I only read about 44 books this year, which is down about 8 or so from last year. That’s interesting to me, as I have been reading pretty voraciously. The NYPL digital book service is making my total go up, however a shorter commute, and the lack of using an ipod to read audiobooks (a combined effort of my larger ipod dying and NYC being too loud to listen to an ipod at normal audio levels). I also consulted a lot of books, but didn’t READ them fully, especially about travel. I need to figure out a better way to deal with that.

17 fiction/39% (20 last year/ 1% more than last year)
27 non-fiction/61% (32 last year/1% less than last year)

Wow, I am so consistent.

Only 2 could be construed as “religiously themed.” But food (7) and music (4) figured prominently.
5 books were of authors I met.
19 were audiobook, which is way up from last year–thanks NYPL!

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Biggest surprise: To Catch a Predator
Biggest letdown: Omnivore’s Dilemma, Smashed
Favorites: Nightmare Alley, They Shoot Horses Don’t They, the Dexter books, Outposts, God’s Harvard
Most Overrated: Omnivore’s Dilemma
Books I could not finish this year included:
Lenin’s embalmers (I will finish this, but haven’t yet–carryover from last year)
Lamb by Christopher Moore (Started on the plane)
4-Hour Work Week (started before I left home)
Thunderstruck (Started before I left home)

by Chris Hansen

Yes, I love TCaP.  I love it so much I had to read this book.  Yes, it’s crazy exploitative, but, they are CHILD MOLESTERS, so I don’t care.  Actually it’s probably because I love the show so much that I don’t care.  Does that make me bad?  Maybe, but at least I am no CHILD MOLESTER.

I thought this book would be awful and cheesy–something written just to capitalize on the popularity of the show.  But it’s actually kind of well researched and written.  A lot of it is not about the show at all.  And, shockingly for a Dateline themed book, it points out that the Internet has made this kind of crime drop.  Wow.  Chris Hansen is like, a real journalist.  Crazy.

26 Truths About Your Twenties 

This book made me angry. It was clearly marketed to me, in its pretty chick lit packaging. Reading it, I realized it was EXACTLY the kind of shit written about NYC that I HATED before I moved here. I mean, I still hate that shit, but I guess it’s the kind of chick litty stuff that’s supposed to make me relate to it because the main character is BUYING EXPENSIVE STILETTOS! AT a NAME BRAND STORE! That’s ON FIFTH AVENUE! To denote its NEW YORKINESS! Because it’s one of the few things about NYC you’ve heard of if you’ve never been here. Oh the glamour of a publishing job and a small roachy apartment! Oh the loneliness/freedom of drinking too many cosmos and cabbing it home.

I wanted to throw this book.  Maybe I am too old for it, which makes me a little sad.  It would be more accurately titled: “My Parents Pay My Rent: Being 22 and an Upper Middle Class White College Graduate and Manufacturing Disaffection About It Until I Get Married and Become a Successful Writer.”  That’s probably not catchy enough though.

by oliver sacks

Man I have always wanted to read an Oliver Sacks book.  It seems perfect for me.  I listened to the audiobook, which was a bad move because non-American accents kill me on an audiobook.  It was just okay.  I found many of the vignettes interesting but there was no real common thread to bring it together.  Perhaps I have to try a non-audio version.

by Michael Pollan

It took me almost the whole year to read this book. I expected it to be SO GOOD, and everyone raved about it, but holy god is this book boring and pompous. First, could we get a food book that, instead of yelling about how horrible the food is in America, could even barely mention how LUCKY WE ARE to be able to choose between different kinds of food? I don’t feel quite in the food crisis Michael Pollan feels we are. Also, the interesting part of this book would have been inside the corn syrup factories, which he cannot go to. And there’s no real conclusive scientific evidence that HFCS is worse for you, not that this book has very much science in it. I did like the conversations with farmers. But the middle of this book almost killed me. I considered not finishing it. Basically this book says what tens of other books say, but in a more boring way, written in a voice that I find grating, ignorant, and unthankful.

by Ian Christie

I really wanted to read Lords of Chaos, but the library didn’t have it, but this history of metal was good anyway. I have a hard time figuring out what kind of metal I like. I have figured out I like orchestral arrangement, falsetto, anything with piano-y stuff, some speed, but really no one subgenre. I do love that the metal sign is totally based on Italian-American hand gesturing. I need to go over this book more and look at a few more bands, but basically I have been listening to a lot of Blind Guardian, DragonForce, In Flames, Hammerfall, and Iced Earth. Oddly, even though I have an irrational hatred of dragons, I love bands that sing about them.

