What did you read in 2008?

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible A. J. Jacobs
The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence Carl Sagan
Snuff Chuck Palahniuk
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel Dai Sijie
The Messenger Daniel Silva
Moscow Rules Daniel Silva
The Kill Artist Daniel Silva
Tyrannosaur Canyon Douglas Preston
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong James W. Loewen
The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Malcolm Gladwell
The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals Michael Pollan
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter Richard Feynman

The Handmaid's Tale although short took me a long time to read. I also read about 100 pages of Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon which was a real chore.

Also started reading all of these in 2008, but am not finished with them yet.
The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World A. J. Jacobs
Your Pregnancy Week by Week, 6th Edition Glade B. Curtis, Judith Schuler
Sams Teach Yourself the C# Language in 21 Days Bradley L. Jones

How was The Handmaid's Tale? I just got another book by Margaret Atwood on Mirka's recommendation, which I have yet to start. I keep forgetting the name...Crsomething & Oryx.

I have never ever recommended Margaret Atwood! @@@33344 CUSS

I hated The Handmaids Tale.

I count my books! I have a page-a-day diary in which I record such things (what books I finished on that day, what films I saw at the cinema, if I saw someone with an eye-patch in the train station, etc.). I can't type out all of the books I read here because that would be a waste of time but here are the percentages:

Normal, non-genre, adult books-40%
YA novels-30%
Horror-10%
Romance (swoon)-10%
Crime-10%

I keep a spreadsheet of my books, which I can sort by title, author and year read. I'm disappointed in myself for only reading 28 in 08...but I blame that on going the entire month of January without reading anything (which was stupid) and spending all of February on one book, which I still haven't even finished. Sooooo, two months of reading down the drain.

Well, now I'm irritated with myself, because I only bought the book because I thought for some reason that you recommended it. But you should be happy to know that my reason for buying it was the thought that it was a Mirka recommendation.

...so I just went and looked and it was Tanus who recommended Margaret Atwood, but his post was right below yours, and this is a problem I have. I switch words and occasionally sentences that are on different lines and whatnot. Soooo, in my mind, it was you who said that, Mirka. oops!

I've done the same thing since 2004. I recently uploaded it to google docs so I can access it anywhere and I'll never lose it. I didn't do too much better, only 30 this year. Plus if you look, I was all over the map when it came to books.

Books of 2008

01. ASSASSINATION VACATION by Sarah Vowell - 1/11/08
02. THE PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE by Rick Warren - 2/2/08
03. YOU REMIND ME OF ME by Dan Chaon - 2/18/08
04. THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald - 3/1/08
05. FRESH FAITH by Jim Cymbala - 3/7/08
06. JOE COLLEGE by Tom Perrotta - 3/23/08
07. A RAISIN ON THE SUN by Lorraine Hansberry - 4/7/08
08. HEAT by Bill Buford - 4/24/08
09. RANT by Chuck Palahniuk -6/7/08
10. I LOVE YOU, BETH COOPER by Larry Doyle - 6/11/08
11. DEAR MR. MACKINS by Richard J. Mackins - 6/15/08
12. CHASING GHOSTS by Paul Rieckhoff - 6/24/08
13. THE CONTORTIONIST'S HANDBOOK by Craig Clevenger - 6/26/08
14. JESUS' SON by Denis Johnson - 7/13/08
15. MONEYBALL by Michael Lewis - 7/18/08
16. ONE MISSISSIPPI by Mark Childress - 7/29/08
17. REMAINER by Tom McCarthy - 8/11/08
18. SPEAK by Laurie Halse Anderson - 8/18/08
19. THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy - 8/19/08
20. I KILLED by Ritch Shydner & Mark Schiff - 8/22/08
21. HEART SICK by Chelsea Cain - 9/6/08
22. THE SHACK by William P. Young - 9/25/08
23. COMPANY by Max Barry - 10/23/08
24. ADVENTURES OF THE ARTIFICIAL WOMAN by Thomas Berger - 10/28/08
25. GIRLFRIEND IN A COMA by Douglas Coupland - 11/12/08
26. BAND OF BROTHERS by Stephen E. Ambrose - 11/30/08
27. THE LAST LECTURE by Randy Pausch - 12/4/08
28. CHILDREN OF MEN by P.D. James - 12/20/08
29. DISRUPTING CLASS by Clayton Christensen - 12/26/08
30. MULTIPLE BLES8INGS by Kate Gosselin - 12/28/08

I can't remember all the books i read this year, but i'll give it a shot. I'm not going to count rereads either.

Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Dubliners - James Joyce
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce
Ulysses - Joyce
The Magus - John Fowles
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
The Waves - Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Jacob's Room - Virginia Woolf
Lady Chatterly's Lover - DH Lawrence
House of Leaves - Mark Z Danielewski
Only Revolutions - Mark Z Danielewski
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Complete Short Stories of Vladimir Nabakov
The Silent Cry - Kenzaburo Oe
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti - Stephen Graham Jones [twice]
Ledfeather - Stephen Graham Jones [twice]
Demon Theory - Stephen Graham Jones
The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong - Stephen Graham Jones
The Alphabet Man - Richard Grossman
The Book of Lazarus - Richard Grossman
Already Dead - Charlie Huston
The Collected Stories of Raymond Carver
The Collected Stories of Jorge Luis Borges
100 Years of Solitude - Gabrial Garcia Marquez [though this may have been last year. Can't remember.]
The Name of the World -Denis Johnson
Eugene Onegin - Aleksandr Pushkin
Death in Venice - Thomas Mann
Stardust - Neil Gaiman
The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman
Coraline - Neil Gaiman
Alice and Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
The White Hotel - DM Thomas
The Flute Player - DM Thomas
Lanark - Alasdair Gray
Rubicon Beach - Steve Erickson
The Raw Shark Texts - Steven hall
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Crash - JG Ballard
Jennifer Government - Max Barry
I Am Legend - Richard Matheson
Cold Snap - Thom Jones
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Twilight - William Gay
Rage - Stephen King
The Shining - Stephen King

There are some others that i can't remember. All my books are back home, so it ain't so easy to remember.

Exactly what I've done - google kicks ass...at least after your disabled all of their ads!!

The Handmaid's Tale is a good story, but it's hard to trudge through, not as bad as Against the Day (Pynchon) is, but still hard. It's in a very 1984 / Fahrenheit 451 type prose and coincidentally enough the same genre.

Don't worry, I'll read it. I'm sure it will be good.

Never thought about it..

1) Choke by CP
2) Lullaby by CP
3) Rant by CP
4) Survivor by CP
5) Diary by CP
6) Haunted by CP
7) Cats Cradle by Vonnegut
8) Breakfast of Champions by Vonnegut
9) The Electric Acid Kool Aid Test by Tom Wolfe
10)Blindness by Saramango
11) House of Leaves- Danielewski
12) Zen mind, Beginner Mind
13) The Pig That Wanted To be Eaten
14) The Dharma Bums by Kerouac
15) The Raw Shark Texts by Hall
16)Less Than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis
17) The Idiot by Dostoevsky
18) Nine Stories- by Salinger
19)Jesus' Son- Denis Johnson
20)A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

I think there's more, but I'm not home to look at my book shelf.

You all have impressively large lists.

This is mine, from what I remember:

Raw Shark Texts- Steven Hall
Microserfs- Douglas Coupland
Jpod- Coupland
Eleanor Rigby- Coupland
Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
Wind-Up Bird Chronicles- Murakami
Darkly Dreaming Dexter- Jeff Lindsay
Perfume- Patrick Suskind
Last Exit to Brooklyn -Hubert Selby Jr
About a Boy- Nick Hornby
This Book will Save your life- A. M. Homes
Neverwhere- Neil Gaiman
Syrup- Max Barry
The Rum Diary- Hunter S. Thompson
No Country For Old Men- Cormac McCarthy
A Friend Like Henry- Nuala Gardner

Oooh, I want to play!

Flash Fiction: Very Short Stories -- ed. James Thomas
The O. Henry Prize Stories (2006) -- ed. Laura Furman
City of Glass -- Paul Auster
Oracle Night -- Paul Auster
The Book of 10 Nights and a Night -- John Barth
American Gods -- Neil Gaiman
Preludes and Nocturnes -- Neil Gaiman
The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish -- Neil Gaiman
Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson
Speaker for the Dead -- Orson Scott Card
Invisible Monsters -- Chuck Palahniuk
The Illustrated Man -- Ray Bradbury
Crooked Little Vein -- Warren Ellis
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind -- Julian Jaynes
Kingdom Come -- Mark Waid
Crisis on Infinite Earths -- Marv Wolfmann
My Many Colored Days -- Dr. Suess
This Book Will Change Your Life -- Benrik

Oh... I thought there'd be more. Of course there's all those books I started last year but still haven't finished.

