Monday, December 31, 2007

2007 in Books

This isn't going to be an account of what I thought the best books published in 2007 were--due to my aversion to hardcovers, I hardly read anything the year it comes out. Instead, this is about the annotated list I keep of all the books I read each year. Probably my system for this is one of those idiosyncratic things that only makes sense to me. I count some books I read for school and not others. I don't count plays because it takes me an hour to read a play but a week to read a novel, so including plays seems like an unfair way of inflating the statistics.

Nonetheless, here's the stats for this year, and the list of titles:

37 books read in total. 14 British, 12 American, 8 French (7 non-translated, 1 translated), 1 Colombian, 1 Ancient Greek, 1 Ancient Roman. 20 books by 19 different male authors; 17 books by 8 different female authors. 24 read for fun, 13 for school. 30 fiction, 7 non-fiction. 26 new reads, 11 re-reads.
I am most happy with the stats for American authors and for non-fiction--I'd resolved to read more of each and think I succeeded.

My resolutions for 2008: continue reading literature in translation, continue reading nonfiction, read more plays (I have a ton of plays sitting unread on my shelf), and find a better way of cataloguing the plays I read.

Later today I'll be posting a "Best of 2007" where you'll find out what my favorite books were out of these 37. But I'll let you know that the worst book I had to read was Carmen, Prosper Merimée's novella, in the original French. Trust me, Bizet's opera is sooo much better...

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