Last post?

I have been very, very lazy when it comes to this blog.  About a month ago I realized that it had been a year since I started writing it.  Which meant that it was time to wrap things up, or at least write a wrap up post.  And hey, maybe I could take a break from writing something up about every book that I read while I was doing it!   That decision was fatal, of course.  I've spent the last month on an undocumented reading binge.  And on having a cold.  I'm sure it was the energy drain of the cold that really stopped me from finishing this blog article....;-)

Ahem.  At any rate, how did it go?

I thought I'd start by sharing some stats.

Over the course of the year I read 63 books and 20,323 pages.  I took on average 15.68 days to finish each book.  But that average is pretty deceptive.  My median time to complete a book was only 8 days.
The average was driven up by a couple of books that took forever to finish (Remember Thinking Fast and Slow? 138 days to completion.)  And while I was too lazy to calculate separate average times for fiction and non-fiction, as I was doing the sums I noted that I read nonfiction much more slowly than fiction.

What did I read? Twelve books of nonfiction, three books of poetry, and forty-eight works of fiction.  Hm...that comes out nicely.  One book of non-fiction and four works of fiction monthly.

Did I ever manage four books at a time?  I was too lazy to go back and chart how many books I was reading at any given time over the course of the year, but I did note that over Xmas I was reading (drum roll please) FIVE books simultaneously:

• Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama 
• Sibleys' Birding Basics
• Snobbery with Violence
• Captain Vorpatril's Alliance
• Second Chances

Tah dah!  Two books leaning to the serious side, and three leaning to the ....less serious side.  All at the same time. Apparently it is possible for me to read four books at a time, plus or minus one.

And finally, did I keep my commitment to blog about every book I read over the course of that year, and did I admit when I didn't finish something?

To answer the second question first: no.  I started out with good intentions.  But I didn't end up blogging about books I didn't finish.  I started several that I lost interest in and I wasn't interested enough to keep track of them and write about them.

And did I blog about everything I read?  Well, no.  I deliberately omitted one or two.  But that was just to maintain an aura of mystery.

In conclusion:  thanks for reading.  It's been fun.  I hope that any of you who followed this blog found it at least moderately interesting.

Sibley's Birding Basics by David Allen Sibley

Started: 26 December 2012
Finished: 3 March 2013
Pages: 149

You have to admit that I've hit a record on the pages/day rate with this one.  Even Thinking Fast and Slow went more quickly than this one overall. (Thinking =481 pages/137 days = 3.51 pages/day, Birding = 149 pages/67 days = 2.22 pages/day)

The difference is that I've been studying this one.  You could read this book straight through in fairly short order.  But it's more interesting to read it chapter by chapter, spending  some time observing after each one.  For example after reading "Using behavioural clues", it was interesting to observe the way that finches tend to stay and eat at the feeder while other birds like chickadees consistently dart in and out.  When you're trying to figure out if that yellow bird in the treetop is a goldfinch or a warbler, that could be a valuable clue.  The one that's flitting about is unlikely to be a goldfinch.

A World on Fire by Joe Jackson

Started: 10 Feb 2013
Finished: 23 Feb 2013
Pages: 357

Two men share the credit for the discovery of oxygen:  Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoiser.   And while in many ways it's hard to imagine two more different men, both won great honours and then suffered greatly as the 18th century wound its way to its turbulent end.  The world on fire in the title is the world of the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the fallout from the American Revolution, and only secondarily a world set on fire by the discovery of the sources of combustion.

This book is a joint biography of Priestley and Lavoiser, and draws many contrasts between them.  Priestley was a brilliant experimentalist:  Lavoiser a brilliant theorist.  Priestley was a religious radical and one of the founders of Unitarianism.  Lavoiser was an atheist.   Priestley came from a lower middle class family, and lived and worked in Birmingham alongside the striving classes who owned, ran, and worked in factories.  Lavoiser came from the upper middle classes, and used the money he earned as one of Louis the 16th's tax collectors to buy his way into the aristocracy.  Priestley fled for his life from a conservative mob bent on upholding the rights of the King and the (Anglican) church.  Lavoiser died during the Terror at the hands of a radical French Revolutionary mob.

Overall, an interesting read.  The one disappointment was the debunking of a myth.  Lavoiser did not agree to advance the cause of science by blinking post-guillotin to establish whether and how long consciousness persists  after decapitation.    Apparently, no contemporary records of this story exist.  And given how the executions were organized it wouldn't have been practical for onlookers to observe his head closely at any rate.  :-(