There must be fifty ways…
Last year at this time, everyone who was anyone was juicing about their taking the 50 Book Challenge, as described in 50bookchallenge.
For myself, I didn’t do any juicing, and I really didn’t care to alter my lifestyle or my reading habits just to meet some arbitrary challenge. But I did decide that it’d be interesting to quietly record what I read for a year, irrespective of how many books it was, with no particular goal other than to observe the volume and content of my regular reading.
Even though I didn’t care how many books I read, for the first half of the year I was exactly on track for fifty, reading 13 books in Q1 and 12 more in Q2. That fell apart in Q3, as I read only two books due to travel and work and the PMC, but my throughput came back up to 9 in Q4. That means my total for 2006 was 36, or a book every ten days.
It didn’t surprise me, but it might interest you to know that of those 36 books I read, 95 percent were non-fiction. The only fiction books I read all year were one science fiction book and one humor. Other than that, all my reading had to do with real-world things I was trying to learn about.
That’s easily explained when you understand that my interest in fiction is pretty well saturated by the reading I have to do for DargonZine. As editor and part of our writing community, I read and wrote critiques of 20 short stories, and read another 19 while I was putting magazine issues together for distribution.
Returning exclusively to the books I read, the breakdown by subject is a good reflection of where my mind was in 2006. I read 9 books on photography, 6 on spirituality, and four books each on travel (Seoul and Las Vegas) and blackjack. I also read two books each on grammar, cycling, history, and biography (Einstein); and one book each on design, humor, technology (XSLT), science fiction, and cooking.
I’ve always been a pretty voracious non-fiction reader. Through grammar and high school I lived within a few blocks of the Maine State Library, which stocked little fiction but housed a very large collection of non-fiction. While I did read a fair amount of fantasy and SF as a young adult, I don’t read much fiction at all now, apart from DargonZine.
Finally, nearly half of my reading was books borrowed from the Boston Public Library, which is only a block away from my current home. Another third were my own books, with the small remainder being either gifts or borrowed.
For posterity and anyone who is really, really curious, here’s the full list, in order:
- Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities
- Readers’ Digest Complete Photography Manual: A Practical Guide to Improving Your Photography
- Cooking Soups for Dummies
- Lonely Planet: Seoul
- Culture Smart! Korea
- Winning Casino Blackjack for the Non-Counter
- The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
- Nikon D50 Digital Field Guide
- Wisdom of the Buddha
- Photoshop CS for Digital Photography
- 40 Digital Photography Techniques
- Available Light Photography
- Winning Blackjack for the Serious Player
- Night Photography
- Better Available Light Photography
- How to Look at Photographs
- Holidays on Ice (David Sederis)
- The XSL Companion
- Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
- Nothing’s Wrong: A Man’s Guide to Managing His Feelings
- Common Errors in English Usage
- The Most Powerful Blackjack Manual: A complete guide for Both Beginners and Experienced Players
- Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera
- The Dhammapada: A New Translation
- Tour de France: The History, The Legend, The Riders
- Cambridge Illustrated Atlas: Warfare: The Middle Ages: 768-1487
- Theory & Practice of International Relations
- The Most Powerful Blackjack Manual: A complete guide for Both Beginners and Experienced Players
- Bicycling Science
- A Marmac Guide to Las Vegas
- AvantGuide: Las Vegas
- Mortal Engines (Stanislaw Lem)
- Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal
- Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing
- Einstein: The Passions of a Scientist
- The Unexpected Einstein: The Real Man Behind the Icon