Books I Read in 2009

For the first time ever, here is a yearly book list. I've been meaning to start doing this for years, but instead of keeping track of the books I do read, I end up keeping track of books that I intend to read. I compiled this while I was bored at the office today and should have been working on either editing a paper I'm presenting next month or, ironically, doing some reading. As far as I can remember, this is every book I read in 2009. This list includes books I did not finish, provided that I read over half of them, but does not include the many books out of which I read a chapter or two. The latter was mostly via reading assignments from classes or books I used for research. After looking at them all together, I did notice a few things I did not expect. Firstly, there are more women writers on this list than I anticipated. A little over a quarter of the books I read last year were penned by females. While perusing my own bookshelves, I'm often struck by the embarrassing dearth of quality women writers represented in my collection. I don't think I'm sexist; it's just that somehow more of the books I read happen to be written by men. One reason this was probably different this year is because women are rather healthily represented in history, especially social and cultural history written since the 1970s. Secondly, I read more non-history than I expected as well. A little over a quarter of the books I read last year were non-history, and among those, nearly half were fiction. I read much less fiction than I once did, but it's nice to see it represented if only a little. And it was reasonably diverse fiction as well, ranging from science fiction to historical fiction to literary fiction to Gothic to thriller to, er... gross, sexual coming of age tale? These are roughly listed in the order in which I read them. So, here's the list:

+ = books that I did not read in their entirety but read enough of (i.e. over 50%) that inclusion is merited
* = books that I had read before but reread this year
bold = books that I especially recommend reading
@!%& = books that I especially recommend avoiding at all costs

The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity by Elaine Pagels and Karen King
Frankenstein by Mary Shelly*
Astrology by Zohar @!%&
The Fated Sky: Astrology in History by Benson Bobrick
A History of Western Astrology by Jim Tester
The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons of the Dead ed. by Robert Segal
The Holy Grail by Norma Lorre Goodrich + @!%&
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes
Dreams, Memories, Reflections by Carl Jung
Medieval Thought by Gordon Leff
The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe by Valerie Flint * +
Science and Creation by John Polkinghorne
Freedom of Choice Affirmed by Corliss Lamont
The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot
Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life by Stephen Jay Gould
Religion and Science: Contemporary and Historical Issues by Ian G. Barbour
Psychology and Alchemy by Carl Jung +
Wetlands by Charlotte Roche
The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker
How the Mind Works by Stephen Pinker +
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
Morandi's Last Prophecy by Brendan Dooley +
The Making of the West, Volume 1 by Lynn Hunt et. al.
Universe of Stone: A Biography of Chartres Cathedral by Philip Ball
The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by Mary Beard
Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City State by Mogens Herman Hansen
The Histories by Herodotus +*
The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides +*
A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White +
Andrew Dickson White: Educator, Historian, Diplomat by Glenn C. Altschuler
Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic by Ingrid Rowland
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances Yates
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller by Carlo Ginzburg
The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England by Richard Godbeer
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman by Carol Karlsen*
The Witchcraft Reader ed. by Darren Oldridge
The Witchcraft Sourcebook ed. by Brian Levack
Witches of the Atlantic World ed. by Elaine Breslaw
The Witch in History by Diane Purkiss
Europe's Inner Demons by Norman Cohn*
The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past by Keith Windschuttle +
Not By Fact Alone: Historical Essays on the Reading and Writing of History by John Clive +
Faces of History: From Herodotus to Herder by Donald Kelley
Modern Historiography: An Introduction by Michael Bentley
Confession by Guibert de Nogent*+
Feudal Society: The Growth of Ties of Dependence by Marc Bloch +
The Historian's Craft by Marc Bloch +
Dark Fire by C.J. Sansom
The History of the English Church and People by the Venerable Bede +*
The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours +
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon+*
The Old Regime and the French Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville+
Domenico Scandella, Known as Menocchio: His Trial before the Inquisition, 1583-1599 by Andrea del Col
Beer and Philosophy ed. Stephen Hales

Reading Habits of Highly (Un)Effective People

I've been thinking about my reading habits lately, primarily because after some reflection, I can't remember the last book I read cover to cover. I think it was Elaine Pagels and Karen King's Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity. A good book. Pagels, more than just about any other writer on theological topics, is capable of distilling information on extremely complex topics and elucidating them in simple language. However, sometimes this asset can be a weakness. I definitely wanted to hear more about how Judas was special because of his mission to hand Jesus over to the authorities, as some Gnostics and other non-Orthodox groups in the second century believed. If Jesus had to die to atone for human sins, I feel like this makes an exegesis of Judas' mission essential, and in light of the newly discovered (relatively speaking) gospel, it makes sense that some early Christians would view Judas as special--after all, he had to die for the cause just as Jesus did. Unfortunately, Pagles concerns herself less with a literary/critical interpretation and focuses on the more the political and social arguments raging amongst Christians at during the second century: the role of martyrs and martyrdom, the reasons provided by Christian apologists for Christ's death, etc. Normally, I'd be more interested in these historical aspects, but I've read several other works detailing those issues, and very few scholars do exegesis better than Pagels. But I digress...

The point is that I think I finished that book in August or September 2008 and even though I've read a ton since then, I don't think I've started on page one and ended on the last page of any of the books I've picked up. When I was younger, this was intolerable. When I started reading a book, it was a point of personal pride or possibly even a mild obsession that I finish the book. I once told this to my high school librarian and she nodded knowingly, saying she too had once been a compulsive start-to-finish reader but learned over time that there were simply too many good books out there to waste any time on the bad ones. I resolved then to allow myself the pleasure of saying "no thanks" and closing the book forever. This was back when essentially all I read was fiction. Now, however, fiction makes up probably somewhere between 10 and 15% of my reading list as history, philosophy, and science have taken over the bulk of books in my "to read" pile. This makes it more difficult to read books all the way through since with non-fiction it's much less a necessity than with fiction.

But that's not really the whole story. The real change in my reading habits, and what tends to prevent me from finishing things, is (drum roll please) the internet. I sit online reading stuff all the time. News articles, wikipedia articles, silly internet joke sites, stuff from JSTOR, blogs, Facebook posts, you name it. The hypertextuality and structureless randomness of surfing means that I retain less of what I read and that finality, that sense of accomplishment that comes from finishing a book, is lacking. Has the instant gratification that comes with internet surfing turned even we voracious readers into mindless information consumers? I just started using Google Reader a few days ago and I think I read no fewer 25 articles yesterday. Maybe this will provide some semblance of structure but I doubt it. I don't begrudge the internet or feel that the medium is somehow less worthy than a book, but so far, nothing has replaced ink on dead trees for me. Unlike a book, you can't "finish the internet." Or can you? I'm currently reading Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order and it seems a likely candidate to be the next book I read to the end. Maybe I'll blog about that next...