This year I didn’t quite make it to 52 books, but I did read 40. During this past fall semester I hardly had a chance to read leisurely and while there were many books on Architecture I wanted to read, but due to the demands of my classes I was architectured-out. These are the books I’ve read:
- The Girl with the Pearl Earrings
- Dispatches
- Architecture without Architects
- Crime and Punishment
- The Night Circus
- The Battle for Home: The Vision of a Young architect in Syria
- The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
- Destiny of the a Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President
- Rise to Rebellion: A Novel of the American Revolution
- The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789
- Cloud Cuckoo Land
- The Fountainhead
- Seveneves
- Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture Hasn’t Worked
- The Quiet American
- Old Man’s War (book 1)
- The Eye of the World (Wheel of Time book 1)
- The Great Hunt (Wheel of Time book 2)
- The Dragon Reborn (Wheel of Time book 3)
- The Shadow Rising (Wheel of Time book 4)
- The Fires of Heaven (Wheel of Time book 5)
- Lord of Chaos (Wheel of Time book 6)
- A Crown of Swords (Wheel of Time book 7)
- Path of Daggers (Whee of Time book 8)
- Winter’s Heart (Wheel of Time book 9)
- Crossroads of Twilight (Wheel of Time 10)
- Knife of Dreams (Wheel of Time 11)
- Gathering of Storms (Wheel of Time 12)
- Towers of Midnight (Wheel of Time 13)
- A Memory of Light (Wheel of Time 14)
- The Ghost Brigade (Old Mans War book 2)
- The Last Colony (Old Mans War book 3)
- Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things
- Swimming to Freedom: My Untold Story of Escaping the Cultural Revolution
- Cognitive Architecture
- Man’s Search For Meaning
- The Things They Carried
- Deep Undercover: My Secret Life & Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America
- Chickenhawk
- Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City
It’s hard for me to pick a best book because I read the Wheel of Time series throughout the summer and all of it was amazing. Over the summer I rented a fourth floor studio from a friend friends family whose son lived at home. Him and his dad were both big fantasy readers and had two copies of the Wheel of Time. I had just finished a book and couldn’t get the second one of the series on my kindle so after hearing their praise, I started it. I was hooked and read a book a week. I read them on the train, walking between the platforms, on my lunch break, and in the park after work. I didn’t think I could, I never read a series of that magnitude and I’m glad I did. However, if I had to choose a stand alone book, it would be Crime and Punishment. It was so incredibly written and emotional. It was my first time reading a novel by a Russian novelist and it opened the door for others that I’d like to read.
The worst book I read was Cloud Cuckoo Land. It was horrible, and extremely disappointing because it was written by the author who wrote All the Light We Cannot See, which I loved. I didn’t want to finish it, but I thought it would get better as I continued and it never did. I felt so betrayed by all the positive reviews, I had to leave my own one-star google review in the hopes that someone might see it and be dissuaded from reading it.
Here are the books that I’ve read last year: 52 books, 52 weeks