books
First off, a little bookkeeping. I have been using Goodreads for years now to track my reading. It’s still a pretty good platform, but it’s also just a lot. A lot of ads. A lot of features I don’t use, like “Reading Challenges,” and a lot of the “Community” stuff.
One of the things I’m going to try to do over the next five years, though, is attempt to self-host as many applications as I can.
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I’ve missed this post for a couple of years, which is too bad, I need to write more on my blog. I’ve got a whole bunch of draft posts, maybe this year I actually finish them.
Also, in case this is not clear, these are the best books that I managed to read in 2022. I’m sure there are more interesting lists of the best books that came out in 2022.
…I managed to read 1 more book in 2019 than I did in 2018 and I didn’t wait until May to write about them. I feel pretty good about that. But one book different is basically the margin of error with book you start in 1 year and end is the second. It’s interesting look at my GoodReads “My Year in Books”. They give a page count (which is a little strange given I usually listen to audio book, but it’s probably roughly accurate).
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This post is a lot later than I would have liked, but I’ve held off writing it until I had a chance to finish migrating my blog to a new platform (more on that later). I’m glad I can do it now, on the new setup.
2018 was a slightly lighter year for books, only 19. Goodreads now has a feature where you can see your “Stats”. It’s pretty cool. Looks like my best year (since I started keeping track around about 2011 was 2013 with a whopping 30 books.
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I finished 25 books in 2017. Not bad. I got the number up from last year but I think it’s mostly because I read lots of “fun” books. Lots of fantasy. Another factor is that now with 2 children I have less time for things like movies and TV shows, audiobooks and podcasts are what I have time and energy for these days.
Non-Fiction Politics: The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and Alastair Smith it great.
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According to what I tracked on Good Reads, I finished 20 books is 2017. I feel OK about that. I wish I had a done a bit more “serious” reading, there was a lot of entertainment in there, but it was all fun (at least most of the time) and even in the fluff there were some interesting ideas.
Non-Fiction Politics: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt is one of my favorite books of all time and one of the most important books I’ve read.
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The bad news is I only read 17 books in 2015. However I feel pretty good about that because I read all 10 of The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson, which are all massive. All 10 averaged well over 40 hours a piece. It’s kinda scary to think I spent so much time listening to those books. Recording them must have been a massive undertaking.
The Malazan books were good books, an absolutely massive world with lots of interesting stuff going on, however I may have over done it.
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The number of titles of books I read this year seems a little light, 30 books in 2013, only 18 in 2014. Looking over the list though, I feel a little better about my reading last year, there were some big books on the list.
Non-Fiction Politics and Theology (always a dangerous combination): A Farewell to Mars - An Evangelical Pastor’s Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace by Brian Zahnd.
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I think I’m going to start writing an annual blog post about my favorite books every year. Here’s this years run down. In case you are wondering I don’t actually have a memory capable of remembering all the books I’ve read this year and what I thought of them, but I’ve been logging my reading at GoodReads.com and that makes it easy.
Here they are in no particular order. I’m probably going to try to stick to one book per category.
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