21 August, 2002
One-year sum-up!
While I didn't go public until January or thereabout, I actually started this project on 21 August, 2001, with John Christopher's "Tripods" trilogy. On the whole, it's been a positive experience; I've gotten better at writing coherent book reviews, I think, and I've certainly accomplished my goal of remembering more about the things I read. It hasn't really affected what I read; my preferences still lie in genre fiction, especially scifi and fantasy. Over the last year, I've added mysteries to my repetoire, and increased the number of comics, but I'd have done that without the book log. The only way I can say book logging has changed my reading habits is that I think a little bit more about what I read, while I'm reading it, since I'll have to write something about it.
Statistics:
| Science Fiction and Fantasy | 51 books + 1 fanfic |
| Detective and Mystery | 22 books |
| Other Fiction | 8 books |
| Comics and Graphic Novels | 20 books |
| Nonfiction | 6 books |
| Total | 87 text books + 20 graphic novels +1 fanfic |
Superlatives ("best of" only includes books I haven't read before):
Best novel: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon.
Best scifi: The Cyberiad, Stanislaw Lem.
Best fantasy: The Anubis Gates, Tim Powers.
Best detective book: The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler.
Best comic/graphic novel: Top 10, Alan Moore, Gene Ha, Zander Cannon.
Best nonfiction: Night, Elie Wiesel.
Most satisfying reread: (Most of) Sheri Tepper's True Game meta-series. (That is, I reread most of the series, not that only most of it was satisfying.)
Worst book: Triplanetary, E. E. Smith. (It was hard deciding between this one and Bored of the Rings; I decided Triplanetary was worse by dint of it being much longer)
Biggest disappointment: Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey books. They're not horrible, by any means, but the amounts of praise I've seen heaped on them over the years led me to expect something truly extraordinary.