This is a pretty good explanation of subgenres. It’s a little academic, but I liked it.

by David Weinberger

This book, for me, must be what it’s like for Brad Pitt to read Star Magazine. “Why do these people care about my job? Who would read this?” I mean I like my job, but who picks up a popular non-fiction book on metadata? I have no idea. Which is sort of the problem with librarians reviewing it, I guess, is because of course it’s simplified, it’s not FOR US. It’s for other people to understand what we do. I have no idea why they would want to, but it would be cool if one day I could explain my job to people in other fields.

That said, while this book is (literally) dedicated to librarians and generally very pro-librarians, I think the author has a prejudicially anti-traditional cataloging stance. I understand why, since Dewey is crazy. But still, just because we need to PHYSICALLY colocate things in the real world doesn’t mean we can’t also do a lot of awesome digital stuff away from traditional book cataloging FOR BOOKS. He seems to think it is one or the other–either you catalog physical stuff and are chained to something like DDC, or you are open to a wonderful world of user tagging. Why can there be no compromise?

This is generally how I feel at all discussions of this subject.

Also he seems to really dislike Melvil Dui. Okay, I get it he was racist and sexist, and kind of a crank, but he also did some awesome stuff. Not everything is bad just because you don’t personally like him.

Given that I have a personal stake in keeping some traditional cataloging perhaps I am biased. But honestly it makes me angry when people think we should just let everyone tag everything all the time. That works with many things. MANY THINGS. But it doesn’t with others. And why can’t there be both to allow for maximum access? Do we have to have a rap battle? Can’t we all just get along? Because of this I think all works that don’t move toward a combo of both are basically moot.

Also, he specifically mentions what he thinks the people doing what I do at the place I work should do. Which we are not doing. Which made me snicker. A book hasn’t really ever pointed its finger at me like that. In fact he referred to me and my coworkers as, “men in a well-lit room.” I think this is a funny characterization of my job as the vast majority of librarians are women and work in really dark confines.

My favorite part of the book is this quotation from Dewey:

“My heart is open to anything that’s either decimal or about libraries.” Way to use the Boolean, Melvil. Okay I am stopping before this all gets too biblioblogosphere and I have to argue about piddly things ALA does.

Ten Commandments for Texas Politics
by Kinky Friedman

Reading this book made me popular with cowboy-dressing Hispanic men on the train. I think they were surprised to see me reading a book with a man like Kinky on the cover. Several guys did literal double takes.

I liked this book, but I love Kinky, his music, and his ideas (except for prayer in schools). This was a very fast read. I have only read Kinky’s non-fiction, so maybe I will try some fiction now. The parts about the campaigning were the best, and the parts about the animals I found very boring, but that would be expected. I highly recommend it.  Now I will go play with my Kinky action figure!

by Douglas Brinkley

Man this was the wrong book to read just as the nights got longer. It was obviously depressing. I had been meaning to read it for a while, and then Chad suggested it and it was available digitally. Thanks, NYPL!

While I enjoyed the book, and agreed with most of it, I didn’t feel like I learned a lot more than I already knew. The beginning of the book sets out very bluntly to find out whose fault it is. And yet, in the end, it’s still kind of everyone’s fault. While I agree with Brinkley’s statement that those who say it isn’t important whose fault it is probably say that because it would implicate them, I don’t think that fault is the be all and end all. It would have been more useful to know, say, how to prevent it happening again. And part of my frustration about this part of the book is because if someone did SOMETHING, anything at many points, the extent could have been lessened. That’s probably more a frustration with the situation than with the book though….

