2010 totals

2010 Totals

Dec. 31st, 2010 | 09:02 pm

It's December 31--you know what that means:

• Number of books: 177
• Number of pages: 48,140
• Mean pages/book: 271.98
• Books of the World challenge: 25
• Equatorial Guinea, Seychelles, Tajikistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, [New Caledonia], Tunisia, Fiji, Gabon, Zambia, Jordan, Azerbaijan, Rwanda, Botswana, Qatar, Zanzibar, São Tomé and Príncipe, United Arab Emirates, Tuvalu, Timor-Leste, French Guiana, Venezuela, Slovenia, Bahrain, [Puerto Rico], Cape Verde
• Audiobooks: 27

Pages to date (2006-2010): 173,040

• 2010: 48,140
• 2009: 40,762
• 2008: 27,376
• 2007: 36,821
• 2006: 19,941

1. Jaed Coffin: A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants (224)
2. Kathy Hoopmann: All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome (70)
3. Donato Ndongo: Shadows of Your Black Memory (Equatorial Guinea) (180)
4. Pujita Nanette Mayeda and Friendship with Cambodia: Responsible Traveler’s Guide Cambodia (118)
5. Marc Abrahams: The Ig Nobel Prizes (250)
6. Michael Scott: The Sorceress (502)
7. Helen Bannerman: The Story of Little Black Mingo (48)
8. Laurie Sandell: The Impostor's Daughter: A True Memoir (253)
9. Leonard Q. Ross (a.k.a. Leo Rosten): The Education of Hyman Kaplan (154)
10. Cal Vornberger: Birds of Central Park (208)
11. Michael Wex: Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (319)
12. Stephen T. Asma: The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha (272)
13. Jennifer Toussant-Cali: Meet Vannah of the Seychelles (Seychelles) (48)
14. Jeanne DuPrau: The City of Ember (The Ember Series, #1) (288)
15. Dennis Lehane: Shutter Island (369)
16. Michael Cunningham: The Hours (230)
17. Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim (271)
18. Jeanne DuPrau: The People of Sparks (The Ember Series, #2) (352)
19. Jeanne DuPrau: The Prophet of Yonwood (The Ember Series, #3) (289)
20. Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake (416)
21. Edward Kritzler: Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their
Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom--and Revenge (340)
22. Adam Fifield: A Blessing over Ashes: The Remarkable Odyssey of My Unlikely Brother (334)
23. A. M. Homes: The Mistress's Daughter (251)
24. Robert Frimtzis: From Tajikistan to the Moon: A Story of Tragedy, Survival and Triumph of the Human Spirit (Tajikistan) (376)
25. Garth Nix: Lord Sunday (320)
26. Larry Devlin: Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone (Democratic Republic of the Congo) (306)
27. Jean-Claude Staudt (Ed.), Hilary Roots (translator), & island children (illustrators): Legends of New Caledonia: A Collection of Legends from
the Isle of Pines (New Caledonia) (31)
28. Nim Vantha, Ven Virak, & Sok Sotheavy: Finding Sustainable Livelihoods: A Case Study from Peam Krasaop Wildlife Sanctuary (PKWS), Koh
Kong Province, Kingdom of Cambodia (30)
29. Asian Development Bank: The Significance of Referral Systems as a Response to Human Trafficking and Unsafe Migration (35)
30. Dillon Banerjee: Insider's Guide to the Peace Corps: What to Know Before You Go (2nd ed.) (192)
31. Asian Development Bank: Broken Lives: Trafficking in Human Beings in the Lao People's Democratic Republic (54)
32. Asian Development Bank: Build It and They Will Come: Lessons from the Northern Economic Corridor: Mitigating HIV and Other Diseases (38)
33. Aicha Ben Abad: Tunisian Mosaics: Treasures from Roman Africa (Tunisia) (144)
34. Carrie Ryan: The Forest of Hands and Teeth (318)
35. Michael Chorost: Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (238)
36. Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go (294)
37. William Gibson: Spook Country (379)
38. I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced (189)
39. Jeanne DuPrau: The Diamond of Darkhold (The Ember Series, #4) (295)
40. Suzanne Stone: Volunteering Around the Globe: Life Changing Travel Adventures (207)
41. Epeli Hau'ofa: Tales of the Tikongs (Fiji) (103)
42. Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn: Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (317)
43. Daniel M. Mengara: Mema (Gabon) (126)
44. Patti Smith: Just Kids (303)
45. Heidi Squier Kraft: Rule Number Two: Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital (256)
46. Josh Swiller: The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa (Zambia) (281)
47. Steve Hely: How I Became a Famous Novelist (322)
48. Jean Hanff Korelitz: Admission (452)
49. Marguerite van Geldermalsen: Married to a Bedouin (Jordan) (288)
50. Margaret Atwood: The Year of the Flood (448)
51. Angie Sage: Syren (Septimus Heap #5) (640)
