In 2005, I spent 16 hours on elliptical and stairmill exercise machines. I lifted the same amount of weight a few times. I starting jogging in September and logged a vast 27.2 miles in the real world and another 24 on treadmills. I didn't walk, hike, or kayak much. I biked about 735 miles, including 100 days commuting to work, and I swam 46.5 kilometers. I started and ended the year at the exact same weight and percentage of body fat.
In 2006, I hope to bike 1000 miles, run 250 miles, and swim 50 kilometers.
I am drawn to retellings of classic stories, of fairy tales, Arthurian legend, Christian myth. Penelope has waited long enough to speak, and Margaret Atwood did her proud. She employs her usual detached, dry tone with an overlay of waspishness for Penelope.
Officially, the count for the year is 44 fiction and 11 nonfiction books, plus 13 audio, five on-screen, and 32 children's books, three short stories, four trash, and six other.
Seventeen nonfiction, including six audio
Daniel Barash and Nanelle Barash, Madame Bovary's Ovaries
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, All the President's Men
Mark Bittner, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
Melvyn Bragg, The Adventures of English (audio)
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (audio)
Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
Katharine Graham, Personal History
Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains (audio)
John Leonard, Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures
Louis Menand, American Studies (audio)
Nancy Mitford, The Sun King: Louis XIV at Versailles (audio)
Thomas Pakenham, Remarkable Trees of the World
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire
Ruth Reichl, Tender at the Bone
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (audio)
John Sutherland and Deirdre Le Faye, So You Think You Know Jane Austen
Fifty-six novels, including seven audio and five onscreen
Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
Michael Chabon, The Final Solution: A Story of Detection
Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Paolo Coelho, The Alchemist
Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
Robertson Davies, The Manticore
Robertson Davies, World of Wonders
Don DeLillo, Mao II (audio)
E.L. Doctorow, The March (audio)
Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (audio)
Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
David James Duncan, The Brothers K
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (audio)
Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
E.M. Forster, A Passage To India
Julia Glass, Three Junes (audio)
Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
Philippa Gregory, The Virgin's Lover
Knut Hamsun, Hunger (PG)
Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Oscar Hijuelos, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
Pam Houston, Cowboys Are My Weakness
Pam Houston, Sight Hound
Zora Neale Hurston, Collected Stories
Rudyard Kipling, Kim (PG)
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (PG)
Halldor K. Laxness, Independent People
Bernard Malamud, The Fixer
W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (audio)
Carson McCullers, Ballad of the Sad Café
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time-Traveler's Wife
Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard To Find
Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra
Carolyn Parkhurst, The Dogs of Babel
Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost
Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spiderwoman
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
José Saramago, The History of the Siege of Lisbon
John Scalzi, Old Man's War
Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (PG)
Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (audio)
Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me
Bram Stoker, Dracula (PG)
Graham Swift, Last Orders
William Trevor, Death in Summer
Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Thirty-two children's books
Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks: A Summar Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy
Gennifer Choldenko, Al Capone Does My Shirts
Gennifer Choldenko, Notes from a Liar and Her Dog
Ann Nolan Clark, Secret of the Andes
Beverly Cleary, Ellen Tebbits
Elizabeth Coatsworth, The Cat Who Went to Heaven
Tomie de Paola, 26 Fairmont Avenue
Sylvia Louise Engdahl, Enchantress From the Stars
Nancy Farmer, The Ear, the Eye and the Arm
Charles Finger, Tales from Silver Lands
Jean Craighead George, Tree Castle Island
Alison Leslie Gold, Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend
Steven Gould, Jumper
Elizabeth Janet Gray, Adam of the Road
Sesyle Joslin and Maurice Sendak, illustrator, What Do You Do, Dear?: Proper Conduct for All Occasions
Sesyle Joslin and Maurice Sendak, illustrator, What Do You Say, Dear?
Cynthia Kadohata, Kira-Kira
Holly Keller, What a Hat!
Cornelia Meigs, Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women
Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon
Laurie Joffe Numeroff, If You Take a Mouse to the Movies
Christopher Paolini, Eragon
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Kate Seredy, The White Stag
Todd Aaron Smith, Cow in the Dark
Lemony Snicket, The Penultimate Peril
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Ghosts of Rathburn Park
Virginia Sorenson, Miracles on Maple Hill
Jerry Spinelli, Loser
Barbara Foster Wallace, The Summer of L.E.B.
