Numbers

OK, 2004 in some numbers:

books read: 254
minutes worked out: 21,235 (2 weeks, 17 hours, 55 min.)
plane trips with Isaac: 8
children's books memorized: Goodnight Moon, The Going to Bed Book, But Not the Hippopotamus, Hippos Go Berserk, Chicka Chicka ABC (Very Hungry Caterpillar always trips me up with that 5-day sequence, and Saturday, when he eats way too much, is a killer)

Top 14 works of fiction, in no particular order:
Berry, Hannah Coulter
Rhodes, Timoleon Vieta Come Home
Alexie, Ten Little Indians
Pawel, Death of a Nationalist
Stone, Bay of Souls
Markfield, To an Early Grave
Danticat, The Dew Breaker
Isegawa, Snake Pit
Kis, Garden, Ashes
Ledig, Payback
Bashford, Augustus Carp, Esq.
Wallant, The Tenants of Moonbloom
Niemi, Popular Music from Vittula
Foden, The Last King of Scotland

Top 14 works of non-fiction, in no particular order:
Slezkine, The Jewish Century
Morgan, A Covert Life
Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?
Perrottet, Pagan Holiday
Appelbaum, Gulag
Jones, Men of Tomorrow
Chappell, A Stone of Hope
Blatty, Which Way to Mecca, Jack?
Lipsky, Absolutely American
Roach, Stiff
Johnson, Street Justice
Webster, Aftermath
Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction
Schwartz, The Numbers Game

4 books I resent wasting my time on:
Shields, Enough About You
LaHaye/Jenkins, Left Behind
Navas, Murdered by His Wife
Ramos, Ballad of Rocky Ruiz

Some connections:
I read a lot of African-centered books this year: above, Foden and Isegawa, which are both about Idi Amin's Uganda; apparently the bit in Foden about some 1970s Ugandan currency featuring Amin defecating on the King of England is fictional, sadly; but also Abani's Graceland, Hartley's Zanzibar Chest, Rush's Whites, Auf der Heyde's Does Anyone Here Have a Whistle?, Galgut's The Good Doctor, and French's A Continent for the Taking.

Also a lot of books about soccer, starting with Foer's How Soccer Explains the World, which in retrospect feels failed overall but really fascinating in its smaller sections.

Appelbaum's Gulag, though financed by right-wing foundations (eg. Lynde and Harry Bradley) and graced, if that's the word, by an irritating ending where she takes aim at like the 5 Stalinists left in academia, was pretty damn impressive, though one of the books she used that most intrigued me turned out to be published by a Christian house, as it was about the subject's conversion while in the gulag.  It also led me to Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, which I've just started.  Gulag was remarked upon by Maria at my gym, who seemed surprised that any Americans knew what the word meant.

Stone and Danticat are both about Caribbean nations; Danticat is Haitian, Stone's made-up country sort of Haitian (ie voodoo) but also named St. Something-or-other.

Among books about Jewish stuff (above, Slezkine, Markfield, Jones, Morgan), I would also include Roth's Plot Against America, Epstein's Fabulous Small Jews, Ozick's Quarrel and Quandary (have read about 30pp of her new Heir to the Glimmering World) and Moore's GI Jews.

Among sports books, Schwartz's book about baseball stats is really, it seems to me, about sort of the statistical sublime, the dream of perfect rationality through numbers and an ever-better system of evaluation that will finally nail, say, fielding as well as hitting seems to have been. Wolff's Big Game, Small World also had some excellent material on basketball around the world, including a funny quandary about whether to trash-talk the King of Bhutan.

Among travel books, I loved Perrottet's wanderings along ancient tourists' routes (#1 graffito: "Miravi" [I was astonished].) O'Rourke's Holidays in Hell was hecka funny, and he makes a hard-to-argue point about Communist dinginess: whatever other utopianisms available, he notes, every country that goes left gets sort of run-down.  This is also mentioned in Drakulic's Cafe Europa, where she points out that contemporary Eastern Europeans have no concept of customer service because it never occurred to them when they were growing up that there could be anything like another choice.

I think I read Ledig's book, a minute-by-minute description of an Allied bombing raid, first, then Sebald. What a genius Sebald was.  Ledig he finds worthwhile in not distancing or aestheticizing his reactions or sneaking in some sort of principle of parity; it's an incredibly powerful vision of how devastated Germany was by Allied reprisals.

More thoughts later, as they occur to me.