52. Barack Obama: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (471)
53. Rick Steves: Travel as a Political Act (222)
54. [Atul Gawande: Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
(abridged audiobook) (re-read)] [~187]
55. Michael Dorris: Rooms in the House of Stone (66)
56. Kurban Said: Ali and Nino (Azerbaijan) (284)
57. Rosalynn Carter with Susan K. Golant and Kathryn E. Cade: Within Our Reach: Ending the Mental Health Crisis (193)
58. J. Maarten: Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu (239)
59. Michael Scott: The Necromancer (Nicholas Flamel, #4) (416)
60. Paul Rusesabagina with Tom Zoellner: An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography (Rwanda) (207)
61. Augusten Burroughs: A Wolf at the Table (272)
62. Michael Cunningham: Specimen Days (318)
63. Peter Allison: Whatever You Do, Don't Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide (Botswana) (246)
64. Chris Bohjalian: Trans-Sister Radio (368)
65. Alan Gordon: Thirteenth Night (243)
66. Cory Doctorow: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (208)
67. Kristin Cashore: Graceling (473)
68. Cory Doctorow: Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present (285)
69. Habibur Rahman: The Emergence of Qatar: The Turbulent Years 1627--1916 (Qatar) (312)
70. Cory Doctorow: Eastern Standard Tribe (224)
71. Stephenie Meyer: The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: An Eclipse Novella (178)
72. Committee of the Board of Health: Venereal Diseases in New Zealand [1922] (84)
73. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.: The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever [1843] (40)
74. Emily Ruete [Sayyida Salme]: Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar (Zanzibar) [1907/2009] (298)
75. Rory Stewart: The Places in Between (308)
76. Donald Burness: Ossobó: Essays on the Literature of São Tomé and Príncipe (São Tomé and Príncipe) (176)
77. Denys Johnson-Davies (Ed. & Tr.): In a Fertile Desert: Modern Writing from the United Arab Emirates (United Arab Emirates) (123)
78. Gerd Koch: Songs of Tuvalu (Tuvalu) (197)
79. Amitav Ghosh: Dancing in Cambodia, at Large in Burma (120)
80. Ly Daravuth and Ingrid Muan: Tools and Practices: Change and Continuity in the Cambodian Countryside (92)
81. Cory Doctorow: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (320)
82. Scott Westerfeld: Uglies (425)
83. Scott Westerfeld: Pretties (370)
84. Scott Westerfeld: Specials (372)
85. Asian Development Bank: Under the Weather and the Rising Tide: Adapting to a Changing Climate in Asia and the Pacific (80)
86. Eleonora Hunt: My Trip Around the World: August 1895-May, 1896 (168)
87. Tanya Shaffer: Somebody's Heart is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa (332)
88. Matthew Jardine: East Timor: Genocide in Paradise (95)
89. Luís Cardoso: The Crossing: A Story of East Timor (Timor-Leste) (173)
90. Brandon Sanderson: Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians (312)
91. Joseph Conrad: An Outcast of the Islands (304)
92. Stephen Moses, James F. Blanchard, Han Kang, Faran Emmanuel, Sushena Reza Paul, Marissa L. Becker, David Wilson, and Mariam
Claeson: AIDS in South Asia: Understanding and Responding to a Heterogeneous Epidemic (136)
93. Ward Muir: Observations of an Orderly: Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital (249)
94. M. T. Anderson: The Suburb Beyond the Stars (227)
95. Abdourahman A. Waberi: The Land without Shadows (118)
96. Edna Fernandes: The Last Jews of Kerala: The 2,000 Year History of India's Forgotten Jewish Community (248)
97. Scott Westerfeld: Extras (417)
98. Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda (208)
99. Bruce Weinstein: Is it Still Cheating if I Don't Get Caught? (160)
100. Bruce Weinstein: Life Principles: Feeling Good by Doing Good (190)
101. Tayeb Salih: Season of Migration to the North (159)
102. Brandon Sanderson: Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener's Bones (336)
103. Laura Manivong: Escaping the Tiger (222)
104. Thomas de Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (127)
105. Alan Michael Parker (Ed.): Imaginary Poets: 22 Master Poets Create 22 Master Poets (160)
106. Olivia Gentile: Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds (345)
107. Joseph Conrad: The Secret Sharer (64)
108. Jhumpa Lahiri: The Namesake (291)
109. Robert Charles Wilson: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (413)
110. Allison Hoover Bartlett: The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: A True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession (282)
111. Paul R. Linde: Of Spirits and Madness: An American Psychiatrist in Africa (240)
