Some results from the Verso Digital survey of consumer purchasing behavior:

Avid readers--those who purchase 10 or more books a year--tend to be older, female, wealthier and better educated--and represent 30.2% of the U.S. adult population, about 70 million people. "They are the market that's a driver for our industry," McKeown said. These avid readers buy books for a variety of reasons, including entertainment/relaxation (32%), education and self-improvement (22%) and for gifts (14%).
and

Readers find out about books mostly through personal recommendations (49.2%), bookstore staff recommendations (30.8%), advertising (24.4%), search engine searches (21.6%) and book reviews (18.9%). Much less important are online algorithms (16%), blogs (12.1%) and social networks (11.8%). These results "reaffirm the power and necessity of bricks-and-mortar stores and traditional marketing efforts," McKeown commented.

Seventy million of us. I find that heartening. And while others may be bummed that blogs are even less influential than online algorithms, I'm not.

I'm quite amused.

Okay, so I'm going to revive a practice abandoned a few years back . At the beginning of every month I'll post a list of the books that I hope to read by its end. There will often be more books on the list than I can possibly read, but I'll try to be realistic in my expectations and shoot for two books a week, with a small number of substitutions and extras to choose from in case things don't work out as I'd planned.

For January:

A World Elsewhere. Wayne Johnston
Earth. David Brin
State of Wonder. Ann Patchett (campus book club)
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. Reif Larsen (Slaves of Golconda)
The Day of the Triffids. John Wyndham
Assumption. Percival Everett
Hard Times. Charles Dickens
The War of the Worlds. H.G. Wells

if time enough:
Measure for Measure. William Shakespeare
The Day the Earth Stood Still. Harry Bates
The Paperbark Shoe. Goldie Goldbloom

Hello 2012!

I've decided that making resolutions--for me, at any rate--is a lot like having Alzheimer's disease. In December I decide on the direction I want to go in, put some thought into my goals for the year. . .  then check the preceeding January's resolutions and see that they're exactly the same, and were exactly the same the year before as well! Good grief.

And looking at the lists of books I intend to read is depressing. There are carry-overs that keep popping up year after year, so no more of that. There's much more brawn to my read-at-whim muscle than you might expect, although putting together my fill in the gaps list of one hundred authors back in 2009 allows me the flexibility to be both flighty and on task. I knocked off another 20 from that list in 2011, bringing my total to 60. I should have no trouble reaching one hundred by the project's end in April 2014.

I'm bringing in the new year with David Brin's Earth, the type of hard science fiction I intended to read last year, before I became sidetracked by a fairly steady supply of time travel fare. I'm also reading Wayne Johnston's A World Elsewhere, a book that won't be published in the U.S. until late summer. After I saw it pop up on a couple of Canadian blogs several months back, I added it to my wish list--portions of the novel take place in North Carolina, in a mansion modeled after the Biltmore estate, so how could I resist? And then I thought I'd see if I could get it through interlibrary loan, and yes, there was a library in Texas willing to send it my way, although they want it back this Friday.

In theory, I remain committed to avoiding all reading challenge entanglements, but there are so many fantastic ones taking place this month: Carl's Science Fiction Experience; Redhead's Vintage Science Fiction Month; Kim's Australian Fiction Month; Allie's Shakespeare Month; and Amanda's Charles Dickens Month. Might I squeeze in one title from each challenge before I swear off them all for the rest of the year? In addition to book group obligations?

And I'm definitely taking part in C.B. James's TBR Double Dare, although I am turning it into a book buying ban until April. In fact, although I'm not officially making any resolutions this year, I do have a catchy slogan--Eschew the New--and I'm going to chant it whenever my finger gets twitchy over at the Evil Place. My daughter's moving to Berlin for six months in a couple weeks and we're going to want to visit her while she's there; I don't need to divert any money on books that I could get from the library if I'm patient enough.

Eschew the new. Or, to quote Maurice Sagoff:

Eschew
The norm
(Dull minds conform)

Guess that means I'm bypassing the buzz books in 2012 to re-read some of my old favorites.

Oops.

I just made a resolution.

Let's pretend it never happened.

2011 reading stats and favorites

I shouldn't have waited until the last minute to work on this post, particularly since I've known since the middle of the week that I wouldn't be finishing another book until 2012, but if I've been consistent about anything this year, it's been in being as bad a blogger as I could possibly be. I'll do better next year--but that's a good hour-and-a-half away.

So what conclusions have I drawn from this year's hastily-assembled reading stats?

That while 82 completed books (I've lost count of the number of books set aside, yet still in progress) is quite respectable, if not awe-inspiring, I'm still a little bummed when I compare that number to the 101 that I managed the previous two years.  Couldn't I have looked at less kitchen porn, read fewer political blogs? Couldn't I have tried harder to convince the guys that six seasons of Lost should take longer than five weeks to watch? Perhaps I could have finished a bit more nonfiction, read a volume or two of poetry, if I'd used my time more wisely.

But of course the most appalling stat is the number of new books that came into the house and remained unread. Dare I mention that I ordered three more this morning, before I go cold turkey for the next three months? Only one of those books do I intend to read right away; I should have waited on the others.

My reading stats for the last seven years (this year's in bold):

Books Total  82  / 101 /  101  /  78  /  81  /  74  /  77
Nonfiction    12  / 16 /  15  /  13  /  8  /  14  /  13
Novels   66  / 78 /  79  /  62  /  62  /  50  /  47
Short Story Collections  2  / 7 /  7  /  3  / 4  / 1  /  8
Library Books  39  / 26 /  48  /  27  /  14  / 31
Newly Acquired/Read  12 / 23 /  32  /32  /  31  /  24
Newly Acquired/Stockpiled  120+ / 113 /  140  /  88  /141+  /  75+
E-texts Read 12  / 17 /  10  /  12
Free E-texts Read 6  / 9 / 5  /  7
Just-published books  21  / 36 /  55 /  41  /34  /  33
Classics    23  / 21 / 10  /  8  /  23  /  12
Pre-20th Century  10 / 9 / 7  /  4  /  12  /  11
Written by women  38 / 46 /  55  /  42  /  33  /  28

Two plays: Othello and Agamemnon

Authors with multiple books read: W. Somerset Maugham (Wendy and I read five Maughams over the summer); Alice Thomas Ellis (3); H.G. Wells (3); Stewart O'Nan (2); Mary Doria Russell (2); William Styron (2); Anthony Trollope (2); Rebecca West (2); and Connie Willis (2).

Rereads: Othello, Pride and Prejudice, The Razor's Edge, House of Mirth, Darkness Visible and Atonement.

I read several books this year that I finished knowing that I want to read them again some day. At the top of that list is Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus, which the Slaves read back in April.

Other favorites from the year are:
Started Early, Took My Dog. Kate Atkinson
Who Was Changed, and Who Was Dead. Barbara Comyns
Galore. Michael Crummey
The Sisters Brothers. Patrick deWitt
A Visit from the Goon Squad. Jennifer Egan
Wounded. Percival Everett
We Had It So Good. Linda Grant
The Sundial. Shirley Jackson
Skippy Dies. Paul Murray
Doc. Mary Doria Russell
There But For The. Ali Smith
He Knew He Was Right. Anthony Trollope
Among Others. Jo Walton

The complete list of books read in 2011 can be found here.

See you next year!

Reading Shakespeare

Three years ago, at one of the lowest moments of my life, I started doing something I never thought I’d do. I’m reading every single play William Shakespeare ever wrote. And I’m reading most of them aloud. From the three dour Henry VIs, through all of your Macbeths and Romeos and Hamlets, all the way to nutty Cymbeline and beyond.


--DG Strong, "How Shakespeare got me through unemployment"

Something beautiful

Meanwhile Richard is demonstrating with his hands the goggles the police use to be able to see what the microdrone is seeing. Hugo puts his hands over his eyes too. Jen and Hugo, still with his hands over his eyes, start a conversation about democracy and internet porn. Mark feels queasy. He thinks about the couple of times he's brought himself off by watching the free porn on the net: two men on the steps of a blue swimming pool, three men dressed as soldiers in a toilet. Both times he had to go in search of something else on there afterwards to make himself feel less degraded. The second time he had simply typed the words something beautiful into the Google images box. Up came a picture of some leaves against the sun. A picture of a blonde photoshop-smooth woman and baby sleeping. A picture of a bird. A picture of Mother Teresa. A picture of a modernist building made of shiny metal. A picture of two people sticking knives into their own hands. Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn't there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google. He surveys the strewn table. Sure, there's a certain charm to being able to look up and watch Eartha Kitt singing Old Fashioned Millionaire in 1957 at three in the morning or Hayley Mills singing a song about femininity from an old Disney film. But the charm is a kind of deception about a whole new way of feeling lonely, a semblance of plenitude but really a new level of Dante's inferno, a zombie-filled cemetery of spurious clues, beauty, pathos, pain, the faces of puppies, women and men from all over the world tied up and wanked over in site after site, a great sea of hidden shadows. More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities.

--Ali Smith, There but for the

What I read in October

by Susan

The Revisionists. Thomas Mullen [on the Kindle]

It seems I am surrounded by text in this city. Even without my seeking it out, it haunts me, hovers in the background, is invisibly sent from one handheld to another. I am a mere punctuation mark--we all are--in stories someone else is writing. Or has already written.

Caleb Williams. William Godwin (for the Classics Circuit) [on the Kindle]

The pride of philosophy has taught us to treat man as an individual. He is no such thing. He holds necessarily, indispensably, to his species. He is like those twin-births, that have two heads indeed, and four hands; but if you attempt to detach them from each other, they are inevitably subjected to miserable and lingering destruction.

Nightwoods. Charles Frazier

At some point, Stubblefield wondered how much he was really learning about Luce. She would talk freely about dress patterns, the daily details of gardening, his grandfather. But Stubblefield kept feeling like he was watching a cardsharp shuffle the deck, all the fine subtle movements to misdirect your attention, and at the end, a reassuring spread of hands to hide the pit opening under her life.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. Helen Simonson (for book club) [on the Kindle]

"I did give [Kipling] up for many decades," she said. "He seemed such a part of those who refuse to reconsider what the Empire meant. But as I get older, I find myself insisting on my right to be philosophically sloppy. It's so hard to maintain that rigor of youth, isn't it?"

Pillars of Gold. Alice Thomas Ellis

Only a few years before, Camille had been acutely concerned about her mother's appearance, sometimes refusing to be seen with her in public, but now it seemed that she no longer minded: she had expropriated from Scarlet's wardrobe those few articles that she felt would suit herself and had thereafter left her mother to her own devices. It gave Scarlet the impression that she had grown very old and from now on might just as well go round in her shroud.

Home Life. Alice Thomas Ellis

One of the things I like about the country is that the problems it presents are different. For instance while the drain in London sometimes get blocked up it is never because there is a hedgehog in it.

Zone One. Colson Whitehead

 If the beings they destroyed were their own creations, and not the degraded remnants of the people described on the things' driver's licenses, so be it. We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.