Book Addict: Final Total for 2010 and some favorites

ok, I've put off this post for far too long. The time has come to just write this post and be done with it. And so . . . at long last . . . .the final total for the # of books I read in 2010 . . . is . . .

112!

wohoo! My goal was to reach 100 and I exceeded it and feel pretty excited about that. :)

And for some silly meaningless statistics:

The month I read the most was Oct with 19

The month I read the least was Aug with 3

(uh yeah, it appears that after I only read 3 in Aug, I kinda sorta freaked out about reaching my goal and followed up by reading 15 in Sept and 19 in Oct to make up for it. Amazing what a little determination can accomplish). ;)

And I averaged, overall, a nice hefty number of 9.3 books a month for the year. Hey that ain't too shabby, eh?

I read 36 nonfiction books

5 Classic Literature

and 21 Young Adult or (older) Children's Lit

The best YA series I'd recommend from this year's reading is: The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. I was completely hooked. Although I will be more careful from now on to wait until a series is COMPLETE before starting it. I like just plowing through at my own pace, thank you, rather than waiting for the next book. And actually I prefer reading books that are able to manage a beginning, climax and ending all within the confines of a single bookbinding - but sometimes a series can be still be good.

The book that I think of probably most often, even still: The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. And maybe this is because I also subscribe to her blog and get daily happiness quotes from her newsletter every weekday, but I find myself often thinking of what happiness is, how we define it, whether or not we really do "choose" it, or what we can do (or not do) to increase it in our lives. The research she put into the book impressed me and I just find the topic fascinating. It's always interesting to me to take a deeper look at concepts that we often just take for granted as part of our lives.

The best "classic" I read this year: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. I can't tell you why exactly, but I really liked this one. Also liked the Thomas Hardy books I read (The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure). I didn't get to quite as many classics last year, though, so I'm hoping to do better with that this year.

And, the best book I wish I had written: Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. I really enjoy non-conventional formats and this sort-of memoir arranged by brief alphabetical encyclopedia entries was fantastic. I'd love to organize my life history in this sort of format sometime just for fun. :)

If I counted correctly, I have 2 authors who tie for the most books I read by them:

Rick Riordan with The Lightning Thief series (with 5)

and 5 books by Madeleine L 'Engle. As far as L'Engle books go, I will have to say that if you have not read the Wrinkle in Time series, you should give it a try. And if you have and didn't like them, you should try L'Engle's non-fiction. I find her so insightful - the books of hers that I own are marked and underlined all throughout. And also, either if you did or did not like A Wrinkle in Time, I'd recommend looking into her books for adults just for fun. There are some of her books I've read that I haven't liked all that much. Definitely some I've liked more than others. But I like her enough that I'm still determined to read all of her books. Making some progress there, at least. ;)

Last year I also commenced what I refer to as my "love research." When I posted on Valentine's Day last year I mentioned a class I took in college called "The Love and Morality Seminar" which I really liked and learned a lot from. I remembered a lot of the material came from a guy named Leo Buscaglia. So I just decided to check out some of his "freaky-good" books from the seventies and see if I could glean anything else from them. And then from there I found myself looking into some other books on the topic of love. Maybe this seems like a kind of hokey subject to be doing any sort of reading on - but I'm not ashamed to say I found it all very interesting. Love is a good thing, right? Of course I'm right. And in total, I read 5 Love books. So that topic wins the Topic of the Year Award.

And, finally, here is a list of some of my favorites (by no means comprehensive - these were just the ones that jumped out at me as I scanned down my list):

1. Jude the Obscure - Hardy

2. Yours Ever - Mallon

3. 84, Charing Cross Road - Hanff

4. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet - Ford

5. The Adoration of Jenna Fox - Pearson

6. Bright Star - Keats

7. Walking on Water - L'Engle

8. A Mapmaker's Dream - Cowan

9. The Speed of Light - Rosner

10. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake - Bender

11. Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life - Rosenthal

12. The Age of Innocence - Wharton

13. The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank - Feldman

14. Abide with Me - Strout

15. The Forgotten Garden - Morton

Go here to see my Goodreads list of all the books I read last year (and beyond).

Happy Reading!

Oh and what were some good books you read last year??

(PS- My Jan and Feb Reading Round-ups will be coming at the end of this month, as well as - I hope - the official introduction of the Book Addict's Bookclub. In the meantime, we are reading Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell and talking about it at the end of Feb! yahoo! I'm excited.) :)

(and, blogger is being weird on me and not including the spacing between paragraphs that I'm actually using, so if this is all cramped together, I'm sorry, it's not my fault) :(