I’m talking all this week about the year in review, and following up on the goals I set last January. Today’s subject is my reading list. (Please note I mean, what I read in 2013, not books published in 2013. I think the most recent book I read is from 2012.)
I intended to read 13 classic novels this year — and I did not do too well in following through.
I read much more than the past few years, though (I think I’ve finished 20 books so far this year, and expect I’ll finish another one or two before the year is out.) The point of my goal was to spend less time cruising the internet and more time reading actual books, and I made a huge dent in the stack of books that had been sitting on my shelf unread and collecting dust, so I’m happy with that.
Also, I started writing book reviews here on my blog, and while they’re pretty amateur, they’re some of my favorite posts to write. I hope to write more of those in the coming year.
If I had to pick a theme of the books I read this year (other than “books that were sitting on my shelf already”) then I would call 2013 the year of the dystopia.
It was pure coincidence, BTW, that 2013 was also the year I started reading the news and keeping up with current events, and the same year we learned about PRISM and the NSA tracking our every online move. But that’s beside the point.
I used to consider myself somewhat of a connoisseur of post-apocalyptic, dystopian fiction (mostly because the classic Brave New World is one of my all time favorite books) but I realized I am being a little self-inflating in thinking I deserve that designation.
Before this year, I had really only read:
- Brave New World (by Aldous Huxley)
- Anthem (by Ayn Rand)
- Fahrenheit 451 (by Ray Bradbury)
- Animal Farm (by George Orwell)
- V for Vendetta and The Watchmen (by Alan Moore)
So this year, I tore through:
- The Hunger Games books, (by Suzanne Collins) (I read the first one in 2012, but re-read it this year)
- Ready Player One (by Ernest Cline)
- The Handmaid’s Tale (by Margaret Atwood)
- 1984 (by George Orwell)
- The Passage and The Twelve (by Justin Cronin)
- Wool (by Hugh Howey)
Here’s what’s in my current to-read list:
- In The Country Of Last Things (by Paul Auster)
- Never Let Me Go (by Kazuo Ishiguro)
