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