the year that was: reading

This year I did not meet my goal of a book a week. In fact I didn't even come close. It was a busy year and I ended up spending a lot of time on other persuits (primarily paid work, gardening and canning). A lot of those long lazy Saturdays of yore were long, but not lazy, so not much reading got done during the summer. In all, I read 38 books this year. I would have liked to made some more progress on the big pile that I want to read, but I'm not too upset about it either.

The book that took the greatest effort was probably "Programming ASP.Net". It didn't help that I took this on when the weather was still warm and I had a lot of other things cooking. The biggest waste of time was probably "The Rational Guide to SQL Server 2005 Service Broker." That isn't a criticism of the book necessarily, but more an admission that I didn't apply it right away and would have to start from scratch again if I wanted to use it now. I really enjoyed "Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters" although it's hard to pick a best book of the year because there was a good crop.

I expect the pendulum will swing a little back toward reading this year as other things settle down and give me more quiet time. It's important to my mental health to curl up with a book and wander off into another world every now and then.