Making it Up As I Go

Well, I achieved the goal of 100 books, both in reading and writing about them. Hurrah! The final total was 114 read- you can find the final list below. I looked over the list and did some analyzing, and here, purely for my own edification (and yours if you wish), are some numbers:

Out of 114 books,
94 were fiction
20 were non-fiction (out of these, 5 were biographies)
22 were “children’s books”
25 had some kind of mystery element
12 had some kind of supernatural element
13 had some kind of fantasy element
4 were science fiction
13 were anthologies
5 were epistolary
6 were fairy tale related
36 had a female narrator/main character
44 had a male narrator/ main character
34 were had multiple main characters, were anthologies or non fiction, or otherwise didn’t fall solidly into that male/female narrator split
40 were written by a woman
58 were written by a man
16 weren’t written soley by a man or woman
There were also 12 authors/editors of whose books I read more than one.

I’m surprised and quite pleased at the number of non-fiction books I read, and also kind of surprised by the number of mysteries. I also figured out that I bought FAR more books than I got out of the library or from Booksfree, something I hope to change in this new year.

Now, as promised, here is my Top 13 Books I Read in 2004 list (in the order I read them):

Diary by Chuck Palahniuk
The Society of Friends by Kelly Cherry
Lord of Castle Black by Steven Brust
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
Little Red Riding Hood in the Big Bad City edited by Martin Greenburg and John Helfers
Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
The Secret Letters of Marilyn Monroe and Jaqueline Kennedy by Wendy Leigh
Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

This is going purely off looking over the list and letting my memory go to work, they’re the books that after all this time I still get a warm fuzzy feeling about. I highly reccomend them all. Really, I reccomend all the books I read this year, there’s only one I really remember being dissapointed by, but I won’t point it out, I don’t want to embarrass it.

So to finish up for the year, here is the final list of 2004. I’ll be starting the count again, so the list in the sidebar will be diminished for a while, but don’t worry, I’ll build it back up again soon.

An Invisible Sign of My Own by Aimee Bender 1-4-04
Hell Hath No Fury: Women