun.
Two maybe to not worry about:
-Log from the Sea of Cortez: Listen, I love Steinbeck and I loved parts of this book as he described a mission of running up and down collecting maritime specimens. But there’s only so much I care about the descriptions of different fish and that level is low.
-Mr. Vertigo: This was also a fun story at times, but there are wayyyy better Auster books you should spend your time on (Brooklyn Follies, Book of Illusions, Moon Palace).
Here is where I note I read zero books on my Nook this year. I think I have one in my library there so I’ll probably take care of that for 2020 housekeeping purposes.
2020 is also starting with a library book and I envision that being a larger trend for the year. Please send any recommendations my way, and happy reading!