The Inevitable Round-Up

Looking back on the books I read in 2013, the first thing I notice is there's quite a lot of them.
According to my Goodreads stats, which I think are pretty accurate, I read 42 books this year, clocking in at 12,872 pages. The page count is a bit iffy, since a lot of them were on the Kindle, but still - the main thing I notice is it's a lot more than last year. Before that the count is hard to compare, since I wasn't keeping track of my reading as I went along.

I attribute this increase in volume mainly to more sensible working hours. I owned a Kindle in 2012 (it was my birthday present from my wife), but while it helped me read more on the way to and from work, I was often too cream-crackered to do any reading.
That's still sometimes been the case this year, but in general I've been reading every day.

Looking at the spread of ratings, I am quite pleased. Mostly 3 out of 5s, and bear in mind that 2 is "it was OK" and 3 is "liked it", with 11 4-star ratings, and five 5-stars.
My theory is that if you give too many ratings over three, you just aren't being a very discerning reader. Having said that, the ratings are based on how I felt when I finished them and, like Roger Ebert's film reviews, try to compare the reading experience to books of a similar type. In other words, I don't seriously think The Time Traveller's Wife is better than Swann's Way overall, I just enjoyed it more on the bus to Aberdeen.

So, I don't know, maybe I do think it's better than Swann's Way. (And I nearly gave TTTW 3/5 anyway, except when I'd just finished it, I couldn't bring myself to mark it down for the earlier clunky bits.)

At the other end of the spectrum, my grand unified book-ratng theory holds that if you don't have at least a few ratings below 3, you're staying too much in your comfort zone when selecting your books.

So, half a dozen merely OKs, including the very disappointing The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - I'd rather have read your actual memoirs, Umberto.
And mercifully only one outright bad book this year - Redshirts, by John Scalzi, which reads like the novelisation of a forum discussion thread.

Those 5-star books:
The Death of Mao - James Palmer
A bit of log-rolling for a mate, this rating, but it is properly a good book. I must admit I enjoyed it less than his 1st book, The Bloody White Baron, since the subject matter is less pulp-adventure stuff and more like the sort of thing I used to have to read at university and then for work. Still, good book.

Everything That Rises Must Converge - Flannery O'Connor

Well worth finally getting round to.

The Hittites & Their Contemporaries in Asia Minor - J.G. MacQueen
I nearly gave this less than 5/5 but then wondered, well, what am I marking it down for? Being a bit dry? Not helping me out with pronouncing Turkish place names?  So, full marks as an introduction to the Hittites.

Watership Down - Richard Adams
I was of course familiar with the film, and picked this up expecting something of a light distraction, the sort of thing you might get from The Wind in the Willows or a Wodehouse novel. Instead I got a very moving, gripping epic and lots of useful information about rabbits.

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
My book of the year. I had avoided reading this for absolutely ages, put off by descriptions of the book's structure that made it seem dour, daunting and abstruse. Instead it's a page-turner that's grand and silly and sad and everything else.

So there you go.