Tag: books

2010 reading list, a year end summary

Posted on by jessamyn

I made an effort to make time for reading this year. The combination of this and a lot of airplane time meant more good books read. Here are previous year end lists: 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. My booklist lives in a separate blog and it has its own RSS feed.Here’s the wrap-up of what I read in 2010.

number of books read in 2010: 48
number of books read in 2009: 39
number of books read in 2008: 31
number of books read in 2007: 53
number of books read in 2005: 86
number of books read in 2004: 103
number of books read in 2003: 75
number of books read in 2002: 91
number of books read in 2001: 78

average read per month: 4

average read per week: .92
number read in worst month: 2 (Jan/June)
number read in best month: 7 (July)
percentage by male authors: 73
percentage by female authors: 27
fiction as percentage of total: 60
non-fiction as percentage of total: 40
percentage of total liked: 90
percentage of total ambivalent: 9
percentage of total disliked: 1

I read a lot of books on a few topics this year: art history/theft/discovery, cybercrime novels and a few victorian mysteries and some graphic novels. Still not really on the ebook bandwagon. Still enjoying reading paper books in bed. Still finishing a few books I started in 2010, I expect this trend to continue. Wish me luck, and happy reading in 2011!

mushrooms cultivated in the books….

Posted on by jessamyn

“By introducing the book as a material in the garden, Jardin de la Connaissance offers an evocative cultural frame to examine transformational processes inherent in nature. Invoking the mythic relation between knowledge and nature, integral to the concept of ‘paradise’, we invite the emotional involvement of the visitor by exposing these fragile and supposedly timeless cultural artefacts to the processes of decomposition. ” More. [thanks greg!]

access to reading lists in prison libraries

Posted on by jessamyn

There’s an interesting little article in the New York Times today about whether the prison reading list of a prisoner can be used against them in a trial. The case involves a 2007 home invasion and murder in Connecticut. The defense has indicated that the books that one of the accused men had checked out of the prison library prior to the crime were “criminally malevolent in the extreme.”

In a motion last month, the defense lawyers referred to “Department of Correction library books.” They noted that Mr. Hayes, who spent much of his life in Connecticut jails, had borrowed “one or more books of fiction whose plots can fairly be described as salacious and criminally malevolent in the extreme.” The lawyers were trying to block any reference to Mr. Hayes’s prison reading before the Cheshire crime at his trial. They said a mention of the books would be “highly inflammatory and very prejudicial to the defendant.”

In a strange twist, there have been two books already published about the murders that residents are trying to have banned from the local library. More on this from Library Journal recounting a program from ALA Annual.