bsowell

As I promised last year, I kept careful records of every book I read in 2009. In addition to recording the titles and authors, I’ve noted the length of each book and when I read it. Below are some statistics I’ve calculated from this data.

Reading Statistics

• Total pages read: 18031
• Avg. pages per month: 1502.58
• Avg. pages per week: 346.75
• Avg. pages per day: 49.40
• Longest book: A Pattern Language, 1166 pages
• Shortest book: Brunelleschi’s Dome, 165 pages
• Longest time to read a book: A Pattern Language, 48 days
• Shortest time to read a book: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, 1 days

In addition to the average number of pages, I also computed the distribution of the number of pages read each month. For this I assume that I read at a constant (i.e. the same number of pages per day). This is clearly not true, but it still shows the basic trends.

Finally, I’ve plotted a histogram of the lengths of the books I read. As one would expect, the largest buckets are between 200 and 400 pages.

Here is the complete list of books I read in 2009. The rows highlighted in yellow are books I reread this year, and those highlighted in green are books I listened to in audiobook form. In the later case I used Amazon for the number of pages. Of course, the number of pages is approximate, and I make no claims to consistency about things like handling front and end matter or different editions.

Update: I’ve added stars to those books that I particularly like.

The following is a list of all the books I read in 2008. They are listed chronologically by completion. I’m collecting better data for 2009, but for now I only have the titles and authors.

• Decoding the Universe, Charles Seife
• Postsingular, Rudy Rucker
• I’m Just Here for the Food, Alton Brown
• Blankets, Craig Thompson
• The Constant Gardener, John le Carre
• A Cook’s Tour, Anthony Bourdain
• The Practice of Programming, Brain Kernighan and Rob Pike
• Glut, Alex Wright
• Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge
• Deep Economy, Bill McKibben
• Mistress of the Art of Death, Ariana Franklin
• Mind Wide Open, Steven Johnson
• Oath of Fealty, Larry Niven and Jack Pournelle
• Farewell my Subaru, Doug Fine
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
• Suburban Nation, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck
• Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks
• The Architecture of Happiness, Alan de Botton
• Confessions of an Economic Hitman, John Perkins
• Player of Games, Iain M. Banks
• The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson
• Black Hole, Charles Burns
• Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, eds.
• Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges
• Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
• The Most Beautiful House in the World, Witold Rybczynski
• Saturn’s Children, Charles Stross
• WorldChanging: A User’s Guide to the 21st Century, Alex Steffen ed.
• A Place of My Own, Michael Pollan
• The Poisonwod Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
• The Edifice Complex, Deyan Sudjic
• Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks
• Anathem, Neal Stephenson
• The Option of Urbanism, Christopher Leinberger
• The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri, David Bajo
• The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross
• The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie
• Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Live of a Critic in Discuise, Ruth Reichl
• The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought the Down, Colin Woodard

Last weekend was the beginning of the biannual Ithaca book sale. It’s run by volunteers, and usually has upwards of 250,000 books. The prices decrease for each of three consecutive weekends, but they start at $4.50 for a hardback, so I though it would be worth it to go early. Apparently everybody else had the same idea, because it was packed on Saturday morning. I was about ready to leave during my two hour wait in line, but I am glad I didn’t as the selection was pretty amazing. I looked exclusively for computer science books and found a number of gems:

• Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (first edition) by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman — The classic “red dragon book” on compilers. This was actually very well timed as I am in the midst of writing the front end of a simple compiler for my research.
• Introduction to Algorithms (first edition) by Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest — Along with the compilers text, this is the book I’m likely to get the most use out of. It’s one of the classic works on algorithms, and it is pretty encyclopedic for results up through the eighties. It’s probably not the best for an introductory algorithms course, but it’s great as a reference.
• Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation (first edition) by Hopcroft and Ullman — The “Cinderella book.” This is another classic, and I’ve been told that the first edition is better than subsequent editions.
• Operating System Concepts (sixth edition) by Silberschatz, Galvin, and Gagne — The “Dinosaur book.”  I think this is the textbook for the Cornell OS class, so I will need it at some point.
• The C Programming Language (second edition) by Kernighan and Ritchie — I need to brush up on my C/C++, and who better to read than the creators of C themselves. I’ve read part of the first edition but it’s been a while
• Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson — Rails is a popular web application framework for the Ruby language. I’m probably unlikely to use it in the near future, but I’m a sucker for web development.
• GNU Emacs Pocket Reference – I’m also a sucker for Emacs. I know most of the stuff in here, but it never hurts to have a reference.
• C Pocket Reference – Likewise for C.

Not too bad for $35. I hope to go back at some point and take a look at their fiction.

And the IT worker has to know in their bones that if they make a mistake, things can go horribly wrong. Tension and cynicism are constant companions, along with camaraderie and competitiveness. It’s a lot like being a spy, or necromancer. You don’t get out much, and when you do it’s usually at night.

–Ken MacLeod, from the introduction to The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

Real hackers — computer programmers in the sense that the word was coined at MIT in the 1960s — are meticulous, intelligent, mathematically and linguistically inclined obsessives. Far from diving in and out of your bank account details, they’re more likely to spend months working on a mathematical model of an abstraction that only another hacker would understand, or realise was an elaborate intellectual joke.  

–Charles Stross, from the afterward to The Atrocity Archives

I just finished reading What to Eat by Marion Nestle. Unlike the other food books I’ve read recently, this one focuses on personal nutrition rather than the environment, thouth the two are not mutually exclusive. She summarizes her advice nicely with a 1959 quote by the cardiologist Ancel Keys:

Do not get fat; if you are fat, reduce. Favor fresh vegetables and fruits. Avoid heavy use of salt and refined sugar. Get of plenty of exercise and outdoor recreation. See your doctor regularly, and do not worry

Nestle’s book is largely an indictment of the food industry and its advertising practices. Food is big business, and companies frequently use nutrition claims to distinguish their products from the rest of the field. Though these claims technically have to be backed up by scientific results, Nestle finds that many of these “scientific” studies are funded by the very companies citing them. In fact, many companies add nutrients to foods in order to obscure the large number of calories/cholesterol/etc. that make the food otherwise unhealthy. Instead, look for products with few ingredients.