112. Michael Clinton: Global Faces: 500 Photographs from 7 Continents (352)
113. Henri Charrière: Papillon (French Guiana) (560)
114. Susan Beth Pfeffer: Life As We Knew It (345)
115. Frank Kane and John Tilsley: In the Shadow of Papillon: Seven Years of Hell in Venezuela's Prison System (Venezuela) (287)
116. David Mitchell: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (491)
117. Suzanne Collins: Mockingjay (400)
118. Harvard Lampoon: Nightlight: A Parody (154)
119. Tom Reiss: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life (476)
120. John Elder Robison: Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (317)
121. Shanta Rao: Stories of Women (136)
122. Slavoj Žižek: Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (Slovenia) (188)
123. Nawal el Saadawi: Woman at Point Zero (112)
124. Ali Al Saeed: QuixotiQ (Bahrain) (192)
125. Sandra Wilkinson: Brain Death (396)
126. Susan Beth Pfeffer: The Dead and the Gone (321)
127. Nick Reding: Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town (269)
128. Cassandra Clare: City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments #1) (493)
129. Kristin Cashore: Fire (Graceling #2) (466)
130. [J. K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (759) (second reading)]
131. Marcel Proust: Swann's Way (474)
132. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (48)
133. Marion Zimmer Bradley: The Colors of Space (141)
134. Marion Zimmer Bradley: The Door Through Space (204)
135. Michael Paul Masdon: Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath (314)
136. Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (352)
137. Mary Roach: Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (336)
138. Mark Vonnegut: Just like Someone Without Mental Illness Only Moreso (224)
139. Jeanette Winterson: The Stone Gods (212)
140. Wilson Smith: Just Dirt: Memoirs (131)
141. Denis Johnson: Tree of Smoke (620)
142. James Boswell, Robert William Chapman (Ed.): Selections from James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson [Oxford, 1821] (220)
143. Esmeralda Santiago: When I Was Puerto Rican [Puerto Rico] (286)
144. Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (333)
145. Barbara Kingsolver: The Lacuna (508)
146. Walter Kirn: Up in the Air (302)
147. James Joyce: Ulysses (783)
148. Charlaine Harris: Dead Until Dark (Sookie Stackhouse #1) (316)
149. Emma Larkin: Finding George Orwell in Burma (304)
150. Adam Hochschild: King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror & Heroism in Colonial Africa (384)
151. John Ortved: The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History (352)
152. Amitav Ghosh: In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale (400)
153. Dante Alighieri (tr. Robert Pinsky): The Inferno of Dante A New Verse Translation (~355)
154. Cassandra Clare: City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments #2) (453)
155. John Perkins: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (250)
156.  George Obama and Damien Lewis: Homeland (256)
157. Cassandra Clare: City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments #3) (541)
158. Germano Almeida: the Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo [Cape Verde] (152)
159. Karlyn M. Ward: Visitation in a Zen Garden (64)
160. George Eliot: Scenes of Clerical Life (431)
161. Alain de Botton: A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary (112)
162. Kelsey Timmerman: Where Am I Wearing: A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People That Make Our Clothes (272)
163. Sandi Fox: Cats on Quilts (128)
164. Wang Gang: English (320)
165. Michael Flynn: Eifelheim (512)
166. Urgunge Onon: My Mongolian World: From Onon Bridge to Cambridge (162)
167. G. Michael Flieg & Allan Sander: A Photographic Guide to the Birds of the West Indies (144)
168. Jonathan Safran Foer: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (368)
169. Peter Hessler: River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (432)
170. John Reader: The Untold History of the Potato [a.k.a. Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent (336)
171. Martin Lloyd: The Passport: The History of Man's Most Travelled Document (288)
172. Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus (~110)
173. Richard ffrench and Roger Neckles: Birds of Trinidad and Tobago (2nd ed.) (132)
174. Nicholas Drayson: Guide to the Birds of East Africa (206)
175. Rebecca Skloot: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (384)
176. Paul R. Linde: Danger to Self: On the Front Line with an ER Psychiatrist (277)
177. Barbara Demick: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (336)

