Hard to believe it's already that time again.
I read 117 books in 2008 (these 110, plus six that I borrowed or deaccessioned), for an average of one every 3.1 days. That's down again from last year, a trend I have to attribute to the fact that I've been spending more time with the Legacy projects (which, while great fun, means I tend not to read quite as much) and less time on the train.
This was another very good reading year; in fact, it was so good that I've decided to dump my "bottom five" lists for fiction and non-fiction, since I didn't read enough bad books to make lists of them. I'll just give the good ones this time (in no order within the lists)
Fiction Top Five
- The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (review)
- The Late George Apley: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir by John P. Marquand (review)
- The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (review)
- The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff (review)
- The Black Tower by Louis Bayard (review)
Non-Fiction Top Five
- The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard (review)
- The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine by Benjamin Wallace (review)
- The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson by Kevin J. Hayes (review)
- Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (review)
- Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature by D. Graham Burnett (review)
Yale University Press gets my Publisher of the Year Award for the second year running; they continue to impress with the consistent quality of their publications.
Happy New Year to all, and may your 2009 be filled with good books and good cheer.
