I am not entirely certain how comprehensive this list is. I’ve never bothered to keep track of the books I read, but I recently read an article telling me that 13% of Americans claimed to have read 11 to 20 books in the past 12 months. This made me curious as to where I might fit into these statistics, so I did my very best to figure out just what I managed to read this year.
I had a lot of trouble trying to decide which books I actually read early in the year and which ones I had read towards the end of 2011. I definitely read all ten books in this list last year. I have a suspicion that I read one other Discworld book, but I am pretty uncertain. I wish I knew for certain because I would have really liked to make it into the next bracket!
These should be, more or less, the books I read during 2012 in something close to the order in which I read them:
- “Foundation” – Isaac Asimov
- “Hogfather” – Terry Pratchett
- “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” – Cory Doctorow
- “Red Mars” – Kim Stanley Robinson
- “Bypass Gemini” – Joseph Lallo
- “Undersea” – Geoffery Morrison
- “Unstable Prototypes” – Joseph Lallo
- “John Gone” – Michael Kayatta
- “The Long Earth” – Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett
- “Green Mars” – Kim Stanley Robinson
The surprising books from StoryBundle.com
Four of the books that I read last year came from StoryBundle.com’s first bundle, the “Big Bang Bundle.” I bought the bundle because I thought it was an excellent idea, but I didn’t actually expect to get around to reading any of it. The list of books that I want to read is already rather daunting. Fitting in more books from authors I’d never heard of didn’t seem like something that would happen.
After finishing up Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Red Mars,” I decided to give one of the StoryBundle.com books a try. It seemed to take no time at all to breeze through Joseph Lallo’s “Bypass Gemini,” especially reading it right after “Red Mars.” I enjoyed it enough to buy the sequel, “Unstable Prototypes.”
All the books that I’ve read so far from the “Big Bang Bundle” have been excellent. The folks at StoryBundle.com claim that they read all the books and choose the best ones to include in their bundles. I really like the idea of buying a set of curated novels.
I will be looking forward to their next Sci-Fi bundle!