2011: The Year in Review

Administrative Note: I'll be adding to this over several days, so keep visiting. When it is "finished", I'll remove this note.

Books Read: 82 long-form items for the year. Neither the best of the counts nor the worse. As the year went on, I started shifting my habits and the changes may result in a larger count in 2012 (we'll see).

Best books? A mixed bag and possibly a big shift in what I read. Some of the best stuff I read this year was in those comic...graphic novels, especially the Sandman items by Neil Gaiman (and diverse hands). Other highpoints were re-reads, such as William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, where I appreciated even more the combination of efficient information delivery and sparse prose.

The biggest win was my increasingly fractured attention span. Every reading plan for the year was abandoned, leaving an increasing number of books started, but not finished. I probably have three times as many beings "currently being read" as I actually finished this year.

This has got to change, and hopefully I'll manage to pull it off. Everything "currently being read" is abaondoned. I'm really going to try to lead only a dozen or so books simultaneously (part of the idea is to increase the number of anthologies, so I'll be working on the 2012 Year in Shorts as well), trying to keep to 1 main electronic book at a time and a few paper books at a time, rather than this Mayfly-like approach of the past year.

Like any other plan, it may not survive initial contact with the enemy, but we can hope.

Shorts Read: Coming!

Audio Listened to: Coming!

Video viewed: 320 episodes/movies. For a guy who doesn't watch much television...I seem to have watched a lot of television in 2011! Best was catching up on Dr. Who in the post-reboot episodes. I had seen batches, here and there, but this was a time for sitting down and watching them all in their "correct order". Close behind was the BBC series of Sherlock, putting Holmes in our world. Several movies were notable, for example Glass, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Letters from Iwo Jima. Worst? Falling Skies (series), The Deer Hunter.

Absolute winner in video this year? Restrepo. If you haven't seen it, see it now.

Other Notes: Coming!