Last year, I listed the Books I Read in 2003 in the order in which they were read. For 2004, I decided to list them by category. The asterisks beside three of the names denote books that I read a majority of, but may have skipped or skimmed over a small portion.
Since I haven’t made any New Year’s resolutions so far this year, my resolution will be to read more books in 2005 than I read in 2004. “The Books I Read in 2004” are in the extended entry. Click the name of the book to read to the description.
FICTION:
1) The Book of Illusions, by Paul Auster
2) The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, by Paul Auster
3) If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, by Jon McGregor
4) Angels & Demons, by Dan Brown
5) The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
6) The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe
7) Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
8) The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston
9) The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
10) Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, by Hilary Mantel
11) Play It As It Lays, by Joan Didion
FICTION: SHORT STORIES
12) How To Be Alone: Essays, by Jonathan Franzen
13) I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere, by Anna Gavalda
14) Open Secrets, by Alice Munro
15) After the Quake, by Haruki Murakami
NONFICTION: SOCIOLOGY
16) Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America, by Barbara Ehrenreich
17) Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
18) Laughter Out Of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown, by Donna M. Goldstein
19) Teenage Wasteland : Suburbia’s Dead End Kids, by Donna Gaines
20) The McDonaldization of Society, by George Ritzer
21) The Globalization of Nothing, by George Rizer
22) Home Town, by Tracy Kidder
NONFICTION: CONSUMERISM & ADVERTISING
23) No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, by Naomi Klein
24) Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, by John De Graaf
25) Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers, by Alissa Quart
26) The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer, by Juliet Schor
27) Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism, by Daniel Harris
NONFICTION: MISC.
28) We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, by Philip Gourevitch
29) Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, by Eric Schlosser
30) Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness to the Women of America, by Myrna Blyth
31) Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back, by Jane Holtz Kay
32) The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, by Amy Tan
33) The Undutchables, by Colin White & Laurie Boucke
34) Midlife Crisis at 30: How The Stakes Have Changed For a New Generation – And What To Do About It, by Lia Macko and Kerry Rubin
35) Consumed: Why Americans Love, Hate, and Fear Food, by Michelle Stacey
36) Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays, by Joan Didion
37) The Art of Travel, by Alain de Botton
38) * Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, by Susan Bordo
39) * Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, and Collaborations with Artists, by Paul Auster
TEXTBOOKS, READ FOR SCHOOL
40) The American Class Structure (In An Age of Growing Inequality), Sixth Ed., by Dennis Gilbert
41) Poverty and Development Into the 21st Century, by Tim Allen and Alan Thomas
42) * Capitalist Development & Democracy, by Dietrich Rueschemeyer
Total: 42
(The textbooks total doesn’t include all of the ones read during the spring, summer, and fall university semesters of 2004.)
