It is now March, and I have somehow never posted my reading log for 2011. Last year was a light one for my reading, and I’m not entirely sure why. The books below represent a thousand pages less than in 2010 (4794, or an average of ~13 pages a day).

• Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer
• Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game by Dan Barry
• How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown - This is a great book about the discovery of bodies roughly the same size as (and larger than!) Pluto, leading to its demotion to dwarf planet. I'm of the opinion that we might as well have some standard of planet-ness, and one that gives us 8 planets instead of dozens is preferable.
• Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving - John Irving's books are always emotionally intense, and this one is no exception. M got it for me for my birthday, but it took me nearly six months to get through. I had to interleave it with some lighter non-fiction.
• Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
• Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhof
• The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood - Great universe, seriously boring story. Fills in some of the gaps in Oryx and Crake, and apparently she's writing a third book.
• 1984 by George Orwell
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman
• The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini by Ruth Brandon
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
• The Robot Novels: The Caves of Steel / The Naked Sun / The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov - Asimov's voice and habits are completely internalized at this point. I don't need him to recite the Three Laws in every novel. I don't need reminders of who Susan Calvin is. Reading this was good (I had met Daneel Olivaw in the Foundation series when I red them a decade ago, but didn't appreciate his origins) but I enjoyed Fforde's unique books much more.
• The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde - Excellent storywriter with some really unique ideas. This is the first of six planned books starring Thursday Next, and I plan to read through all of them, slowly.

See also 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

I tried to make a conscious effort to split my time half-and-half between fiction and non-fiction this year. I started out the year with three non-fiction books in a row, so I obviously didn’t get off to a great start. But I ended the year with 6 fiction and 9 non-fiction (if you count my still-ongoing reread of Lord of the Rings as a single book), so I don’t think I did too bad.

• As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires by Bruce Weber - This story changed the way that I think about baseball. There aren't two teams on the field, there are three. And one team can never win, they are only ever ignored or reviled. And the challenge before them is just as hard as the one the actual players have to do.
• Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus
• SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven Levitt
• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
• The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
• The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson
• Rework by Jason Fried - Wins the coveted Logan's Favorite Book of 2010 award, and is a strong early favorite for Logan's Favorite Book of the Decade. The philosophy that the guys behind 37signals operate their business under resonate incredibly deeply. When I run a company, this will be my bible.
• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
• Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice
• An Imaginary Tale: The Story of i by Paul Nahin
• The Algorithm Design Manual by Stephen Skiena
• The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul by Douglas Adams - This was the last remaining book of his that I had never read. Reading the two Dirk Gently books has been a treat. It was something like finding an unknown painting by an old master. It's the same tilted voice I grew up loving, but with a story I wasn't familiar with.
• The Punch: One Night, Two Lives, and the Fight That Changed Basketball Forever by John Feinstein
• The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking
• The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, and The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien - This is a re-read. Every time I read these books, I'm reminded how much of an amazing trilogy the movies were, but also how much of a pale imitation they are of the depth of the books. (I'm still reading Return of the King.) I have a four-volume boxed set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. One of my earliest memories is my dad reading me the passage through Mirkwood out of this book. This fall, I thought I had left The Hobbit in a hotel room in New Hampshire, and I got surprisingly emotional about it. Luckily, it just slid under the driver's seat in my car.

See also 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

Looking back, 2009 was great year for my reading list. Although I only read three fiction books (not counting the collection of Science Fiction I used as waiting-for-inter-library-loan filler), they were all remarkably good. Next year’s list is likely to be very interesting. Not only am I trying to figure out how to fit my new Kindle (thanks, Mom and Dad!) into my reading habits, but I also hope to get fiction recommendations from other people for 2010 so I can try to divide my time 50/50. Right now there are four books on my nightstand, and they’re all non-fiction. What a bad start to that New Year’s resolution.

Here are the books I read this year, and my thoughts on some of them:

• The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
• The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson
• When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
• Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman - Probably my favorite book of the year. It's got a superheroes-are-imperfect Watchmen vibe going on, but it's less of a distopian view and more of a "day in the life of" the participants. I'm also apparently a sucker for novels with an alternating first-person gimmick (see also The Time Traveler's Wife). I'd be lying if I said I didn't visualize Neil Patrick Harris as the super-intelligent villain.
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - This is the first book that I think I've read that has colored the way I read other non-fiction books. How Bill Gates got a lot of computer experience in High School in the 70s was an especially interesting bit.
• Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis by Rowan Jacobsen
• The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft by Ulrich Boser
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: 25th Annual Collection by Gardner R. Dozois
• Born to Run: The Rise of Ultra-running and the Super-athlete Tribe by Christopher McDougall - Started out slowly with some interesting ultra-runner stories, and escalated into a fantastic tale about the author taking part in a 50-plus mile run in the Mexican desert with some professionals and some legendary native runners. Makes a persuasive case that long-distance running is the reason humans started walking upright.
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy - No, wait, maybe this is my pick for book of the year. The Road was intense and bleak and depressing. My favorite thing about this book is that McCarthy didn't try to give it a story arc or a moral or a hero. It's just a guy and his son trying to get by in an impossible situation. So real, so tragic.

