When I was a teenager, I always had a book with me, the bigger the better. I still remember reading both Roots and Battlefield Earth simultaneously when I was a junior in high school, and carrying those two books with me wherever I went--about 1700 pages of literature total--drew quite a few comments from my teachers. Unfortunately, my hunger for reading fell away during college, where professors emphasized analyzing literature over enjoying it; the teenager who once read dozens of books in an average school year was suddenly the twenty-something undergrad who read barely two or three a semester, and even then found little enjoyment in them. Even after graduation, during my first two years of full-time teaching, I was working 14-16 hours a day, which left little time for pleasure reading.
However, now that I'm in my fourth year of teaching and my schedule has evened out--though I still put in upwards of 12 hours a day at work, 6am to 6pm--I can't get enough to read, and it doesn't matter the subject, style, or author. This year alone, I read books about forensic science, Theodore Roosevelt, zombified mothers, wormholes, demonic possession, the Trojan War, South Korea, Walter Cronkite, Superman, a World War II submarine, homicidal cats, dystopian teen prisons, Mumbai slums, Saturday Night Live, gay marriage, and so on. There were graphic novels, biographies, memoirs, poetry collections, short story anthologies, children's books, comic books, young adult novels, works of narrative nonfiction, and immortal works of literature. And they came from everywhere, too: India, Spain, Colombia, South Korea, the United States, England, France, Chile, and Iraq. It was a prodigious year, to be sure, and one that I hope to trounce next year.
Below are the books I read or re-read (*) in 2012, in order. Some of my favorites, for those who are curious, are shown above.
- The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession (David Grann)
- Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers and My Uncle Arthur, New York's Greatest Hoarders (Franz Lidz)
- The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith)
- How to Rule the World: A Handbook for the Aspiring Dictator (Andre de Guillame)
- Blankets (Craig Thompson)
- Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Marjane Satrapi)
- The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine (Tom Standage)
- Pyongyang: A Journey into North Korea (Guy Delisle and Helge Dascher)
- Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (Barbara Demick)
- Night Shift* (Stephen King)
- Pulphead: Essays (John Jeremiah Sullivan)
- Lord of the Flies* (William Golding)
- The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine (Benjamin Wallace)
- Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die (North, Bennardo, and Malki!, editors)
- Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)
- Anthem* (Ayn Rand)
- Cosmopolis (Don DeLillo)
- Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
- Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust (Victoria Barnett)
- Night* (Elie Wiesel)
- Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party (Geoffrey Kabaservice)
- The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Evidence in Jazz Age New York (Deborah Blum)
- Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story (Brendan Halpin)
- Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (Cheryl Strayed)
- The Fried Twinkie Manifesto: And Other Tales of Disaster and Damnation (Ryan Moehring)
- Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam (Pope Brock)
- Do Not Ask Us What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (Robert Draper)
- Here, Bullet: Poems (Brian Turner)
- August: Orange County (Tracy Letts)
- All My Friends Are Dead (Avery Monsen and Jory John)
- The Taking Tree: A Shrill Parody (Shrill Travesty and Lucy Ruth Cummins)
- Go the F**k to Sleep (Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortes)
- That's Not Your Mommy Anymore: A Zombie Tale (Matt Mogk and Aja Wells)
- Cronkite (Douglas Brinkley)
- Skipping Towards Gomorrah (Dan Savage)
- The Partly Cloudy Patriot (Sarah Vowell)
- Endgame: Bobby Fisher's Remarkable Rise and Fall--from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness (Frank Brady)
- Trout Fishing in America (Richard Brautigan)
- Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation (Tom Bissell)
- The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (Luis Sepulveda)
- That Night (Alice McDermott)
- The Stupidest Angel (Christopher Moore)
- Grant's Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant's Heroic Last Year (Charles Bracelen Flood)
- The Best Man (Gore Vidal)
- The Committment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family* (Dan Savage)
- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life and Death (Jean Dominique Bauby; Jeremy Leggatt, trans.)
- HHhH (Laurent Binet; Sam Taylor, trans.)
- Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)
- England Under Hitler (Comer Clarke)
- Book (Robert Grudin)
- So You Created a Wormhole: The Time Traveler's Guide to Time Travel (Phil Hornshaw and Nick Hurwitch)
- It's Even Worse Than it Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein)
- Skinny Dip (Carl Hiaasen; audio book, read by Barry Bostwick; abridged)
- The Book Thief (Markus Zusak)
- The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code (Sam Kean)
- Kingdom Come (Mark Waid and Alex Ross)
- Fatal Dive: Solving the World War II Mystery of the USS Grunion (Peter F. Stevens; audio book, read by Robertson Dean)
- Leviathan (Scott Westerfeld)
- The Lost Symbol (Dan Brown; audio book, read by Paul Michael)
- Where Things Come Back (John Corey Whaley)
- Lost in Shang-Ri La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II (Mitchell Zuckoff; audio book, read by the author)
- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Sherman Alexie)
- Behemoth (Scott Westerfeld)
- First Day on Earth (Cecil Castellucci)
- The Ticking (Renee French and Chris Staros)
- American Born Chinese (Gene Luen Yang)
- Tricks (Ellen Hopkins)
- Pitch Black (Youme Landowne and Anthony Horton)
- Demo: The Collected Edition (Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan)
- The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court (Jeffrey Toobin)
- Stargirl* (Jerry Spinelli)
- Me the People: One Man's Selfless Quest to Rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America (Kevin Bleyer)
- Tim Gunn's Fashion Bible (Tim Gunn)
- Goliath (Scott Westerfeld)
- How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You (Matthew Inman and The Oatmeal)
- Goliath (Tom Gauld)
- World War Z (Max Brooks)
- Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (Rachel Maddow)
- On Bring Different: What it Means to be Homosexual (Merle Miller)
- Colonel Roosevelt (Edmund Morris)
- Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries (Jon Ronson)
- How to be a Person: The Stranger's Guide to College, Sex, Intoxicants, Tacos, and Life Itself (Editors, the Stranger)
- Scorch Atlas (Blake Butler)
- Bonechiller (Graham McNamee)
- Oddly Normal: One Family's Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms with His Sexuality (John Schwartz)
- The Curiosities: A Collection of Stories (Brenna Yovanoff, Tessa Gratton, and Maggie Stiefvater)
- The Odyssey* (Homer; graphic novel illustrated by Gareth Hinds)
- Lockdown: Escape from Furnace 1 (Alexander Gordon Smith)
- The Silver Pony: A Story in Pictures (Lynd Ward)
- Chicken With Plums (Marjane Satrapi)
- Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live (Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrab)
- Road to Perdition (Max Allan Collins)
- Into the Wild (Jon Krakauer)
- Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Katherine Boo)
- Down the Rabbit Hole (Juan Pablo Villalobos; Rosalind Harvey, trans.)
- Of Love and Other Demons (Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Edith Grossman, trans.)
