Books read, 2016

books2016

In an annual ritual, but a delightful one I hope, I rounded up all the books I read this year (minus one that’s out on loan and one that’s a play in a giant Shakespeare omnibus), put them in the middle of my floor and took their photo.

My total of 40 for 2016 is precisely half of 2012, the year I read 80 books and my best year to date. But that year I had a lot of short books to read, and also unlike this year, I wasn’t spending an hour or two per week working on my own book. I realized, too, that I took far fewer Metrolink trips this year, an act that gave me enforced reading time.

Still, there’s nothing wrong with 40 books. Wednesday’s column tries to make sense of the year. Below is a list of every book in chronological order.

  1. “Slogging Toward the Millennium,” Bill McClellan
  2. “The Hour After Westerly,” Robert M. Coates
  3. “Long After Midnight,” Ray Bradbury
  4. “The Day After Tomorrow,” Robert A. Heinlein
  5. “Twelfth Night,” William Shakespeare
  6. “Now Wait for Last Year,” Philip K. Dick
  7. “Early Bird,” Rodney Rothman
  8. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 30th Anniversary Issue
  9. “Frankenstein,” Mary Shelley
  10. “The Last Man,” Mary Shelley
  11. “The Last of the Best,” Jim Murray
  12. “The Last Laugh,” S.J. Perelman
  13. “The Penultimate Truth,” Philip K. Dick
  14. “Heart Like a Starfish,” Allen Callaci
  15. “Empire,” Lewis DeSoto
  16. “The Autobiography of Mark Twain,” Charles Neider, ed.
  17. “Stalking the Feature Story,” William Ruehlmann
  18. “Forgotten Bookmarks,” Michael Popek
  19. “The Complete Stories,” Flannery O’Connor
  20. “Howards End,” E.M. Forster
  21. “Then We Came to the End,” Joshua Ferris
  22. “Howards End is on the Landing,” Susan Hill
  23. “Sixpence House,” Paul Collins
  24. “Mary Shelley: A Biography,” Muriel Spark
  25. “John Carter of Mars” (No. 11), Edgar Rice Burroughs
  26. “The Divine Invasion,” Philip K. Dick
  27. “Tortilla Flat,” John Steinbeck
  28. “Ask a Mexican!” Gustavo Arellano
  29. “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America,” Gustavo Arellano
  30. “Eat Mexico,” Lesley Tellez
  31. “Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Vol. 2,” H.P. Lovecraft, et al
  32. “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” Victor and Jacob Maymudes
  33. “Spend All Your Kisses, Mr. Smith,” Jack Smith
  34. “Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan,” Howard Sounes
  35. “Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina,” David Hajdu
  36. “Positively Main Street: An Unorthodox View of Bob Dylan,” Toby Thompson
  37. “Gentlemen of the Road,” Michael Chabon
  38. “The Wishbones,” Tom Perrotta
  39. “The Puppies of Terra,” Thomas M. Disch
  40. “Of All Things!” Robert Benchley

Of course I didn’t get to everything I’d have liked, not by a long shot, but many of these I’d been wanting to read for a long time. How was your year in reading?

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