As it was an odd damn holiday, it was an odd damn year, too. However, I shall refrain from summing up anything other than this book log, since you can find dozens of such stories elsewhere. On the numbers front, a quick count shows seventy-six different things read listed in the index since the beginning of August; some of these are short stories or skimmed books, but other are multi-novel omnibuses, so take that as you will. (I take it as, “Geez, that is a lot.”) It turns out there are only ten books on both Chad’s book log and mine (eleven things, counting the Fellowship movie); I thought it would be more, probably because many of them are ones the other has read, just not within the relevant time frame. (However, my living quarters are much less cluttered than Chad’s, since I get a lot of things out of the library.)
A lot of my favorite authors haven’t been mentioned yet; I think the book log has been motivating me to re-read less, so people like Bujold and Brust, who put out books just before I started this, haven’t turned up yet. (It’s traditional for me to re-read Bujold during finals, when I’m particularly stressed, though, so just wait.) Overall, keeping this has been a good idea; it’s forced me out of my previous bad habit of finishing some books without really forming any impression of them, or thinking much about them. The time I spend on it varies, depending on how much I have to say about the book in question, but it’s not more burdensome than Usenet (well, perhaps a little more so, because I do tend to pay slightly more attention to my writing here). If any of my five readers have been contemplating keeping a book log of their own, I recommend it.