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

#571
Title: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
Author: Barbara Demick
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Year: 2009
336 pages

Demick uses the life stories of several North Koreans as a framework to give shape to and personalize a history of North Korea, and the effects of that history and politics on these storytellers' lives. This creates a more intimate and nuanced account than many, rendering daily life in North Korea more accessible to the outside reader.

Danger to Self: On the Front Line with an ER Psychiatrist

#570
Title: Danger to Self: On the Front Line with an ER Psychiatrist
Author: Paul R. Linde
Publisher: University of California Press
Year: 2010
277 pages

Linde uses patient stories to open discussions of psychiatry/psychology concepts and intervention principles. It makes for a somewhat uneasy blend of story and pedagogy. The most consistent focus is on the author and his growth as a psychiatrist. This is fine; however, Linde often makes statements about philosophy and practice that he overgeneralizes to most or all psychiatric workers. I don't agree with Linde at a reasonable number of points, and would not have been troubled by this if he did not make such over-inclusive assertions. This puts me, a reader who has worked in multiple psychiatric assessment and treatment units, in the position of countering Linde as I'm reading, which distances me emotionally more than I would have thought going into it.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

#569
Title: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Author: Rebecca Skloot
Publisher: Crown
Year: 2010
384 pages
either
Skloot delivers an excellent blend of personal story and and the history that proceeds it, derives from it, and to some extent has overridden it. In its tone and interests, it is similar to Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and you Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, neither entirely condemning nor exonerating any of the people and institutions involved. Skloot brings alive the answer to the question of why we need Institutional Review Boards and Human Subjects review, invoking the Tuskeegee syphilis studies among others to illustrate the pattern of using less- powerful and more vulnerable groups as experimental subjects with inadequate consent (or, later, inadequate informed consent). Skloot does not take sides in the matter of whether Henrietta Lacks's family ought to benefit economically from the scientific use of her cell line. She facilitates each player's stand and arguments without much comment, which seems reasonable to me. It doe seem as though there is an ironic revenge in HeLa's ability to infiltrate and overwhelm other sample cell lines.

A Guide to the Birds of East Africa

#568
Title: A Guide to the Birds of East AfricaAuthor: Nicholas Drayson
Publisher: Mariner
Year: 2008/2009
206 pages

A sweet little novel, refreshing in its lack of slaughter and mayhem. The premise, that who may ask the lady on a date will be decided by bird sightings, is especially fun for birders, as is the triumphal moment of the contest. Each chapter is headed with a charming sketch of a bird.

Birds of Trinidad and Tobago (2nd ed.)

#567
Title: Birds of Trinidad and Tobago (2nd ed.)
Author: Richard ffrench and Roger Neckles
Publisher: Macmillan
Year: 2004
132 pages

I received this as a gift after standing on a mountain in Tobago and realizing that my Caribbean bird books at hand didn't include Trinidad and Tobago. Thus, I used it retroactively to look up the birds we spotted and those we could identify without a book. This is better than many bird guides as the photos are reasonably clear and the descriptions full of information. We saw and can positively identify 16 birds that don't appear in this book, but 43 that do, including the White-tailed sabrewing, Rufous-tailed jacamar, Blue-crowned mot-mot, and some gorgeous Southern lapwings. It's a good basic guide and certainly better than many of the pocket bird identification books.

Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

#566
Title: Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke
Translator: Stephen Mitchell
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1923/2009
(Audio cassette 1997 by Audio Literature)
110 pages (as audio)

Translated and read by Stephen Mitchell. I love Rilke so instead of commenting on the poems, I'll kvetch a little about some of the shortfalls of audiobooks. In book form, does this translation have an introduction? Explanatory notes? A facing page in the original German? In addition to the pretty clear sense at times of not getting the whole book, I also wonder how to convert audio duration to pages. It doesn't trouble me that much, but I find myself more drawn to novels as I peruse audiobooks. It's a nuisance to read non-fiction and then go to a bookstore or library to look at intros, afterwords, end notes, and diagrams. In any event, Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus work very well together and I enjoyed Mitchell's somewhat academic but non-intrusive reading.