Elizabeth Yates, Amos Fortune, Free Man
Jane Yolen, Briar Rose
Four trash:
Pamela Aidan, An Assembly Such as This (Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman: Book 1)
Philippa Gregory, Meridon
Philippa Gregory, The Favored Child
Philippa Gregory, Wideacre
Three short stories
E.M. Forster, "The Machine Stops"
Doris Lessing, "The Summer Before the Dark"
Annie Proulx, "Brokeback Mountain"
Six graphic novels or other
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen
Audrey Niffenegger, Three Incestuous Sisters
Robert Sabuda, Winter's Tale
Charles Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1957-1958
Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers
Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, 1985-1995
Of the lists of 100 best that I began tackling in 2001, this year I read six from Feminista (55 total), five from Radcliffe (82 total), four from Modern Library (65 total), and five from Triangle (22 total). Of Newbery medal winners, ten (leaving nine outstanding); of honor, four (leaving 186). I read two Man Booker and four Pulitzer prize winners and four books by Nobel laureates.
I read the first Philippa Gregory because it was faux Tudor gossip and not bad of its sort. The faux Austen was fun and didn't make me feel unclean, as did the three non-Tudor Gregorys (two of which I sped through chez my sister, leaving me to request the third through the Denver library). Shudder. Two other books I regret reading are The Alchemist and Stranger in a Strange Land. The former was for bookclub and took me a couple of hours, whatever; the Heinlein disappointed me on multiple levels.
Without the two bookclubs, I wouldn't've read Cowboys Are My Weakness, Sight Hound, The Razor's Edge, The Time-Traveler's Wife, The Dogs of Babel, or Death in Summer. I am glad to think better of Maugham than I did after Of Human Bondage and Houston was fun to discuss and to meet (and I loved the cat's chapter). I unapologetically love Time-Traveler's Wife and I guess I forgive the CM rating of The Dogs of Babel because for Yule I gave each member of that bookclub a device to cube-ify a boiled egg.
For favorite authors I read The History of the Siege of Lisbon; The Final Solution: A Story of Detection; the Deptford trilogy; Hurston's collected stories, and No Country for Old Men. I'm glad I only listened to the McCarthy, but I'm not done with him yet.
Usual Suspect or online journal hype led me to The Brothers K, Bel Canto, and Old Man's War. The two former are among my favorites for the year and I'll probably read Ghost Brigades even if OMW didn't rock my world. Other hype led me to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, An Instance of the Fingerpost, and The Myth of You and Me, all three of which I loved.
Project Gutenberg gave me Ivanhoe and Dracula and these reaffirmed my stance that except for Jane Austen I prefer 20th-century fiction to 19th. Ditto for The Brothers Karamazov. The lists I've harnessed myself to led me to Graham Greene, whom I enjoy, and Wise Blood, which I...finished, and The March. Medieval geekery, language trickery, and Iain Pears set me up for The Name of the Rose, which I enjoyed reading and got more from than I expected of myself. Three Junes had tantalizingly too little parrot in it (as did The Final Solution).
Of the children's books I read, 15 were Newbery medal or honor books; the five picture books were read aloud to children, Paolini was for hype and Rowling and Snicket because I like the series the hype has led to. I'll read any early Cleary (Otis Spofford is still unread) and Jean Craighead George was pretty good for 40 years later (also the book wasn't an unworthy sequel). The Wallace I read for Claudia's sake and it was fine but didn't motivate me to find other books with Claudia in them. I have author-loyalty for Snyder, the Spinelli was to see if I suddenly like him (eh), and the Yolen was for fairy-tale retellings.
By count of texts, 70% of my reading was geared for adults. Page-wise, I'm sure that percentage is higher, but I refuse to do page counts, partly because that would be yet another quantification for me to obsess over and partly because I am just as glad, and gladder, to have read The Return of the Soldier at 112 pages as I am to have read (listened to) The Brothers Karamazov at 900+. And mostly because Al Capone Does My Shirts is not less valid than Rubyfruit Jungle.