2009 Book & Music Recap
This is the first part of my annual recap of my year in media. Tomorrow I will probably look back at the movies of ’09.
I didn’t really keep up with music this year as much as I normally do. But in no particular order, the releases I was most fond of from this year were:
1. Dan Auerbach – Keep It Hid
2. Chuck Ragan – Gold Country
3. A.A. Bondy – When the Devil’s Loose
4. Avett Brothers – I and Love and You
5. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – s/t
6. The Monsters of Folk – s/t
7. M. Ward – Hold Time
8. Mindy Smith – Stupid Love
I should probably confess to loving half of Only By the Night but hating myself for it.
The books I read this year are listed below. I again fell short of my goal, but in this age of illiteracy I consider any number over zero to be a personal triumph.
Fiction:
- A Happy Death by Albert Camus
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
- Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski
- God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut
- Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- The Fall by Albert Camus
- The Plague by Albert Camus
- The Shack by William P. Young
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
- Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
Non-fiction:
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
- Against Joie de Vivre by Phillip Lopate
- An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis
- Bachelorhood by Phillip Lopate
- Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins
- High Crimes: the Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed by Michael Kodas
- Interventions by Noam Chomsky
- Mystery and Manners by Flannery O’Connor
- Portrait of My Body by Phillip Lopate
- The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- The New Christians by Tony Jones
- The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose
- The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs
- Vagabonding by Rolf Potts
Tags: Camus, fiction, Joseph Heller, Lopate, M. Ward, nonfiction, Vonnegut
December 30th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
[...] b l o g b a n d i t » Blog Archive » 2009 Book & Music Recap [...]
January 12th, 2010 at 6:35 pm
Interestingly enough, we read a few of the same books.
Breakfast of Champions, Fahrenheit 451, The Shack, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.
After reading your posts and year-end recaps, I took out two pieces of paper and began making lists of media consumed in 2010, and barring disposal by my well-intentioned wife, I’ll follow your lead in posting year end lists next Jan. Until then, take ‘er easy, Dude.
January 12th, 2010 at 7:07 pm
What’d you think of The Shack? I’m guessing, like me, that you didn’t read it because you’d heard what a stunning work of literature it was.