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.

• Baby-foot
• Un sac de billes
• Candide
• Carmen
• Salammbô
• The Virgin in the Garden
• Jacques le fataliste
• Jane Eyre
• A Room with a View
• Hitchcock/Truffaut
• Les Liaisons Dangereuses
• Still Life
• A Year in the Life of Shakespeare: 1599
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• Babel Tower
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Special Topics in Calamity Physics
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
• It Must've Been Something I Ate
• A Whistling Woman
• Three Novellas (by Gabriel García Márquez--I counted this as one book. The novellas were Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold.)
• The Unpossessed
• The Odyssey
• The Aeneid
• The Group
• Slaughterhouse Five
• Northanger Abbey
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
• Bullet Park
• The Things They Carried
• The Fervent Years
• How I Paid for College
• Shiksa Goddess
  

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...