Taking stock

I saw 38 movies this year. (I know this because I keep notes in Tinderbox. You can see them in the left column of the main page, http://markBernstein.org/. That’s better than the previous year, when I saw 33 movies. Some of these movies are long: I count a seasonal television show as one film. Still, this seems too low; I’d like, for example, to be reasonably conversant with most of Ebert’s Great Movies, and to even get started on them (there must be 140 by now) I've got to pick up the pace.

I read 44 books in 2009, down from 46 the previous year. Tinderbox again has the notes, and this time I let Tinderbox do the counting, too. I wrote that “I read ^ value($ChildCount(/Books 2009)) books”, where “Books 2009” is an agent that gathers each book note for the calendar year. My favorite book this year was Allegra Goodman’s Intuition. My favorite technical book was Javascript: The Good Parts. In nonfiction, Nick Hornby loved 1599, and so did I.