How were these? My friends tell me to read him, but I haven't had the chance yet.

I loved them. They are mystic, lovely and a bit twisted.
You should read them.
I plan to read more by him this year.

Tracked via my facebook bookshelf:

Was reading The Monkey Wrench Gang as the year started, The Edward Abbey.
The Stranger, Camus
Invis Monsters, The Palahniuk
The Revolution: A Manifesto, Ron Paul
Snuff, The P
Lullaby, The P
Essentials of Philosophy, James Mannion
Live Free or Die, by my man Gardner Goldsmith
The Prince, Machiavelli
Stranger Than Fiction, The P
Reasons to Live, Hempel
Diary, The P
How to WIn Friends and Influence People, Carnegie
The Communist Manifesto, The Marx
Man Without A Country, Vonnegut
The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Roberts
The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon
Siddhartha, Hesse
The Anarchist Manifesto, Anselme Bellegarrigue
The Kingdom of God is Within You, Tolstoy
Non-Violent Resistance, Gandhi
New Libertarian Manifesto, Konkin
The God Delusion, The Dawkins

And I started The Market for Liberty around the 27th and finished it in the New Year.

My reading rate quadroupled in August, I'm reading more now than ever.

I keep track on a website: LibraryThing. It's kind of a cool resource with message boards and stuff, None of which are nearly as useful as this one. I read about a hundred books in the past year. Im a college student so about sixty of those are for class and the rest are for fun. Here are my favorites/highlights(in no particular order or organization):

Dharma Bums by Kerouac
Herzog by Saul Bellow
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Dubliners by James Joyce
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
The Early History of Rome(in Latin) by Livy
Shame by Salman Rushdie
How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers
American Pastoral by Phillip Roth
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
Underworld by Don Delillo
Snuff by CP
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Oracle Night by Paul Auster
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man by James Joyce
Vox by Nicolas Baker
Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
What is the What by Dave Eggers
Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollack
Complete Stories of Kafka, Katherine Anne Porter, John Cheever, Jorge Luis Borges
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
The Best American Short Stories ed by Salman Rushdie
A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs
Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth
Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov
Sixty Stories by Donald Barthlehme
Pricksongs and Descants by Robert Coover
Blood Child by Octavia Butler
Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed
Men and Cartoons by Johnathan Lethem
In Persuasion Nation, Pastoralia by George Saunders
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
V. by Thomas Pynchon

Pricksongs and Descants by Robert Coover

That has the story the Babysitter in it, doesn't it? That story is *wild*.

Kiss Me, Judas by Will Christopher Baer
Penny Dreadful by Will Christopher Baer
Hell's Half Acre by Will Christopher Baer
6 Sick Hipsters by Rayo Casablanca
Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland
What is the What? by Dave Eggers
The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis
Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman
IV by Chuck Klosterman
Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman
Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
Freakonomics by Steven Levitt
Confessions of a Political Hitman by Stephen Marks
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
Chinese Takeout by Arthur Nersesian
Dogrun Nersesian by Arthur Nersesian
Suicide Casanova by Arthur Nersesian
The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian
The Swing Voter of Staten Island by Arthur Nersesian
The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx by Arthur Nersesian
Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk
Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut

Kiss Me, Judas by Will Christopher Baer
Penny Dreadful by Will Christopher Baer
Hell's Half Acre by Will Christopher Baer
6 Sick Hipsters by Rayo Casablanca
Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland
What is the What? by Dave Eggers
The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis
Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman
IV by Chuck Klosterman
Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman
Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
Freakonomics by Steven Levitt
Confessions of a Political Hitman by Stephen Marks
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
Chinese Takeout by Arthur Nersesian
Dogrun Nersesian by Arthur Nersesian
Suicide Casanova by Arthur Nersesian
The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian
The Swing Voter of Staten Island by Arthur Nersesian
The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx by Arthur Nersesian
Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk
Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut

Ironman, all you did was double re-post my list.

