Last January, on a bit of a whim, I started recording the books I read. And while I stumbled here and there with the rest of my 2009 resolutions, I was amazingly dutiful about this list. And so it was that I was able to relive a year of literary adventures this afternoon. This was pure book geek fun, folks, and I plan to keep my “Books Read” list going in 2010.
First, the numbers …
I read 117 books in 2009: 59 works of fiction, 56 non-fiction and 2 poetry. Broken down by genre, the count is: 47 picture books, 31 middle-grade books, 8 young adult books, and 28 adult books.
Books that truly thrilled me got a star next to their entry, and I gave many of them as Christmas gifts this year. Only one book had two stars next to its name. Which book was that, you ask? ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE, by Barbara Kingsolver, known around here as the book that changed the way I live. If you haven’t already read it, you really should.
The number that gave me most to think about was this one: 21 That’s the number of books on my 2009 reading list that I managed to blog about during year. Interesting. I started this blog as a place to talk about books—books I love, books I write, books that find their way into my hands in mostly random and always interesting ways. But blogging about books has gotten harder for me over the past three years. Part of the problem is time, as in: I don’t have enough. The other part, though, is my personal struggle with what blogging about a book means … and what not blogging about a book means. Today’s exercise has got me thinking even harder about books and my blog and how the two fit together.
In case you are worried that my New Year’s Day was all book geekery, check out the image behind the cut. My husband, kids, and I started 2010 with a hike in the woods behind our house, and what we found there had one of us screaming.
© Loree Griffin Burns
It’s a deer carcass. And for the record, I was NOT the one who screamed!