What I Read in 2009, Numerically Speaking

Reading everyone else’s end-of-year posts, plus reading Jenna Freedman’s Lower East Side Librarian Reading Log 2009, made me want to make a wrap-up post of my own. In 2009 I did not read as many books that I own as I wanted to—though I hope that will change in 2010 with the help of the TBR challenge. I did carry on reading Proust, and still am: I’m about a hundred pages into The Captive now. I read a whole lot of poetry in April, May, and June, and surprisingly few works in translation compared to last year.

This year I read 33 books total (that’s four fewer than last year), categorized as below:

• Poetry: 11
• Adult fiction (novels or short stories): 9
• Adult nonfiction: 9
• Kids’ books/YA books: 4
• Books translated from languages other than English: 2
• Books by women: 14
• Books by men: 19

Favorites:

• The Coral Thief by Rebecca Stott
• The Winner of Sorrow by Brian Lynch
• The Printer’s Devil by Paul Bajoria
• The Magician’s Book by Laura Miller
• Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems by Mark Doty
• Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit

Re-reads: just one: The London Scene: Five Essays by Virginia Woolf

Books I expected to like way more than I actually did (though I didn’t hate either of these, just didn’t like them as much as I thought I would):

• Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott
• Forgetting Elena by Edmund White