Books of the Year
Tags: books
It’s almost June. If you worry you have accomplished little in 2011 so far, do not read any of the following, more or less recently published:
Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages
The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible
The Year of Living Like Jesus: My Journey of Discovering What Jesus Would Really Do
Living Oprah: My One-Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk
365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy
A Year of Blind Dates: A Single Girl’s Search for ‘The One’
Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan’s Most Rigorous Zen Temple
The Calculus Diaries: A Year Discovering How Maths Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse
An Afternoon in Summer: My Year on a South Sea Island, Doing Nothing, Gaining Everything, and Finally Falling in Love
My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student
How I Lived a Year on Just a Pound a Day
Give It Up! My Year of Learning to Live Better
Not Buying It: My Year without Shopping
A Year without ‘Made in China’: One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy
A Life Stripped Bare: My Year of Trying to Live Ethically
A Year Without Underwear: Exploring the World on a Bicycle
Talking to Zeus: My Year in a Greek Garden
365 Thank Yous: The Year a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life
Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading
The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
The Beauty Experiment: How I Skipped the Lipstick, Cut My Hair, Forgot Fashion, and Faced the World without Concealer for a Year… and Made Over My Life
The Doper Next Door: My Strange and Scandalous Year on Performance-Enhancing Drugs
Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin
Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison
Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously
However could you have missed Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year Without Sex?
Addendum:
Andy McBean, A Year on the Bog: 1 man, 1 stopwatch, 12 months, 273 toilets (Southbank Publishing)
“Meta, or, My Year of Years: My Year Spent Reading All The ‘My Year Spent…’ Books.”
Actually, that was a blog: http://myyearofeverything.tumblr.com/.
Evidently Chastened finished the poor guy off.
… well, I’ll be jiggered (as someone said in the latest LRB). Another reminder, as if I needed it, that it’s as hard to produce satire as to have an original idea.
In truth I hadn’t realized “Chastened” was a real book. I’d taken that title for a joke, and a good one at that.
I only know about these books because I once thought about writing one–about reading all of Shakespeare in a year. When I realized how overdone–and silly–the genre is, as this post demonstrates, I decided just to
blog about Shakespeare.