Tuesday 21 December 2010

Passing the time with books

I'm still stranded in Kirkland (outside of Seattle) and still without my visa or passport. I won't bother retelling the whole sorry tale here, let's just say I've started to feel like this guy:

Only now I'm kind of deflated.

Anyway, this year I planned to read 50 books, and I've finally done it! Here's the list, by month, with ratings (based entirely on how much I liked reading it):

In bold are my top 10, and italics are the ones that really weren't worth it.

1. The Giver - Lois Lowry 5/5
2. Into Thin Air - John Krakauer 3/5
3. Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles - Simon Winchester 3/5
4. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents - Julia Alvarez 3/5
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5. A Cook's Tour - Anthony Bourdain 3/5
6. A Very Long Engagement - Sebastien Japrisot 4/5
7. Bipolar Orders: The Two Koreas Since 1989 - Hwang Gu Lynn 2/5
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8. Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer 4/5
9. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery 5/5
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky 4/5
11. The Geography of Thought - Richard E. Nisbett 3/5
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12. Lamb - Christopher Moore 4/5
13. Mythology - Edith Hamilton 4/5
14. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera 3/5
15. The Education of Little Tree - Forrest Carter 5/5
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16. On Writing Well - William Zissner 2/5
17. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson 4/5
18. The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks 4/5
19. A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson 3/5
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20. House of Sand and Fog - Andres Dubus III 3/5
21. Buddha - Deepak Chopra 3/5
22. Thursday Next: First Among Sequels - Jasper Fforde 3/5
23. Gathering Blue - Lois Lowry 3/5
24. Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 4/5
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25. A Million Little Pieces - James Frey 1/5

26. The Girl who Played with Fire - Stieg Larsson 4/5
27. Maniac Macgee - Jeremy Spinelli 4/5
28. A Corpse in the Koryo - James Church 2/5
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29. The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood - Rebecca Wells 5/5

30. Coyote Blue - Christopher Moore 4/5
31. The Falls - Joyce Carol Oates 1/5
32. Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami 4/5
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33. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers 2/5
34. Eat Pray Love - Elizabeth Gilbert 3/5
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35. Just a Phrase I'm Going Through - David Crystal 5/5
36. Unitarian Universalist Pocket Guide - various 3/5
37. The Penelopiad - Margaret Atwood 4/5
38. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - J. K. Rowling 3/5
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39. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut 4/5
40. The Piano Teacher - Janice Y. K. Lee 2/5
41. The Color of Water - James McBride 4/5
42. The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards 1/5
43. Unbearable Lightness - Portia diRossi 3/5
44. Work Hard. Be Nice. - Jay Matthews 5/5
45. Neither Here Nor There - Bill Bryson 4/5
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46. Full Frontal Feminism - Jessica Valenti 3/5
47. Dead Man Walking - Sister Helen Prejean 5/5
48. When My Name Was Keoko - Linda Sue Park 2/5
49. Amy and Isabelle - Elizabeth Strout 2/5
50. Apologize, Apologize! - Elizabeth Kelly 2/5