2014 Best of Lists

The ten books that made it to my 2014 best of the year list were split, half non-fiction and half fiction (although a trilogy comprised three of those).  Considering that non-fiction books made up only 16% of the books that I read in 2014, the books on that list are presumably stand-outs.

Best non-fiction of the year:

• Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, by Joe Bageant
• Over-diagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health, by Gilbert Welch
• Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, by Caldwell Esselstyn
• 935 Lies, by Charles Lewis
• Narco Land, by Anabel Hernández

A comment on the non-fiction choices:  everyone simply must read both Dr. Welch's and Dr. Esselstyn's books; your survival depends upon it. Anyone who considers business with or travel to Mexico must read Ms. Hernádez' book. And anyone who has an opinion about politicians in the USA or the actions they have or will in the future take, especially with regard to putting soldiers in harm's way or spending your tax dollars on conflict, really must read Mr. Lewis' book. Really.

Best fiction of the year:

• The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion
• Mira Grant's trilogy: Feed, Deadline, and Blackout
• The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker

As always, the numbers. Of the 127 books I read, only 21 were non-fiction. My reading was up from 2013's 111 books, by 14%.

In 2014 I started using Goodreads to list the books I've read, although I write reviews for very few of them.  To my delight this means that I can use cool, automatically generated statistics, e.g., my 2014 reading totaled 40,564 pages. Oh yes, it shows only 125 books read. (Which means that I missed one. But it seems like far too much work to ferret out which one that is.) Anyways, perhaps more cool is this chart that depicts the books I read by the number of stars I assigned to them: