Street fund
- 105 pennies
- 10 nickels
- 31 dimes
- 12 quarters
That's a cool $7.66. I didn't find any folding money, though. Nor did I find any Canadian coins; Marion, I can't take you for some ice cream. The grand total, 1997-2009, is $300.51.
Books
In 2009 I read 102 new books. I usually surpass my pre-owning-a-bookstore goal of 25 new books a year in mid April. I resolved in 2009 to read more literature in translation, and I accomplished that goal with eight books (my faves in blue):
- Novels in Three Lines (Félix Fénéon), The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (Georges Simenon), and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Dai Sijie), translated from French;
- Club Dumas (Arturo Pérez-Reverte), The House of Bernarda Alba (Federico García Lorca), and The Angel's Game (Carlos Ruiz Zafón), translated from Spanish;
- The Housekeeper and the Professor (Yoko Ogawa) and A-bomb Drawings by Survivors (Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum), translated from Japanese.
The best books I read in 2009 are
- Arrival, by Shaun Tan, a beautiful wordless book about the immigrant experience;
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, about the World Trade Center disaster and the search for family;
- Watchmen, a richly textured and sophisticated graphic novel by Alan Moore;
- Columbine, by Dave Cullen, about the Columbine High School shootings;
- The Book of Genesis Illustrated, by R. Crumb; and
- Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy; the first three pages are so beautifully written that I had to walk away from the book for a while.
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?--Henry Ward Beecher
6 comments:
There is truly no other place where human nature is so weak. I'm reading four books right now. AND, I need to come in to get a couple more! One hundred two books - WOW!
Alice Munro, Runaway. It's for a book club. Also because Canadian writers have this thing about short stories and I'm still getting the lay of the land, Can-lit-wise.
The high today was -10F, so I'll take a raincheck on the ice cream anyway, Pegster. Good hunting in 2010, too.
The first book I'll finish is U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton. Then I'll read The Scarpetta Factor by Patricia Cornwell. Both were Christmas gifts! Yay! After that, I'm hoping that Kevin will be done with Columbine so I can borrow it!
That Henry Ward Beecher quote was my quote of the day today! :-)
If you keep track of your reading, maybe you should join goodreads.com (unless you already have).
"Arrival". A WORDLESS book? How can that be?
I read (listened to) only 44. I didn't get to finish Suttree yet because the tape got tangled and I had to return it. I hope they send it back soon. I guess I'm not enjoying it as much as you did. His descriptions are superb, but let's get on with the STORY!
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