Mainly, though this book assigns fault, it doesn’t tell me WHY the people at fault did nothing. And that for me is the central mystery. Yes I know George Bush ignored NOLA’s pleas, but the book I want is WHY did he do so. I mean there is the easy Kanye West, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” which I do not doubt, although I think the more accurate statement would be, “George Bush doesn’t care about poor people.” This “WHY?” idea gets a SMALL mention at the end of the book (local lawmakers didn’t ask for anything specific from feds, just for “help,” which feds took as a sign they didn’t need anything) but not why any president would feel comfortable not doing anything in a time of national crisis is a question I still can’t answer. But probably no one can.

by Hannah Rosin

Nanette recommended this to me and oh boy is it up my alley.  A journalist goes to an ivy league built for home schoolers.  I am a sucker for the evangelical culture.  I liked it, but in a trashy way.  It didn’t really make me think and I didn’t learn anything from it, which is fine.  But it’s set up as a non-fiction important look into this culture.  I highly recommend it thought to everyone interested in Evangelicals, or how they are being groomed to take over politics.

75 Objects with Unexpected Significance

I got this book at Book Expo. It has a lot of very pretty pictures. Basically a lot of arty/semi-famous people are asked to photograph and explain something they own with significance. It’s funny and surprising what people choose, but I wish there were more stories and they were more in depth. It made me wonder what I would choose, and I could not figure it out.

by Anthony Bourdain
I like reading short vignettes, so this book is great. It also has a lot of Bourdain saying he is/was wrong, which is hard to find.  And it also points out how wrong ketchup on hot dogs is.

Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong
I LOVED THIS BOOK.  Basically it tears down all the things “science” has told us recently about food.  It’s amazing and I wish I could remember all its statistics to throw back at people when they spout food nonsense.

One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally 
I am waaaaaaaay behind on book blogging so you might see a flurry of book posts.

I liked this book.  On one hand it did completely underline how great eating fresh, local, and farmer-farmed (as opposed to factory farmed?) food is.  It also underlined how incredibly rich and unthankful you have to be to whine on and on about how deprived you are because you don’t like the self-imposed silly rules you have put on eating habits.  Which is the position most Americans are in.  I am all for making reasoned decisions on where and why you eat what you eat, but I can’t feel sorry for you for making those decisions.  At no point in this book was I afraid they might starve though I think you are supposed to feel that way.  I wanted to scream, “Okay, the potatoes rotted–go get a cheeseburger and chill out!”
I guess to be paid to write a book about this type of thing though, you have to go whole hog.  Mainly, I was grateful to have the food I have and it did make me think more on food decisions.  I liked reading it, the narrators just grated on me.

by Amy Sedaris

I love Amy Sedaris, but when I flipped through this book in the store, I wasn’t all that enthused about it.  I found the NYPL had a digital audio copy and found her reading of it far more enjoyable.  I think it would have been weird though had I never seen the book.  Although she mentions that she didn’t want it to be just a jokey book that happened to have recipes, I think that’s exactly what it was.

by david rakoff

His previous book, Fraud was more up my alley, but I liked this a lot too. I love that he reads his own books, because his delivery is hilarious.

 by Chris Anderson

Part of the problem with reading the hip book way, way after everyone else has read it is that many of its ideas seem self-evident and old news.  Enjoyable, quick read.  Many of its ideas I felt were true but the evidence used wasn’t the best.  However, of course, I am sure there is a lot more evidence now, years later, than when this was published.

by Nicholas Dawidoff

This book was a great interview based history of major movements/actors in early country.  In addition to learning a lot, I now know to be successful in early country, you have to have been raised in a falling down house in the worst part of town.  Someone in your family had to be a preacher, someone else a drunk.  Someone died tragically, and you had to feel responsible.  You probably have to marry early, and then cheat on your spouse as you descend into an alcoholic self-hatred spiral.  This is when you become super famous.  Then you find Jesus.

Also, Merle Haggard owns stock in Cracker Barrel and will only eat there when on the road.  This makes me love the Cracka even more.

