Interconnected is by Matt Webb, who can also be found at S&W.

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26 December, 2007:

Posted at 18h41. Permalink.

I completed reading 104 books in 2007 (as mentioned last month). Though I'm starting more books this year, for the sake of hitting that magical 2 per week, I won't be finishing any.

I've not kept a record like this before. I have this picture of myself that the books that really change me are all squashed into the last 12 months. But when I look at my bookshelf, it turns out that's not true: I didn't read Catch 22 this year, nor Lolita, nor Black Swan Green (even the Compass Rose, source of The Author of the Acacia Seeds, I picked up last year). Most of my cybernetics and modernism reading was last year (or the year before, even). Some books - like Computer Lib and art catalogues - I consult and dip into but never read cover to cover, so they don't appear in my list. And some, like Le Guin's translation of the Tao Te Ching and Robert Graves' of the Rubaiyat (Omar Khayyam), are so vivid for me I swear I must have read them recently but never made a note.

Anyway. I like books that make me say Ha! a lot. Good ideas are like tickles. In the list below, along with the date I finished the book, I've added a '*' if the book tickled me. If it was a re-read then there's an 'r.'

The reason I've put any stars in December is because I can only tell if a book was awesome for me after some time has past, and at this point it feels as if I've had a 100% awesome reading month. Actually, this month has felt a bit like reading only one or two books: The Catcher in the Rye, The Gum Thief and the Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin are all about the urge to disappear, just in different societies. And the Fabric of Reality and Complexity were similar enough that I wanted to bang their heads together and go 'look! You're talking about a physics which is fine-grained and organic in just the way you other folks talk about economics and cellular automata. Discuss!' Complexity, of course, bounced off the duffers of the generation before... said duffers being the revolutionary stars of From Newspeak to Cyberspeak and Platform for Change, both of which I'd read a couple of months earlier. Super bizarre.

Here's the list.

January:

February:

March:

April:

May:

June:

July:

August:

September:

October:

November:

December:

I could say a whole bunch about pretty much any book on this list, and I would love to but time prevents it. But if there's one you'd like to hear more about, drop me a mail and I'll post a story about it here.