Success! I didn't quite read enough for another 10 to end the year, but I'm OK with that. I suppose I could've read some kids' books before I gave them away as holiday gifts and padded the book total, but I'm better than that. Not much better, but better. And the fact that I read a full book (albeit a very short one) on the last day of the year when I didn't technically have (and averaged roughly 100 pages a day over the last five days of the year) makes me feel like I ended on a strong note.
Here's the breakdown of the final eight books:
Best Fiction Book: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris (Beloved and A Good Man Is Hard to Find are better-written books, but the Sedaris one brought me the most enjoyment.)
Best Nonfiction Book: Belushi: A Biography by Judith Belushi Pisano (I don't think I've ever read an oral history that I haven't enjoyed, but this one was particularly good. And who knew Suze Orman was once Mrs. Belushi Pisano's roommate and knew John pretty well?)
Toughest Read: Beloved by Toni Morrison (nothing was all that tough in this batch, so this gets it by default)
Easiest Read: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris
Number of Books on Loan: 0
Number of Books Given as Gifts: 1 (Beloved by Toni Morrison. Thanks, Frank!)
Number of Books Signed by the Author: 4 (Beloved by Toni Morrison, Palo Alto by James Franco, Belushi: A Biography by Judith Belushi Pisano and Tanner Colby, and Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris)
Book That Was Sitting on the Shelf the Longest: Beloved by Toni Morrison
Best Passage (you must be 18 years of age or older to read this passage):
"...[M]y father found a number of other ways to use my car to his advantage.
One day, he asked me to pick him up at Benny Glickstein's bar, the 9M. He had some stops to make. We had only gone a block or two when we saw a fat woman waiting for a trolley, and my father recognized her. She was about forty years old.
'Stop the car,' he said.
After I pulled over to the curb, he got out of the car, walked over to the woman, and started talking to her. The next thing I knew, she was sitting in the back seat.
'Drive down to where they're building the Walt Whitman Bridge,' my father said. I looked at the woman in the rearview mirror and her face was expressionless, as though it was just another day in her life.
'Okay, park over here,' he said, when we reached a secluded area of the construction site.
'Take a walk,' he said. 'Come back in ten minutes.'
When I came back, my father was in the passenger seat. 'Now I'm gonna take a walk.' As soon as he disappeared, the woman said, 'Come here.' I got in the back seat with her, and she blew me.
When my father returned to the car, the fat woman was still in the back seat and I was behind the wheel.
'Come on,' my father said. 'Drop her off.'
We ended up dropping her off at the same trolley stop that she had been waiting at in the first place, and we drove away.
Even though some of these things were shocking to me at first, that was life with my father; the older I got, the more I learned to accept it. There was no use moralizing about it--then or now. The bottom line is, that was his way of life."from You Only Rock Once by Jerry Blavat (as told to Steve Oskie)
And now, here are the final statistics:
Number of Books Read: 78
Total Page Count: 23,704
Average Pages Read per Day: 64.9
Fiction Books: 32
Nonfiction Books: 46
Longest book (in every sense of the word): The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories edited by Daniel Halpern (667 pp.)
Shortest book: Save the Last Dance for Satan by Nick Tosches (114 pp.)
Best Fiction Book: Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton
Best Nonfiction Book: (tie) The Miracle of St. Anthony: A Season with Coach Bob Hurley and Basketball's Most Improbable Dynasty by Adrian Wojnarowski and All Hopped Up and Ready to Go: Music from the Streets of New York, 1927-77 by Tony Fletcher
Toughest Read: The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories edited by Daniel Halpern
Easiest Read: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris
Number of Books on Loan: 4
Number of Books Given as Gifts: 8
Number of Books Signed by the Author: 21
Book That Was Sitting on the Shelf the Longest: Either Sixties Going On Seventies by Nora Sayre or Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Number of Pages I Will Be Reading Today: 0. I need a break. But it will be a short one, I hope.
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