Month: January 2010

2010 Pub Challenge

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The 2010 Pub Challenge is about reading 10 books published in 2010.  Follow the link to the official home page of the challenge to read the rules and how to sign up.  Even before I discovered this reading challenge, I had made a new years resolution to read 10-12 books in 2010 that had been published in 2010.  I have discovered that my reading feels more exciting when I mix in a good many new books.  But this challenge presents another challenge:  How to find the best books of 2010 before the end of the year when everyone publishes their Best of 2010 reviews?

The only solution I can think of is to read as many book reviews as possible and see if I can spot titles with several consistent rave reviews.  Bookmarks Magazine does just this, but unfortunately, I’ve sworn off buying paper magazines, but they do have a links page to many current book reviews.

What I’ve decided to do is collect links on this page to the best online book reviews I can find.  Hopefully this will help me spot the emerging best books of 2010.  I also create another list, one for books I want to keep an eye on.  Working on this 2010 goal is actually helping me achieve a long term goal I’ve been thinking about for years.  I’ve always wanted to find a way to systematically read book reviews.  Even if I don’t have time to read all the books I want, I’d like to at least be aware of what’s out there.  Assembling this list below has been very rewarding already.

Best Book Review Sites

2010 Books to Keep an Eye On

 

JWH – 1/2/10

SuperBookworms and Reading Challenges

I wrote about my discovery of SuperBookworms at the end of 2007.  I was in awe of Eva who read over 200 books that year.  Well, this year she’s read over 400!  And she’s not just reading little escapist genre novels, but mostly a diet of big meaty literary books, and she follows up her reading by writing long elegant and educational reviews.  If you love to read you will find Eva’s blog a total inspiration.  Eva is part of an Internet sub-culture of online bookworm bloggers.  These people love books and reading, and they inspire each other to read more by proposing reading challenges.  A reading challenge works to get people to read a certain type of book, or a certain number of books.  Here are some examples of 2010 reading challenges:

There’s even a blog about reading challenges, A Novel Challenge.  Each of these sites will set up the rules for the challenge, and many of them will ask you to register – all this means is your name (real or imaginary) and blog URL gets added to a public list of people joining the challenge.  That way other people can go check what you’re reading.  You can link to your blog’s home page, or to a page created just for the challenge.  Most sites that host a challenge also create a challenge logo with link that you can place on your blog to help advertize the challenge.  Some challenges get 100-200 readers.

If you love discussing books, a reading challenge is merely an informal online book club.  There’s no real obligation.  It’s a great way to find new books and meet likeminded bookworms.  And some of these bookworms are super bookworms, which I’ve define as bookworms who read over a hundred books a year.  I’ve never found anyone who has read as much as Eva read this year, but it’s not uncommon to find readers who read 100-200 books a year, and pretty easy to find a handful of readers who read more than 200 books in a year.  I once read 478 books in 18 months, but I was a college dropout at the time, avoiding work, and they were mostly little science fiction paperbacks. 

I’m lucky to finish 40-50 books a year.  I aim for 52 a year, or one book a week, but in recent years I haven’t even made that goal.  I don’t think my mind could handle 400+ books like Eva reads – that’s just too much for me to think about.  Eva has health problems and reading is a relief for her, but her mind is far sharper than mine, and can digest and process vast quantities of words.  I can’t, even though I wish I could.  I mentally move like a sloth compared to Eva’s hummingbird speed thinking.  I would love to read and review more books but there are physical limits for everyone, and I’ve long discovered my limits.

Because of my reading limitations, I’ve decided to improve my bookworm life from another angle of attack.  I want to read fewer books, but find intensely great books to read.  I have three reading goals for 2010.  First I want to read 10-12 books published in 2010, and hopeful find books that will be on the best of the year lists at the end of 2010.  Second, I want to read another 10-12 classics that are memorable across the ages.  Finally, I want to read 10-12 books off my bookshelf – I have hundreds of unread books that I couldn’t wait to read them when I bought them, but have been neglected ever since.

I was very disappointed in my 2009 year of reading. I want to make 2010 a standout year.  Since 2002, I felt I’ve been going through a reading renaissance, but things got stale last year.  This past decade was the most exciting time for reading since I became a bookworm in my youth.  Reading excitement fell off after my early college years, and it wasn’t until I discovered audiobooks in 2002 that reading got exciting again like it had been in my teen years.  I don’t want to lose that thrill, but I think it will take concentrated work.

What’s really sad is I have so many great books on my bookshelves going unread.  I took five minutes and grabbed all the books that made my heart ache that I didn’t read this year.  I should give these top considerations for 2010.  I could have grabbed ten times more.  I’ve got to stop buying books if I can’t find the time to read them.  Here is my personal reading challenge – finish 10 of these books before I write my reading roundup one year from now:

  1. The Book Nobody Read: In Pursuit of the Revolutions of Nicholas Copernicus – Owen Gingerich
  2. The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism – Ross King
  3. H. G.: The History of Mr. Wells – Michael Foot
  4. The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World – Jenny Uglow
  5. A Long Fatal Love Chase – Louisa May Alcott
  6. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature – Steven Pinker
  7. Emotional Intelligence:  Why it Can Matter More than IQ – Daniel Goleman
  8. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Society – Jared Diamond
  9. Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe – Simon Singh
  10. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers
  11. Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions – Lisa Randall
  12. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature – Erich Auerbach
  13. Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe – Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee
  14. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science – Richard Holmes
  15. Stories of your Life and Others – Ted Chiang
  16. The Axemaker’s Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture – James Burke and Robert Ornstein
  17. Body and Soul: The Making of American Modernism: Art, Music and Literature in the Jazz Age 1919-1926 – Robert M. Crunden

If I finish any of these books, I’ll write a review and make a link of the title.  Just creating this personal challenge makes me feel excited about 2010.