See also 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

I thought that looking back on my list of books this year, I was going to feel somewhat disappointed. My late-fall reading list was thin. But actually looking on the list, I’m having a hard time picking out my favorites. Here’s the list of the books, along with some notes on the books I particularly enjoyed.

• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Kingsolver, Barbara - This is my pick for Book of the Year. Kingsolver's family spent the entire year eating only food that they grew, raised, or traded for. She reveals how little we know about the food we buy at the grocery store, and this book has made me much more conscious of the source of my food. I'm not strictly a locavore, but this book pushed me in that direction.
• Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word by Kennedy, Randall
• The New Kings of Nonfiction by Glass, Ira - A great collection of short non-fiction collected by the host of This American Life. They're all fantastic examples of clever storytelling.
• Watchmen by Moore, Alan - I had heard of and about this comic book for years, and I decided I should finally read it before the movie comes out in March. I got it from the library, and before I had a chance to start it, M grabbed it and became engrossed. She hates comic books, but she liked this one. I can't think of a higher compliment.
• The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible As Literally As Possible by Jacobs, A.J.
• Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 by Puleo, Stephen
• Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Lewis, Michael - Not quite as stirring as his Blind Side, but a solid book about baseball drafting, statistics, and money.
• The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, Fyodor
• Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Adams, Douglas - I read Adams's Hitchhiker books growing up, and I loved them. I remember trying to start this once and putting it down in the first chapter. Reading it again, it definitely starts slowly, but it's an amusing book. It was nice to be able to read something brand new in a familiar voice that died too young.
• No One Belongs Here More Than You by July, Miranda
• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bryson, Bill
• Don't Shoot the Dog! by Pryor, Karen
• Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Sacks, Oliver W.

See also by book lists for 2007, 2006, and 2005.

For the past two years, I’ve posted my reading list for the year as well as ratings and brief reviews for each book. This year, I’m going to do it a little different. If you review my old lists (2005, 2006 part 1 part 2), you’ll notice that it gets hard to describe unremarkable books from eleven months prior. So instead I will share with you my thoughts about my three favorite books from 2007.

Book of the Year - World War Z by Max Brooks I won’t be surprised if you’ve already been bored to tears with praise for this book. Neither would I be shocked if you thought that a book about a fictional war with zombies wasn’t going to be any more than a re-tread of decades-old plot elements. But this book is something different than that. Starting with the cover itself, Brooks creates a universe where the war actually happened. The review quotes on the back and the biography on the flaps treat it as a documentary with historical implications. It’s written as a series of interviews with survivors: The doctor who met Patient Zero, soldiers who fought phalanxes of rampaging mobs in Yonkers, an isolate teenagers who had to escape from an apartment building in Japan by climbing down the outside of the building. Each story is just a handful of pages long, but the interweaving storylines and Brooks' ability to give every character a unique personality make the book feel as true as he had intended.

Surprise of the Year - The Blind Side by Michael Lewis The Blind Side is a true story about a poor black boy from Memphis thrust into a wealthy white religious High School. He’s built like a linebacker, but he moves like a basketball player (and, in fact, plays for the basketball team for a while). But when shifting football tactics make people built like him a precious commodity, his adopted family convinces him to play. It’s a great story, full of inspiration, and it showed me a glimpse into the world of football strategy other than “get the ball down the field”. (Incidentally, I wish I remembered where I heard about this book. It was on my list for more than a year before I stumbled on it in Logan Airport.)

Classic of the Year - I Am Legend by Richard Matheson Inspired by the look and feel of the Will Smith movie, I decided to pick this up and read it. It blew me away. Matheson spends a long time showing you what years of loneliness and constant invasion can do to a person. The setting and direction of the novel, as well as its moral, are very different from the movie, but the same intense feeling of a hero fighting an impossible struggle is obvious. (Note that it’s not a long story, maybe 150 pages, and the book I got had a number of Matheson’s short stories along with it. They were good, also, but none of them stuck out in my mind so much as the title story.)

Full list of books I read in 2007:

• Space Race by Deborah Cadbury
• Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
• Zodiac by Neal Stephenson
• The Old New Thing by Raymond Chen
• Beyond Fear by Bruce Schneier
• Manhunt by James L. Swanson
• Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
• World War Z by Max Brooks
• The Poincare Conjecture by Donal O'Shea
• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
• The Blind Side by Michael Lewis
• The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich
• I Am Legend by Richard Matheson