list of books read in January 2013

From my Librarything 75 books in 2013 thread (which, for me, overlaps with the Read The Books You Already Have, Dammit thread).

Fiction is in red, so I can track it more easily.

1. The Man in the Empty Boat, Mark Salzman (Kindle Single)
2. The Last Novel, David Markson
3. 43, Jeff Greenfield (Kindle Single. Do these count as one book? .5 of a book?)
4. Final Vision, Joe McGinnis (Kindle Single)
5. Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins
6. The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, Joe Klein
7. Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!: Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History, Jeff Greenfield
8. Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan, Jeff Greenfield
9. Libriomancer, Jim C. Hines
10. The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright
11. People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo--and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up, Richard Lloyd Parry
12. Death Served Up Cold, B.J. Oliphant
13. Here's to the Newly Dead, B.J. Oliphant
14. Dead Souls, Ian Rankin
15. Border Crossing, Pat Barker
16. The Panic Virus, Seth Mnookin

VIDA count: Twelve books by men, four by women (year-end goal is 50% or better)
ROOT count:  a big whopping FIVE (year-end goal is fifty books I didn't buy in 2013)
Fiction vs. non: Ten to six, a bit better. This isn't as big a goal, it just bugs me that I wound up over the years somehow reading much less fiction -- I think that's mainly because so little mainstream big names (Franzen, et al) don't appeal to me. It also means I read wayy too many memoirs, mainly for research, but still.

2013 booklist

the good, the bad, and the /ugly/ unread

Great, it's even WORSE than I thought originally.

Read books: 321
Unread books: 828

the read and the unread

I am so serious about this (my thread is here) I spent actual HOURS organizing my Kindle and from one folder called "books" creating two new ones, "new books" and "read." This took for-fucking-ever and drove me BATSHIT because there are over 1000 books on my Kindle, and it's one of those old keyboard ones, and it was a lemon out of the box because it's always been very halting. Maybe it knew how hard it was going to be driven. Anyway, the total damage is about 300 books read, and 750 books unread.

....yeah. That's a worse percentage of read/unread than my paper library. //cries

-- Some people on LibraryThing seem bent on downsizing their libraries, tho. I find that horrifying. (After about three giant culls of my own library -- just before I went to college, when I had to sell books in bulk in grad school because I was so broke and when my parents sold everything we owned when I was ten because we were Moving To Europe Forever ((i.e. Nine Months)) -- I got so absolutely sick of not being able to find books, or not remembering what a book I'd had was called and being unable to replace it, I determined to NEVER GET RID OF A BOOK AGAIN. Yeah. Basically I don't get rid of books unless they become unreadably damaged somehow, and even then I might keep them for sentimental reasons, like the Smollett-translated Don Quixote I had at St John's which my tiny adorable evil kitten peed all over before she got fixed. It lives in a vacuum-sealed bag wrapped in a series of bags in a taped-up box sunk deep in a closet. But anyway.)

 WILL I MAKE IT? STAY TUNED THROUGH 2013 TO FIND OUT. Lord.  

I just figured out it would probably take me over ten years just to read all the paper books in my house I haven't gotten to so far, which was so depressing I had to spend a quarter of an hour updating my Amazon wishlist to cheer myself up.

TRUE STORY.

I think I also probably "won." Especially if you count the unread books on the Kindle. //facedesk