It is available for six cents on amazon.

by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen

This book took me ages to finish because I kept losing it!  It’s good, a lot like Stiffed.  It goes into all the alternative ways people are dealing with their own bodies after death.  A friend of mine really didn’t like how much the author put herself in the book, and I can agree with that, especially toward the end, but it didn’t make the book unreadable for me.

Now I totally want to put my ashes in a reef ball!

by Simon Winchester

I love everything Simon Winchester, and when I love something, especially a book, I prolong the ending as long as possible.  I think I prolonged the ending to this well over a year, because the last chapters mentioned the Pitcairn Islands.  The Pitcairns are particularly interesting to me, but sadly he doesn’t get to go to them.

Basically the premise is that he visits all of the far flung islands still considered part of the British empire and talks about the way of life there.  With my recent work subject of esoteric islands, I thought it was time to finish it.  It was great.  I highly recommended it.  It really made me want to buy an island.

by Mitchell Parcelle

I thought this would be a longer term history of the Empire State Building, i.e. why it was built and such.  Instead it was a really soap opera-y business saga of who owned it and sold it in the 80s and 90s.  I would only read this if I were super interested in NYC real estate (I am not) or Donald Trump (I am really not) or the history of the Empire State Building (I am not so much).  I would have liked to know the original history of its erection, but this was a snooze.

When I saw this book at the library, I thought there could be no book in the world more targeted at me.  In it, a man visits many odd churches and writes about them.  In reality, this book has long, long stretches that remind me of taking an awful anthropology class.  If I wanted to read Henry James I would have picked that up, but this book quotes him (without exaggeration) every other page.  Snooze.  I could have done without the high-minded analysis and more description of the events.

So skimming over the James parts made this an interesting book.  It got a little slow toward the end.  I did like the inclusion of Atheists as a religion–sort of interesting.  But overall this could have been so much better.

I love Chuck Klosterman. I hate Chuck Klosterman. But I can’t stop reading Chuck Klosterman. CK, is the closest I will come to having a cult leader, because even when I originally do not agree with him, after I go along for the ride, I totally agree with him. And I even liked the fiction he wrote, which is saying something for non-fiction authors. I <3 the Klosterman.

Oddly, the cover and back cover is a photo of CK right by my place of employment.  So now I think of him when I pass it.

by Koren Zailckas

Man, I did not like this book. First, as a friend put it, can you really trust a memoir written by a 22 year old? That wasn’t my problem per se with the book. I had two main problems. First, the interesting part of this book to me was glossed over. Second, I thought the author took her personal abuse of alcohol as a trend among ALL YOUNG women that is ridiculous.

On the first point, the author makes vague references about how she doesn’t really believe she’s an alcoholic or in AA or in the whole 12-step thing. That is interesting. However, she doesn’t explain much about that. She just relates drinking stories in which she blacks out, and how college drinking to blackout is popular. This made me wonder who the intended audience for this book is? People who haven’t been to college in the last 15 years? Several times I found contradictions within pages of each other–on one page she can never sleep while drunk, a few pages later, she talks about how she can only sleep when drunk. The confusing thing to me was, if you drink as much as she does in this book, you’d think you’d learn things like “eat before drinking” or “don’t drink straight from the bottle like it’s soda.”

The major theme of this book is all women are self-conscious and shy and society makes us drink to excess to deal with that. Huh? It seems like the author disavows the idea that any women drink just for fun, not because they have problems socializing. I don’t buy this. Everyone doesn’t drink for the same reason, and I think this extrapolation is wrong.

In similar news, this video is great.

by Adrianne Frost

I am not, what you might call, comfortable with children. Growing up, my siblings were 14-18 years older than I was. My parents, in their 40s when I was born, hung out only with adults. While other kids wanted to go outside and play, I mainly wanted to stay in the library and read quietly. I remember having my first friend over in the seventh grade or so. Before that I mainly read books far out of my age range. I mention this less to say “look how impressive a reader I was at a young age” and more to point out that few children ask their parents what the word “fellatio” means because it isn’t in the children’s dictionary and it seems an important word in the book “The Exorcist.”

None of my siblings had children, and most of my dad’s friends had older kids. Children however tend to like me, oddly, I think because I speak to them like adults, just like I wanted to be spoken to as a kid. I recall only holding a baby once, when forced to.

