2017: The Year In Books

With another year coming to an end, it is time to take a look back at the 28 books I read over the past year, 3 less than last year.  Of those 28, 7 were non-fiction and, of the 21 novels, only 4 were TV show tie-ins.  For the first time, none of the books came out of my “to-read” drawer, and a record 16 were e-books.  I read over 80,000 pages, my lowest total since at least 2013.

Once again, a majority of the books I read this year were by authors I’ve never read before. The 15 authors that I read for the first this year were:
Amy Schumer
Jessie Humphries
Gene Kim
Tod Goldberg
Matt Zoller Seitz
Philip K. Dick
Harland Sanders
Paul Levine
William J. Mann
Matthew V. Clemmons
Chris Smith
Riley Sager
Whitney Cummings
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Tom Perrotta

There were 4 authors I read multiple titles from during 2016, the ghost writer for Richard Castle, Jeffery Deaver, David Mack, and Erle Stanley Gardner.

7 of the books I read were released this year, while 3 of them were released last century.

Finally, the breakdown by month.  Vacation in December certainly helped pad its totals a tad bit.

Continue reading →

Book 9 (of 52) – The Man In The High Castle

The Man In The High Castle – Philip K. Dick

Imagine a world where the Allies lost World War II, with the US split between the Germans and the Japanese.  This is the world where Philip K. Dick puts us in The Man In The High Castle, where the Germans have taken over the east coast and the Japanese the west, leaving a free state between them in the Rockies.  Dick’s tale focuses primarily on the last two, switching among connected but disparate stories.

I watched the first episode of Amazon’s adaptation of this book and it did not really hold my interest.  The same can be said of the book, which took me forever to read and which I never really was enthralled by.  The concept certainly holds some interest, but the execution left me wanting more.