One Last Thing...

...on the books I read last year. Most represented publisher was Penguin with 12 books, then 4 for Oxford University Press.

More on What I Read Last Year

On the way back to Seattle from my friend's bachelor party, I started reading Conrad's Outcast of the Islands. The novel was unremarkable, although I'll keep reading Conrad, but in the notes I learned that one of Conrad's main sources was Alfred Russel Wallace's Malay Archipelago. Since I happened to have a copy of Wallace on my shelf, I read them at the same time. The main things I learned from Wallace and from the Oregon Trail, by Francis Parkman, is that 19th century travelers loved killing animals, drinking coffee, and getting sick.

I did indeed finish the Decameron, as I anticipated, and read it's cousin, Arabian Nights, or at least the first of three volumes. The Decameron took about 4 years for me to read since I would put it down when the stories started to blur together. There were some real gems, especially about putting the devil into hell and a man trying to turn his wife into a donkey, but it doesn't even compare to the genius of Arabian Nights.

Regarding Marx's Das Kapital vol. 1, I've never had so little to say about such a big book, which is basically how I felt about Anti-Oedipus. One of my goals for the year is to find a few things to say about Marx. Briefly, though, I was less attracted to the economic theory and more attracted to reporting on working conditions and labor history, and Marx's style. I'm about 50 pages from finishing a collection of his journalism, and plan to read quite a bit more of him and about him this year.

Trollope's Autobiography was better than his novel, the Eustace Diamonds, which I expected to be quite a bit more hardboiled than it was. The most memorable episode from Trollope's autobiography is when he visits Brigham Young while traveling across America. It's a brief meeting. (Incidentally, Francis Parkman talks a lot in his book on how all the travelers are terrified of Mormons.)

Last year marked a return to genre fiction for me, which I continued by reading the Bonehunters, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons. I don't see my self going whole-hog back into genre fiction, or picking up random titles, but I'll at least finish out these two series and a few others.

The List

In 2011, I read 39 books. 2 were by women. 11 were written in the 21st century, 11 in the 20th, 14 in the 19th, and 3 before that. Original languages are English, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, French, Danish, Japanese, and Arabic. 21 were fiction. Goodreads calculates the total as 17,941 pages. I'll write more on this later but, for now, here's the list:

The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon
The Decameron - Giovanni Boccacio
Capital vol. 1 -Karl Marx
The Hours - Michael Cunningham
Human, All Too Human - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Mismeasure of Man - Stephen J. Gould
Off the Books - Sudhir Venkatesh
Inez - Carlos Fuentes
The Challenge of Jesus - N.T. Wright
Confessions of an English Opium Eater - Thomas de Quincey
Redburn - Herman Melville
The Seven Pillars of Creation - William P Brown
Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
Sons of the Profits - William Speidel
Scarlet and Black - Stendhal
Reaper's Gale - Steven Erikson
Orient Express - Graham Greene
The Sublime Object of Ideology - Slavoj Zizek
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
An Outcast of the Islands - Joseph Conrad
In the Lake of the Woods - Tim O'Brien
The Eustace Diamonds - Anthony Trollope
An Education - Lynn Barber
Nobody Move - Denis Johnson
A Feast for Crows - George Martin
Anti-Oedipus - Deleuze & Guattari
An Autobiography - Anthony Trollope
Repetition / Philosophical Crumbs - Soren Kierkegaard
The Malay Archipelago - Alfred Russel Wallace
A Dance with Dragons - George Martin
Jonathan Wild - Henry Fielding
The Birth of the Clinic - Michel Foucault
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Gay Science - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Oregon Trail - Francis Parkman
1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
Reflections - Walter Benjamin
Arabian Nights vol. 1