A few years ago I challenged myself to read 20 books in one year, kept a record of all of my reading and on December 31 took a step back to recap the year that was.

I didn’t read quite as much this year as I did in 2008 or 2009, but unlike those years, I did post a blog entry for every book in 2010.

This year’s group, in tower form:

In list form (with links to their respective entries):

–Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
–The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
–The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons
–Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
–Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
–The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler
–Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
–All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein & Bob Woodward
–Animal Farm by George Orwell
–When You are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
–Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
–The Downhill Lie by Carl Hiaasen
–The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
–I Love it When You Talk Retro by Ralph Keyes
–Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
–Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman
–The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck
–Planet Simpson by Chris Turner

Being a giant nerd, I actually keep an Excel spreadsheet of my reading. Other than helping me remember the order in which I read each one, it also provides a quick way to serve up some data at the end of the year.

I read 18 books (20 in 2008, 21 in 2009) with a total of 5512 pages. That’s an average of 306 pages per book, with the longest checking in at an even 700 pages (The Book of Basketball) and the shortest at 103 (Of Mice and Men).

It took me an average of 19 days to finish each one — longest, 40; shortest 2.

I know I have written before that I usually really enjoy the titles that have been recommended to me by friends, and this year was certainly no different. “Devil in the White City” is a book absolutely everyone should read — a fascinating true crime tale of a serial killer in Chicago at the end of the 19th Century. Thanks, Mika. “I Love it When You Talk Retro” is an interesting look at how words and phrases stick around in our lexicon long after their original use/meaning is forgotten. Very educational — thanks, Jaclyn.

Made me laugh: “The Book of Basketball,” “The Downhill Lie,” “Planet Simpson”

If you only read five: “The Brooklyn Follies,” “Devil in the White City,” “Three Cups of Tea,” “All the President’s Men,” “Eating the Dinosaur” (four of the five are non-fiction — opposite from last year)

You’ll learn something: “Blink,” “Three Cups of Tea,” “I Love it When You Talk Retro”

Hardest read: “Absalom, Absalom!” (I should have learned from last year, when another Faulkner book took this award — mental note: lay off the Faulkner in 2011)

Unlike the past two years, there aren’t any books on the list I would have left out. Even those that made my brain hurt were well worth the effort.

In 2008, I singled out A.J. Jacobs’ “The Year of Living Biblically” for having the best cover art. This year, there are some great contenders, including “The Brooklyn Follies” and its picture of an old man standing in an intersection staring confusedly into a plastic bag in his hands.

But nothing can top “Eating the Dinosaur” with its diagram of a triceratops (I think) with text pointing out all the different cuts of meat on the animal.

Overall, a very good literary year made even more fulfilling by committing to process each text through my own writing. I will definitely continue to do that in 2011.

At the end of last year’s post I mentioned a writing project I intended to pursue this year. I started and stopped and started and stopped a bunch of times. There’s something there, maybe, and hopefully I’ll sit down and get it going again in 2011.

As far as the blog goes, this was quite a prolific year. I posted 119 entries (including this one), a number that was clearly aided by writing something every day in June. Even without that month, this was still by far the most I have written here during one year. Hopefully most of it was interesting. I plan on experimenting a lot more with multimedia in the coming months.

Happy New Year.