I'm not very good at keeping up my books list over at goodreads.com -- I often forget to record books I've read, and I usually forget to note when I've read them or else enter the dates wrong -- so looking over my list of books there is a wholly unreliable way of finding out what I actually did read in 2008. Nevertheless I gave it a once-over, and it appears that I've read about 40 books so far this year. That's well below my usual. The shortfall is due to the nearly two months I mostly couldn't read after my cataract surgeries. What's not recorded is the depressing number of books that I start reading but don't finish. I think I'm getting harder to please as I get older, or maybe less patient, I don't know, but I do believe that on average I start and stop two to three books for every book I finish nowadays. (One result is that my books-read list on goodreads looks crazily skewed toward four- and three-star reviews; that's what happens when you only read through to the end if you're loving it or darned near.) Just these last two weeks I've already started and stopped three books, while I finished just one. I just can't force-read anymore. Lately my rule has become rather harsh: if I don't wake up first thing in the morning dying to get back to the book I was reading the night before, it's not worth returning to. Too cranky, right? But there are so many books and I've no time to waste on any that don't enthrall me.
Posting this is a bit premature as I can expect, barring some disaster, to read several more books this month, especially during the holiday break, and chances are high, I think, that a certain one of them will turn out to be the best book I read this year. I feel like doing this now, though, so here are my favorites among the books I think I read so far this year.
Fiction:
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. I: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
Hottentot Venus by Barbara Chase-Riboud
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
Wild Nights! by Joyce Carol Oates
Strange As This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake
The Age of Dreaming by Nina Revoyr
Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas
Nonfiction:
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier
My Life by Fidel Castro
Low-Wage Capitalism by Fred Goldstein
