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Tuesday, August 13, 2019

4 years!

Today marks my completion of four years of doing at least one half hour of reading per day. In the past year, I have read 33 more books comprising 14,786 pages. This brings my total for the four years to 129 books totaling 65,187 pages.

My year four books were:

Foundation and Empire - Isaac Asimov (282 pages)
The Emporer of all Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee (609 pages)
All the King’s Men - Robert Penn Warren (464 pages)
Second Foundation - Isaac Asimov (279 pages)
Seal Team Six - Howard Wasdin (416 pages)
The World According to Garp - John Irving (624 pages)
Foundation's Edge - Isaac Asimov (480 pages)
Algorithms to Live By - Christian Griffiths (368 pages)
Crime & Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky (551 pages)
Foundation and Earth - Isaac Asimov (528 pages)
Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris (288 pages)
The Golden Bowl - Henry James (789 pages)
Prelude to Foundation - Isaac Asimov (512 pages)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot (384 pages)
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury (159 pages)
Forward the Foundation - Isaac Asimov (464 pages)
The Stranger in the Woods - Michael Finkel (224 pages)
The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow (608 pages)
Southern Reach Trilogy - Jeff VanderMeer (901 pages)
Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson (656 pages)
Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin (272 pages)
The Fifth Season - J.K. Jemisin (512 pages)
Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl (200 pages)
Moby Dick - Herman Melville (592 pages)
The Obelisk Gate - J.K. Jemisin (433 pages)
The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt (528 pages)
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (80 pages)
The Stone Sky - J.K. Jemisin (464 pages)
I Am Malala - Malala Yousafzai (327 pages)
A House for Mr. Biswas - V. S. Naipaul (576 pages)
Fleet of Worlds - Larry Niven (304 pages)
Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America - John Charles Chasteen (400 pages)
Light in August - William Faulkner (512 pages)

Sunday, August 4, 2019

Born in Blood & Fire: A Concise History of Latin America

Most of the historical non-fiction that I've read so far has been focused on the United States or one of the world wars.  It was something of a departure to read Born in Blood & Fire: A Concise History of Latin America by John Chasteen.  This book covers Latin America from the first European encounters in the late 15th century up to the present.  It's actually a textbook, but I found it remarkably readable.  Obviously a 400 page book covering over 500 years and 20 countries can only have go into so much detail.  Even so, I think it provided me with an excellent look into the evolution of Latin America and how it came to be what it is today.

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