"The book I'm looking for,' says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, 'is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world."
- Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler

Friday, January 3, 2014

2013 Reading


I read 34 books in 2013. They added up to 6989 pages of text and 129 hours and 3 minutes of audio. One book every 10.74 days. Nineteen pages and 21 minutes of book per day. Most of the books were written by women. Almost all were written within the last 20 years. I read slightly more fiction than non-fiction, and almost no poetry. I got an Audible account in 2013, so I also listened to big handful of audiobooks.

In 2012, I read 36 books. But none of them was Infinite Jest, so I'll still chalk up this year as an improvement.

More importantly, of those 36 books from 2012, 29 (81%) were written by men. Noticing that, I promised myself I would be more mindful of the gender of the authors whose books I read. Success!

The best book I read this year was Independence Day by Richard Ford.

So long 2013.




(Books by decade. Click to enlarge.)