Well its all over. 2016 left with a whoosh. We are now in untrodden 2017. Near the outset of 2016 I made a goal to read more in a year than I ever have before, attempting to finish 52 books within 52 weeks. Well, I am happy to say I accomplished my goal. I finished 52 gosh darn books. What a ride it has been. I compiled my list on an excel spreadsheet which doesn't flop over to this blog very well. So I will cut the fat off of it and give my top sheet results.
I read and finished 52 books totaling 26,292 pages. That breaks down to a 506 page average per book, or reading approximately 72 pages a day for each of the 365 days of the year. Of those 52 books, three of them were books I've previously read already, the other 49 were new books to me.
Briefly, I will talk about some of my favorite books on this list.
East of Eden by John Steinbeck - I can't start anywhere else. This may be my favorite book of all time. It has such unusual characters that somehow still seem authentic and true. It is gritty and gut-wrenching. It is the best book I've seen to intertwine the dark and despairing with the bright and hopeful like those mixed ice cream cones you get at the Ranch Drive In. This book is chalk full amazing quotes so I will do it no justice trying to write them all out here, so consider the following just the lightest, briefest taste. In no order and very much mixed up:
"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."
"Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? ... Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience."
"Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids."
"But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed."
"When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else."
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner - This is the most difficult book I have ever read. Thankfully, it is actually the same story written 4 different times. The problem is that each time it is a different narrator who each has their own set of reasons their unreliable. For instance, the first chapter (which is the first of 4, each chapter a different telling of the same story) is written from the perspective of someone who is mentally delayed and ill. Due to this, he has no understanding of "why" things happen, just what is happening. So everything he says is just a description of events that you have to find the plot of. But what makes it even more difficult, is that this same narrator has no concept of time. For example, he will be telling a story and then get a scratch on his wrist, which will remind him of when his wrist got scratched a decade earlier, and he will then seamlessly switch his story to that earlier time frame. This happens A LOT and with NO warning. It effectively puts you in the mind of a mentally ill person. Good luck understanding that.
All that said, it is totally worth it. By the end of the book, I finally started to grasp the story. I immediately wanted to reread it. Such an amazingly brilliant novel. It is beautiful in its composure.
I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb - Oh boy. How to define this book? It took me three tries to get into it. The first two tries, I didn't get past the first chapter and a half. The third time I tried? I couldn't put it down. I read it voraciously. The characters were so well-written that they made me angry. They were real and terrifying and endearing. I'll say this much about the book, it was the 7th book I completed in my journey to 52, meaning I finished it somewhere around the end of February. Close to a year later and I still feel its impact on me and struggle to form the words to describe it accurately. It is just that good. I only have one complaint and it is minor and not worth mentioning here. Since I can't describe it, here are some quotes that do it no more justice than the quotes did earlier for East of Eden.
"The greatest griefs are silent."
"Take what people give you. Drink their milkshakes."
"But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?"
"Love grows from the rich foam of forgiveness, mongrels make good dogs, and the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things."
What If: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe - Ever wondered what would happen if a pitcher in baseball could huck a fastball at 90% of the speed of light? Well here is your answer! What if you dropped a nice cut of steak from the upper atmosphere, would it cook on the way down to the ground, like a meteor burning its way as a shooting star? What if everyone in the world aimed a laser pointer at the moon at the same time, would it change color? What if everyone on earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant? This book has all the answers to the questions you have been dying to know your whole life and more. Plus it is accurately ...erm...
mostly accurately illustrated throughout the book. For example, here is an illustration from that baseball question.
Thank you all for joining me on this journey I undertook. I was very happy I did it. I could probably talk all day about all the books I read over the last year. I will probably make a similar goal sometime in the future. I'm still trying to figure out what I want my goals for this year to be. For now, I am taking a victory lap and reveling in the fact that I actually accomplished what I set out to do. It feels pretty good.
Until Next Time,
-Bradley