And herein is why I dislike children: because there is no other option. No one accepts “No, I don’t want to hold your baby.” But I DON’T. Yet I can’t say that. I think that’s bullshit. This is why the title of this book spoke to me. However, I think it would be better retitled:

I HATE PARENTS WHO DON’T PAY ATTENTION TO/SPOIL THEIR KIDS AND TURN THEM INTO BAD PEOPLE

I have old as well as Old World parents. Nothing was allowed. My sister doesn’t recall me crying as a child. Ever. That’s freakishly weird. As kids we were not allowed to run around indoors, expected to stay quiet, expected to sit through “boring” adult things without comment. I do not recall ever eating candy as a kid.  My parents never left me home alone until I was 18. Now, I don’t totally agree with this parenting strategy AT ALL, but when you see some kids now, running around restaurants, knocking into people, and destroying things, it makes my childhood seem a bit more romantic, especially when their parents laugh instead of apologize. It seems like now it is totally acceptable for people’s children to 1. be taken to completely non-appropriate things and 2. be very disturbing to everyone else around without reproach. While I understand a baby crying in church, I don’t get kids racing up and down the aisles. While I get kids at the Denny’s, I don’t so much at the Morton’s Steakhouse. Sure, crying is acceptable at the Disney movie, but not at the foreign documentary. As a friend pointed out the other day “I would pay extra to go to the museum if there was a day I could go without children.”
Now, I am sure someone will not like this. However, I agreed with almost everything in this book. Sadly, the audience for this book SHOULD be new parents to see if they are raising horrible terrors. Somehow I think the people who raise annoying kids and force them at you all the time are exactly the people who won’t read this book.
As my sister puts it “Some kids, like some adults, are just assholes.” Yet that is not acceptable to say in this culture, and I think that’s crazy. As a kid I knew which other kids were assholes, but now for some reason I have to pretend I do not.  While I admit I have no idea how hard it is to raise children and get them to behave, I also feel like sacrifices parents in older generations made (i.e. let’s NOT go out to eat if we can’t find someone to take care of our kid who freaks out at restaurants), are just being ignored.  Of course, the burden is now placed on the rest of society.  If you don’t believe me, just read the Amazon comments on this book.  This one really summed up who the book was for, and the blasphemous opinion I hold:

“I don’t want kids. But when I tell other people that, they give me looks of shock and horror. All of a sudden, I’m a potential serial killer rather than a happy woman in her 20s. This book allowed me to see that there are OTHER people out there who DON’T like kids and DON’T want kids.”

by Daniel Kalder

This is the memoir of a Scottish man who lives in Moscow who goes on tourist vacations to the middle-of-nowhere. Places where they have never seen anyone from Europe. Places that, when he says he is a tourist, they laugh at him. All places that were in the former Soviet Union. This book gives a GREAT window into the lives of some people who have never ever had books written about them, and moreover, had much of their culture destroyed in the Stalinist era. Who knew there was a Chess City built in the middle of nowhere? Who knew that Europe’s first major desert was created by Stalin’s insistence on crop production. While there were parts of the book that were more personal than travelogue that made me want to scream “Could you have even done a TINY bit of research or preparation before going to these places?” Still it’s a very interesting subject that isn’t really treated in English.

by Augusten Burroughs

Burroughs is often compared to Sedaris, and this seems to be his most Sedaris-like yet.  Much “happier” than his previous books.  I found it very enjoyable, but for the life of me, I cannot distinguish its stories from Magical Thinking! I like his reading of his books, though!

by Mark Kurlansky

I tried to read this in book form on the plane to New Orleans only to learn it was about NYC history, which wasn’t really what I was looking for. I LOVE Kurlansky’s book Cod, so I gave it a try when I saw it on audiobook. I liked it, but some parts were slow. It is amazing how dependent on oysters New York was. Today I also noticed that my preferred hair product (Dep sport clay) has oyster shells IN IT. Weird. It definitely made me want seafood all the time. I liked the book, and now I want to read an eel book someone recommended. It seems animal histories are all the rage.