Views from Medina Road

I read 87 books in 2007 -- all the way through, I mean, not counting the dozens of others that crossed my desk that I skimmed or browsed to some extent to write up their descriptions for the website. That's actually the most books I've read in a single year in the past... 20 years. For over a decade, I had the excuse of reading more short fiction (for my review column in Locus Magazine) than books, and since I gave up the column, various personal and day-job associated circumstances have constrained my reading time, but finally, this past year, I've managed to multitask in ways I would not care to further detail in order to get through almost as many books as I'd like to read in a year, and which in my editorial position I feel I *should* get through... at last. And I'm fairly optimistic about keeping it up.

Somewhat like the photographs of the prominent books of each year that used to grace the covers of February issues of Locus Magazine, I've stacked up (-- *footnote* --) all the books I've read in the past year, all 87 of them, and posted a photo of them over in the middle-right pane of this blog. Click for expanded view. Below that, I've trimmed away some of the individual cover images of books I read earlier than 3 or 4 months ago.

For a couple years now I've meant to write a post about how I've variably kept lists and statistics of books and other material I've read (inspired by Andrew Wheeler's book-a-day ambitions, and periodic annual goals of SF Signal's John DeNardo), and I have forgotten about it. I'll get to it eventually, maybe soon.

*footnote: It's raining here in SoCal, and as I was typing this into the Blogger posting window, the power went out. I restarted the PC, relaunched Mozilla Firefox, my current preferred browser, and when it offered to restore my session, I accepted -- and the text of this post that I'd typed reappeared! A Blogger 'saves drafts automatically' feature, apparently. Cool.