Space Station Mir

So I left off in July with No. 32, but my summer reading didn't end there. Unfortunately, I've lost the list, but I know I read Woodsburner by John Pipkin (33), Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (34), and Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley (35) by Alison Weir. That brings the total to 35 for the summer. In September, before classes had gotten too intense, I managed to read some books I'd gotten earlier from Bookmooch, Alice Sebold's memoir Lucky (36) about her rape and the trial that followed, which I was primarily interested in for background on The Lovely Bones , and Company of Liars (37) by Karen Maitland to see how she re-imagined The Canterbury Tales . I would call it more closely a riff on some of the ideas of The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron , a group of people on the road with a common goal from the former, and people hiding from the plague from the latter. However, the format was very much that of modern fiction rather than poetry or a ...

Speaking of cultures and society, I leave for Spain on January 9. Instead of continuing as a book blog with a specific goal for number of books to read in a year, Space Station Mir will become a chronicle for my adventures in Spain. Expect a post for each new place that I visit, with pictures! I also plan to continue reviewing books, however I will not make a set goal for number of books to read this year. I do pledge myself to read at least one book in Spanish that was not assigned for a class. In terms of my goals for 2009, I was not diligent enough in keeping track of them. Looking back, I've fulfilled some of them and not others. The greatest trend in my reading this year, which marks a huge deviation for me, is that I've read more non-fiction than I think I've read any other year in my life. I've finally developed the ability to sustain interest in non-fiction other than biographies. For a while, biographies were the only non-fiction I ever read, with the exception...