2010-2011 Books in Review

It's time for another book review!  I've fallen into the habit of doing these every two years or so.  Here are my previous reviews: 2009, 2007.

Over the past two years, I've read 30.5 books (I didn't finish one of them), all of which have been reviewed on this blog.  It surprised me to find that I only gave the full 5 stars to one of those books.  I must be getting crotchety in my old age, I guess.  However, there were several that just missed the 5-star cut, ending up with 4 1/2 stars instead.  So, without further ado, let's get to the top three!

And . . . drum roll please . . . the top three fiction books from 2010-2011 are:
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Modern)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Classic)
The Glass Castle (Memoir)

I should note that The Glass Castle is technically non-fiction, but the stories in there are so outrageous that it really feels like a novel.

For this Review, I feel like I really need a separate list for the non-fiction books because I read some really great ones over the past two years.  So, keep that drum roll going . . . the top three non-fiction books from 2010-2011 are:
NurtureShock
Predictably Irrational
Undaunted Courage


I highly recommend all six of these books.  They could all be 5-star books, even though I only gave full marks to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.  The links will take you to my reviews of them.

Lastly, the worst book I read over the past two years was A Happy Marriage, which gets low marks for highly explicit material.  It was the only book I didn't finish out of the 31 on the list.

For the numbers-oriented, here's a statistical summary of my reading in 2010-2011.  For comparison, the number in parentheses is the corresponding figure for all 86 books that I've read since 2007.

Average Pages:  389.9 (377.3)
Average Reading Grade Level:  8.53 (7.65)
Average Rating: 3.71 stars (3.67)
Average Rating by Genre:
   Classic: 3.83 (4.03)
   Fantasy: 3.67 (3.44)
   Memoir: 4.25 (3.64)
   Modern: 3.38 (3.69)
   Mystery: 3.50 (3.19)
   Non-fiction: 3.85 (3.65)

If you're curious, here's what I've got on my stack to be read next:
Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970
The Corrections
The Year of Living Biblically
The Upside of Irrationality
To the Rescue: The Biography of Thomas S. Monson
Inverting the Pyramid


I'm always looking for recommendations, so please leave them in the comments!  Happy reading!

Moonwalking with Einstein

Title: Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Author: Joshua Foer
Genre: Popular Science
Pages (words): 320 (N/A)
Readability: N/A
Rating (out of 5 stars): ***1/2
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: On assignment, the journalist Foer is sent to the U.S. National Memory Championships, and is so intrigued by the competition that he spends a full year preparing to compete in the event the following year.  This book chronicles all that he learned about memory and memorizing along the way.
Thoughts: This was a thoroughly enjoyable book.  I've always been fascinated by memory and learning, so this book was right up my alley in that regard.  There were several things that I learned about the mind that were completely new to me, and I really liked the section about how in many ways our memory is what our conscious selves are.  I only have two complaints with the book.  First, I was hoping to come away with more practical advice about how to naturally remember stuff, but unfortunately something like that doesn't exist.  That's not really a fault of the book, it's just the way things are.  Still it served a great reminder of the memory tricks I've learned in the past that I don't use anymore.  My second complaint is that Foer tends to ramble quite a bit.  That's good because the book covers a lot of ground, but it wasn't always in the most coherent way, I felt.  Overall, I'm really glad that I read it, but it wasn't the best book of the year.
Disclaimer:  There are a few swear words, but that's it.