Reading 2005
End-of-year cleanup continues. Today, I added the agent that gathers all the books I read in calendar 2005. (I need an agent because the individual book pages are organized by season: Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer.)
The agent tells me I read 55 books this year, compared with 55 last year and 53 in 2003. Better, it gathers them all to reunite in one big virtual bedside pile, the better to think back upon a year of reading. (Tinderbox does the counting for me, so if I finish The Medici Money this week, the count will be updated automatically)
- Don't Make Me Think
- Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd)
- Middlesex
- Drawing from Life
- The Perfectionist
- Lost Worlds
- Cabala
- Ruby in the Smoke
- Robert Frost
- On Beauty
- Antwerp
- The Polysyllabic Spree
- The Quarry
- O Chip e o Caleidoscópio
- The Knight
- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
- Specimen Days
- Watch Your Mouth
- The Ornament of the World
- The Undressed Art
- By The Light of the Study Lamp
- Beyond Bullet Points
- Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells
- By Order Of The President
- Les Halles Cookbook
- The Complete New Yorker
- Stable Strategies
- Da Vinci Code
- 1776
- The Bear Went Over The Mountain
- Singularity Sky
- Faithful
- Half Moon Street
- Conflict of Honors
- Song for Eloise
- Pal Joey
- Agent Of Change
- Medici Money
- Year's Best SF 10
- Locked Rooms
- On Food and Cooking
- Blue at the Mizzen
- Iron Sunrise
- The Rabbi's Cat
- The Gastronomical Me
- Skeleton Man
- Fingersmith
- Working Effectively With Legacy Code
- Never Let Me Go
- Refactoring To Patterns
- March
- Soul of a Chef
- Great Movies II
- Almost French
- Flashman
This is one reason it's a good idea to have two notebooks -- a paper book that's always available, and a permanent journal (or Tinderbox) in which you can keep, preserve, and analyze everything. Reading and using your journal is as important as keeping it.
A reference book I wanted to write about shows up in this list. So does a book in Portuguese, a language that is Greek to me; it happens to include a translation of one of my essays and so I blogged it. This isn't rocket science: every aspect of your journal need not be exactly right. There will be no test afterward.