Sunday, January 6, 2013

Books 2012



It’s time for my 2012 book summary. This is always a fun exercise; it’s like viewing photos from your vacation. “Yea, that was a real cool place”, or “It wasn’t what I expected”, or whatever. (I really wouldn’t have a “this was a dump” memory because I would probably have never started such a book and I certainly wouldn’t have finished it.). As the title indicates, this list reflects books that I have finished this past year. As usual, I have done a lot of reading on-line, which I now track on my Twitter feed or in Readability. These are wonderful tools for tracking and sharing reading. In addition, Abbas introduced me to Goodreads. It's a program for tracking your lifetime reading, planned, in progress, and completed. I recommend it. But enough musing and on the list. I will list books in no special order. Most of them I’ve written about before, so I’ll cite my own reviews. Others, because of my delinquencies, I’ve reviewed in this blog, so I’ll mark it for a future blog. I’ll list my favorites at the end. 

Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (audio)

 

John Horgan,  Rational Mysticism

 

John Lewis Gaddis, George Kennan: An American Life 

 

Michael Erard, Babel No More: The Serach for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners

 

Doug McGuff, M.D. and John Little, Body by Science

 

Garry Wills, The Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine & the Mystery of Baptism

 

Jonathan Haidt, Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics & Religion

 

William J. Broad, The Science of Yoga

 

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast & Slow (audio)

 

Robert Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (audio)

 

Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President & the Fracturing of America (audio)

 

Tim Ferris, The 4-Hour Work Week (audio)

 

Robert Parker, The Professional (A Spenser Novel)

 

Eric Ambler, Background to Danger

 

Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain & the Search for Meaning

 

F.L. Lucas, Style: The Art of Writing Well

 

Pico Iyer, The Man Inside My Head

 

Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate (An Isabel Dalhousie Novel)

 

Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

 

Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen

 

Joe Jaworski, The Source: The Inner Path of Knowledge Creation

 

Tony Hiss, In Motion: The Experience of Travel (review forthcoming)

 

Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature : Why Violence Has Declined (audio) (review forthcoming)

 

Okay, drumroll please, while I select the favorites . . . .the judge is now ready to pronounce his decision. The favorites are: 

 

Caro, The Passage of Power

 

McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

 

Pirsig, Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

 

Perlstein, Nixonland

 

Haidt, Righteous Mind

 

Gaddis, George Kennan

 

Mann, 1493

 

Well, another fine year, but lots more to go. I’m off to a good start in 2013, and I’m looking forward to the summary for next year. Until then, Happy Reading! 

 

N.B. I've also read a great deal about India from diverse sources, including the internet (NYT, The Economist, etc.), daily papers published here in India, and many books, but I haven't finished a good number of books that I've dipped into, so expect to see a flood of India books in the list for next year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


2 comments:

one hungry panda said...

Interesting list. Did you notice that you have no female authors on the list? (At least as far as I can tell). Looks like you need to branch out a little in 2013! A couple of my favorites for 2012 were Beverly Silver's "Forces of Labor," Frances Fukuyama's "The Origins of Political Order," "Little Bee" by Chris Cleave, The Hunger Games trilogy, and 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

one hungry panda said...
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