Call of the Wild - Jack London
The Sea Wolf - Jack London
Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
Jpod - Douglas Coupland
All Families are Psychotic – Douglas Coupland
The Island of Dr. Mordeu - H. G. Wells
The Time Machine - H. G. Wells
The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells
Hocus Pocus – Kurt Vonnegut
Demon Theory - Stephen Graham Jones
Kiss Me, Judas - Will Christopher Baer
Contortionists Handbook - Craig Clevenger
Tomato Red – Daniel Woodrell
The Killer Inside Me - Jim Thompson
Dermaphoria – Craig Clevenger
The Stand – Stephen King
Penny Dreadul - Will Christopher Baer
To Have and Have Not - Earnest Hemingway
Under the Bright Lights – Daniel Woodrell
The Tale of Edgar Sawtelle – Daniel Wroblewski
Hell’s Half Acre – Will Christopher Baer
Galapagos – Kurt Vonnegut
Descendants – Kaui Hart Hemings
Slapstick – Kurt Vonnegut
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe – Douglas Adams
Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
Men Without Women - Earnest Hemingway
The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other stories- Earnest Hemingway
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Pat Hobby Stories - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk (x2)

All my books are about business and war. and many of the war books where rereads. And I am really into audiobooks now, does that count?

Leave me alone Tom, I just wanna be a cultie like you....

The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell)
Freakonomics (SD Levitt & SJ Dubner)
Sadaharu Oh, A Zen Way of Baseball (Sadaharu Oh & D Falkner)
Moneyball (Michael Lewis)
Le désir d'être inutile (Hugo Pratt)
Martin Scorsese presents The Blues (ed. by P Guralnick, etc)
Memoirs of a Spymaster (Markus Wolf)
Hammett's Moral Vision (George "Rhino" Thompson)
Dashiell Hammett, a Daughter Remembers (Jo Hammett)
Lone Wolf & Cub (Band 20, 21, 22, 23, 24) (K Koike & G Kojima)
Samurai Executioner (Vol 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) (K Koike & G Kojima)
Corpus Christi (G Mordillat & J Prieur)
Traité de l'efficacité (François Jullien)
L'Art de la Guerre (Sun Tzu)
The International Spy Museum Handbook of Practical Spying
L'Acteur et le Système (M Crozier & E Friedberg)
Traditions Martiales (Ellis Amdur)
Classical Budo (Donn Draeger)
Aikido Masters (Stanley Pranin)
Nietzsche, un Continent Perdu (Bernard Edelman)
Histoire Secrète du Mossad (Gordon Thomas)
Le Négociateur (Frederic Forsythe)
Le Savoir-Vivre chez les Truands (Albert Simonin)
The Silmarillion (JRR Tolkien)
Child 44 (Tom Rob Smith)
The Feckin' Book of Everything Irish (Murphy O'Dea)
The Deportees (Roddy Doyle)
No Country for Old Men (Cormac McCarthy)

and of course several lesson books on german.

I'm keeping a list of what i read this year so i can impress all of you with the massivity of it come twelve months from now!
So far, one down.

I love seeing how many books we all have in common on our reading lists. I mean, I know there is a logical reason for this, and it's not just a coincidence, but still...it makes me happy.

Don't spread such rumors!

No offense to Tanus, either. Many friends of mine like Margaret Atwood, especially Handmaid. I simply don't and there's plenty to read out there.

I haven't kept a list for 2008, maybe I'll try to keep track this year.

I kept a list and I read 169 books, 150 of them were by James Patterson.

...or 150 of them had James Patterson's name on them, anyway

I didn't read that many books in 2008 since I actually just got into reading for real. I've always enjoyed reading but never actually taken the time to sit down and read untill about half a year ago. These are the books I remember reading in 2008 though:

The Art of Happiness - Dalai Lama & Howard C. Cutler
Deception Point - Dan Brown
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Choke - Chuck Palahniuk
Invisible Monsters - Chuck Palahniuk
A Boy Called It - Dave Pelzer
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Played With Fire - Stieg Larsson
The Aircastle That Blew Up - Stieg Larsson
How Proust Can Change Your Life - Alain De Botton

I'm going to keep track of all the books I read in 2009. Mainly for comparison. I believe I'll read about 5 times as many this year because I feel almost addicted to reading at this moment.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon*
The Cold Six-thousand by James Ellroy
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
The Little Stranger by Sarah Walters
Pale Fire by Vladamir Nabokov*
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
The Haunting by Shirley Jackson
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth*
Red Harvest*
The Thin Man
The Dain Curse
The Maltese Falcon all by Dashiel Hammett
The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkis
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Callasso*

*favourites