JWH – 1/1/10

2009 Year in Reading

Reviewing the books I read in 2009 is very psychologically revealing, and disappointing in many ways.  I had a richer reading year in 2008.

Favorite Fiction:

  1. The Naked Sun – Isaac Asimov
  2. The Time Machine – H. G. Wells
  3. Orphans in the Sky – Robert A. Heinlein
  4. Dracula – Bram Stoker

Favorite Non-Fiction:

  1. The First Three Minutes – Stephen Weinberg
  2. Why Women Have Sex – Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss
  3. The Evolution of God – Robert Wright
  4. The Beatles – Bob Spitz

The Whole List:

  1. Farnham’s Freehold – Robert A. Heinlein (3rd time)
  2. Hyperion – Dan Simmons (2nd time)
  3. From Here to Eternity – Modern Scholar audiobook about science fiction
  4. Bellwether – Connie Willis (2nd time)
  5. The Green Hills of Earth – Robert A. Heinlein (2nd time)
  6. The Naked Sun – Isaac Asimov (2nd time)
  7. Roadmarks – Roger Zelazny
  8. More Than Human – Theodore Sturgeon (2nd time)
  9. The Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri
  10. The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
  11. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union – Michael Chabon
  12. The Byrds (4th edition) – Johnny Rogan
  13. The Canon – Natalie Angier
  14. Dune – Frank Herbert (2nd time)
  15. Bet Me – Jennifer Cruise
  16. Variable Star – Robert A. Heinlein (2nd time)
  17. To Your Scattered Bodies Go – Philip Jose Farmer (2nd time)
  18. The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut (2nd time)
  19. The Time Machine – H. G. Wells (3rd time)
  20. The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells (2nd time)
  21. The Fall of Hyperion – Dan Simmons
  22. The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time – Will Durant
  23. Persuasion – Jane Austin
  24. Mayflower – Nathaniel Philbrick
  25. The First Three Minutes – Stephen Weinberg
  26. Dracula – Bram Stoker
  27. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
  28. The Very First Light – John C. Mather & John Boslough
  29. The Beatles – Bob Spitz (abridged audio)
  30. The Year’s Ten Top Tales of SF – ed. Allan Kaster
  31. Replay – Ken Grimwood (3rd time)
  32. The Evolution of God – Robert Wright
  33. The Black Swan – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  34. Ringworld – Larry Niven (2nd time)
  35. Magnificent Desolation – Buzz Aldrin
  36. The Good Solder – Ford Maddox Ford
  37. Orphans of the Sky – Robert A. Heinlein (3rd time)
  38. The Man Who Was Thursday – G. K. Chesterton
  39. Flood – Stephen Baxter
  40. Why Women Have Sex – Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss

It’s pretty obvious this year I’m reliving my reading past.  I’m in two online book clubs devoted to classic science fiction and that’s dominating my selection of books.  My favorite science fiction book of the year in terms of pure entertainment was The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov.  Dune was very impressive, a true masterpiece, but I didn’t connect with it emotionally.  On the other hand I was dazzled by the imaginative speculation in Orphans of the Sky.  Most of the other SF books were page turning fun, but ultimately not that innovative. 

Overall, my reevaluation of classic science fiction has been disappointing.  Even on the online book clubs, enthusiasm for old SF books isn’t that high, we mostly love this stuff for nostalgic reasons.  I grew up thinking science fiction was genius thinking, but it’s not. Science fiction is fun, full of wild ideas, but ultimately, it’s superficial philosophically and contains very little scientific insights.  Few science fiction stories are as brilliant as The Time Machine, most are closer to The War of the Worlds.  The absolute best science fiction, like Orphans of the Sky and Dune, stand out for imagining unique concepts, while other great science fiction novels are merely good examples of story telling. 

Two science books, The First Three Minutes and The Very First Light, and are about the discovery of the cosmic background radiation and were my most mind expanding reads this year in terms of understanding reality.  The Canon was a great overview of science history, with an abundant of fascinating details.  I highly recommend it to people wanting a quick study of science.

In terms of religious philosophy and history, The Evolution of God was quite educational and rewarding.  Again expanding my knowledge of reality significantly.  I’ve been slowly reading the Bible and The Evolution of God makes a great supplement.

The two music biographies, The Byrds and The Beatles, were fantastic reads and terrific strolls down memory lane.  I could only get the abridged version of The Beatles on audio, but I have bought the fat hardback and I’m looking forward to reading it.  However, reading these two books only reinforces my looking backwards towards the 1960s.

The lesson I’m learning from writing this post is I need to make 2010 the year of living in the present.  I’ve already started that by playing contemporary music on Lala.com.  Musically, the huge gravity well of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s holds me inside an event horizon and I have struggle to see the light of modern music. 

The past is obviously a black hole pulling me into it – and I realize I need to fight its powerful pull.  I desperately need to blast out of the orbit of looking backwards if I want to keep my mind expanding.  I will never be young again, and I worry that nostalgia is a kind of premature burial.  I do believe I stay current with computers and the Internet, at least more so than my age group peers.  I’m also in touch with the current pop culture of movies and television.  And I watch a lot of news and documentary shows, and I consume vast quantities of wordage from the Internet.

I find my reading year more exciting and fulfilling when I read new novels and books.  The only 2009 books I read in 2009 were The Evolution of God, Why Women Have Sex and Magnificent Desolation.  I’d like to read at least 12-15 2010 books in 2010.

JWH – 12/31/9