Year-end wrap-up, or, Lay your head down on your desk and have a little nap now

Here we are: the last day of the first year of the blog that began as the awkwardly named whatiscolleenreadingnow.blogspot.com and ended as the more memorable but also somewhat more pretentious www.bookphilia.com.

I started this blog simply to find out how many books I read in a year (I was being asked this question a great deal and had no idea) but it's turned into something bigger than that for me. Honestly, writing this blog is one of my favourite things to do and I think has restored a great deal of my pre-PhD enthusiasm for books (and comfort with talking only about how awesome or shiteous a book is). Other revelations this year: I read more than I thought; I am becoming increasingly impatient with contemporary fiction (i.e., Serious Literature); I love books almost more than anything else in the world (okay, I might have known this one already).

So, here are some stats for you, summing up what I've read in the past year and how I've felt about it at the extreme ends of adoration and loathing - and of course, the final number of completed books.

Authors I've read this year:

Adams, Douglas; Adrian, Chris; Akutagawa, Ryunosuke; Alexie, Sherman; Allen, Woody; Ammaniti, Niccolo; Banks, Iain; Bauby, Jean-Dominique; Brooks, Terry; Burroughs, Augusten; Byatt, A.S; Carey, Peter; Chabon, Michael; Colfer, Eoin; Collins, Wilkie; Collodi, Carlo; Crane, Stephen; Dickens, Charles; Eco, Umberto; Erdrich, Louise; Frame, Janet; Gaiman, Neil; Highway, Thomson; Hynes, James; Jeffery, Lawrence; Johnson, Gordon; Kawabata, Yasunari; Keyes, Daniel; Kim, Young-Ha; Kishi, Yusuke; Krauss, Nicole; Kundera, Milan; Kushner, Tony; LeGuin, Ursula K.; L’Engle, Madeleine; Mahfouz, Naguib; McCarthy, Cormac; Millar, Martin; Mishima, Yukio; Mitchell, David; Miyamoto, Teru; Murakami, Haruki; Nix, Garth; O’Brien, Flann; Pamuk, Orhan; Pavese, Cesare; Priest, Christopher; Prince-Hughes, Dawn; Pu, Songling; Rahimi, Atiq; Rhodes, Dan; Scalzi, John; Sebold. Alice; Shaogong, Han; Singer, Isaac Bashevis; Spark, Muriel; Stewart, Mary; Suskind, Patrick; Takami, Koushun; Tanizaki, Junichiro; Toibin, Colm; Tong, Su; Tuttle, Will; van Niekerk, Marlene; Vonnegut, Kurt; Wodehouse, P.G.; Yoshimoto, Banana; Zusak, Markus.

Countries represented:

Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, Scotland, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, USA.

Most over-represented author of the year:

It's a tie between Garth Nix and P.G. Wodehouse, with 5 apiece.

Most over-represented country:

The USA, with 25+ representations.

Worst books of the year (in no particular order):

The Road, Songs of the Gorilla Nation, Timoleon Vieta Come Home, The Lovely Bones, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Flowers for Algernon, The King of the Fields.

Best books of the year (in no particular order):

Rashomon and 17 Other Stories, At Swim-Two-Birds, Ghostwritten, The Harafish, Leave it to Psmith, Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, Quicksand.

Unfinished reads:

The Early History of Rome, The Cat and Shakespeare.

Total reads for blog-year 1:

86