2014: My Year in Reading

I have a friend who posts a list of all the books they read each year on their Facebook page. This has inspired me to write my own Year in Reading posts.

All of the reading data that follows comes from my Goodreads account. A complete list of all the books I read last year is at the bottom of this post.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I realized after I posted this on February 12, 2015, that I had miscalculated some of my figures based on the data. On February 13, I recalculated all my figures to correct for my previous mistake. This post has been updated to reflect these new calculations. I added a day to my time-to-read figures.

I read 40 books in 2014. It was a nonfiction-heavy year for me.

24 nonfiction
16 fiction

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Book Review: Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn by Amanda Gefter

Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn book cover — *Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn* by Amanda Gefter, published by Bantam 2014

I love Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn by Amanda Gefter more than I’ve loved any book in a long time.

I first became fascinated by cosmology in third grade (no kidding, in third grade I wrote an essay for school titled, “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Cosmologist.” You can ask my mom—she still has it.) While I didn’t dedicate my life to pursuing the subject the way that Ms. Gefter has, her delight and fascination with the theories of cosmology perfectly captures my own. I know the thrill of them the same way she does.

More than any other, this book reminds me why I love this field of study.

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Book Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Ancillary Justice book cover — *Ancillary Justice* by Ann Leckie
Orbit Books, 2013
Cover art by John Harris

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie has been on my “To Read” list since it swept all of the major SF awards last year. I enjoyed it tremendously.

This is old-fashioned space opera, reminiscent of the classics of the Golden Age. Unlike a lot of modern space opera (which I adore, for the record) Ms. Leckie is less concerned with the technology that makes galaxy- and time-spanning civilization possible and offers us a story focused on character and plot.

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Book Review: Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger

Everything Is Miscellaneous book cover — *Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder* by David Weinberger. New York: Times Books, 2007.

The central thesis of Everything Is Miscellaneous is one with which I completely agree: digital information environments allow us to organize, access, and interact with information in new and previously undreamt ways. It allows us to transcend the limitations of physical storage and communication media, to free information to be everywhere and anywhere all at the same time.

It allows information to be whatever we need, whenever we need it. There exists more potential now to add more value, not just to information itself, but to the ways we access and interact with it. Mr. Weinberger offers us a powerful and compelling vision for our digital information world.

These three quotes perfectly sum up what this book is about:

From p. 212:

The difference in the digital order is the difference between the annoying interactions you have on a product support line… and the conversations you have with real people. … The potential for connections from the trivial to the urgent is characteristic of the new miscellany. We are busily creating as many of these meaningful connections as we can.

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