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 |    My primary Writing.com blog. |
It's the end of 2016, which means it's time to review all the reading and listening I've done over the past calendar year. Last year, I was fairly sure I set records that would stand for a good long time when I consumed 80 books, 501 podcasts, 31 comics, and 20 scripts. This past year, I ended up setting high-water marks for not just books, but also podcasts, comics, and scripts.  Here's how 2016 breaks down: = favorite = also highly recommendedBooks (click to expand full list) ▼ For fiction, Ernest Cline easily took the top spots on my list with both Ready Player One and Armada. He took my childhood love of video games and pop culture and turned it into two amazing narratives that had me laughing, gasping, tearing up, and everything in between. John Scalzi's Redshirts was also a great idea for a book... the characters find themselves in a Star Trek-like reality where they realize they're "red shirts," a.k.a. the ones that always die on away missions while the gold and blue shirt wearing leadership always miraculously survives. And I had to put Brandon Sanderson's Calamity on there because it was a great ending to his YA superhero trilogy which I've been a huge fan of since the very beginning. For nonfiction, I really enjoyed Grant Morrison's history and analysis of the history of comics characters in Supergods, and finally got around to reading Steven Pressfield's The War of Art and have to say I now know what all the fuss is about.  Podcasts (click to expand full list) ▼ I had three favorite new podcasts this year, in addition to the regulars that I continued listening to. Keepin' It 1600 is a politics podcast co-hosted by former Obama senior strategy and communications advisor Dan Pfeiffer and Jon Favreau (Obama's former chief speechwriter, not the director ). Even though they were admittedly overconfident and a little condescending about the election coverage, they both have an amazing inside perspective at what a presidential administration has to deal with and needs to accomplish and their commentary has been fascinating. I also loved Dead Pilots Society (from Ben Blacker, the same guy who hosts the Nerdist Writer's Panel), where he does table reads of pilot scripts that everyone loves and were bought by networks but never actually made it to screen. And, for pure entertainment value, My Dad Wrote A Porno has been absolutely hysterical. A British man discovered that his elderly father has taken to writing (very bad) erotica under a pen name, so naturally he figured the best thing to do was to find two friends so they can read and discuss a chapter a week in podcast form.  Comics (click to expand full list) ▼ Earlier this year, I read Civil War for the first time, in anticipation of the movie coming out, and I wasn't disappointed. It's one of the best alternate storylines I've read in a long time. Lazarus was a surprisingly good read with a fascinating and well-conceived take on a post-apocalyptic world, and Red Ten (a superhero adaptation of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None) continues to be a favorite despite the fact that they only put out one issue this year. Scripts (click to expand full list) ▼ I'm not putting any favorites or highly recommended on the script section of my reading list because a lot of the writers on this list are my friends and/or colleagues and I don't want to play favorites with my friends and business associates.  TOTALS: 101 books, 672 podcasts, 220 comics, 65 scripts PREVIOUS RECORDS: 80 books (2015), 501 podcasts (2015), 202 comics (2014), 62 scripts (2010) According to Goodreads, my book reading resulted in the following stats. Interestingly, my shortest book was 14 pages shorter than the shortest one I read in 2015, and my longest book was 347 pages shorter than the longest one I read last year... but my average pages per book increased this year by 26 pages. Total Pages Read: 29,324 Average Pages Per Book: 312 Shortest Book: 25 pages Longest Book: 806 pages In "2015 Reading List"  , I said the following (marks inserted to indicate success or failure): I'm thinking that, for 2016, my reading goals will center around the types of things I read (  ) rather than the quantity ( ). Most notably, I'd like to read more books by friends (), independent authors (), and writers here on WdC (). I hope to self-publish something myself soon (), and I think I'll get more value out of reading the types of things similar to what I hope to publish () than I will participating in challenges where I'm trying to round out items on a list by choosing genres and subject matters that aren't even close to what I'm interested in for myself as an author ().It's safe to say that my quantity of reading didn't exactly decline this year , but I definitely read more in the genres I want to write in (fantasy, sci-fi, mystery, action/thriller) than trying to find stuff that checked off a box on an arbitrary list. And I'm glad I made a concerted effort to read the work of friends and other independent authors, which was a really rewarding experience. It's nice to find new voices and talented writers outside the ones that perennially pop up at the top of sales charts and reading lists; there are some exceptional talents out there. I should have read more on WdC and made more progress in my own publishing efforts (I'll discuss that in a future New Years Resolutions post), but overall I'm very happy with my reading this year. I read a lot of great stuff and... at the risk of setting myself up again... I don't think the high-water marks I've set this year are going to be beaten for quite some time. I read a lot (probably more than I should have), and in 2017 I'm going to sacrifice some of that reading time for writing time, hopefully. My 2017 goal is to have a shorter reading list, but a longer writing list. Farewell 2016... it's time to see what your successor has in store! |
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