Last year I read more books than any other year in my adult life: 124 total books; 105 cover-to-cover. When I look at the spread of page-counts, it is perplexing how I managed such a glut of reading: the average page-count was 384; the shortest book was 68 pages (The Law); the longest was 1,052 pages (Marcel Proust: A Life); only 9 books had fewer than 100 pages. There were many early mornings, late nights, lunch breaks, waiting rooms, and flights spent reading, and my decision to read the whole of Proust's gesamtkunstwerk certainly affected last year's total, but I must take a moment to apply Marx's precept and decide if quantity affected quality negatively or positively.

First, let's separate the wheat from the chaff, so as to tune our focus to books I technically read. My definition of a properly read book is a book the reader read carefully from cover to cover, taking notes, challenging the text, highlighting, consulting outside thoughts, and so on. In other words, properly reading a book is to engage in a sort of dialogue with the book. This leaves out books that I referenced (e.g. anthologies, dictionaries, etc.), skimmed (e.g. to get a feel for a particular subject or author), or abandoned (i.e. just couldn't finish for one reason or another). So, to be fair, let's toss out the books that I didn't technically read last year:

> McDougal Concepts & Skills Geometry: Student Editon Geometry 2005 - used to brush up for GRE.
> William Tyndale: A Biography - got about halfway through and got bogged down.
> Western Philosophy: An Anthology - used for a study on aesthetics.
> The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life - Bloom kept putting me to sleep with this one, but it did lead me to choose The Anatomy of Melancholy for my first read of 2017!
> The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had - I read this up to the sections that are basically annotated reading lists.
> Selected Non-Fictions - one does not simply read through Borges's essays.
> Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration - I love E. O. Wilson, but I just wasn't in the mood for this.
> Value Compact Bible-ESV-Border Design - terrible translation.
> Easy Spanish Step-By-Step: Master High-Frequency Grammar for Spanish Proficiency-FAST! - picked through this one to get a sense of grammar and vocabulary.
> Easy Spanish Reader w/CD-ROM: A Three-Part Text for Beginning Students - see above.
> The Christian in Complete Armour - this is one of those tomes that must be sipped. I got about a fourth of the way through and had to breathe for a while.
> Israelology: the Missing Link in Systematic Theology - this is essentially a dissertation without any regard for readers out side of the candidate's scholarly auditors.
> The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages - having read this one already, I picked through some sections as a refresher.
> The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul - grazed through some essays to prepare for some bigger books on philosophy of mind.
> The Geneva Bible: 1560 Edition - reading this one mostly for the marginalia.
> Barron's Essential Words for the GRE - used to prep for GRE.
> The Complete Works - like Borges, one does not simply read through Montaigne's essays.
> Practical Algebra: A Self-Teaching Guide - more GRE prep material.

Now, this still leaves me with over 100 books. Instead of listing all of them (my 2016 shelf can be perused here), I will point out some highlights.

Of all the books I read last year, there are 5 that stand out. Here they are in order of impact.

1. The Recognitions
Each year, I try to start with a book that is both long and deep. For example, in previous years I've turned to Infinite Jest, The Magic Mountain, Gravity's Rainbow, and Swann's Way. Ever since reading Jonathan Franzen praise it in his essay "How To Be Alone" (in the eponymous book: How to Be Alone), I had Gaddis's debut novel tucked away for the right time, and last year I sensed it was that time. And thankfully the leap of faith paid off. It is one of--if not the--best novels I've ever read. Truly, it has everything. I hung on every word and daydreamed of possibly making it a central text for my dissertation (this fulfillment remains to be seen).

2. Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language
If Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is Hofstadter's Iliad, then this book is his Odyssey. I mean, seriously--how does someone pull off books like these? Hofstadter is the quintessential polymath with a penchant for analogy. Le ton beau is a rumination on the art of translation, using a single French poem that struck him early in his life; and it was the spark that led me to produce my little book of poems, ΑΚΟΥΩ: Incidental Poems. This may well be the best "general" non-fiction book I've ever read.

3. Warranted Christian Belief
Dr. Plantinga offers a satisfying and calculated riposte to the hysterical atheism that seeks to paint anyone with any form of religious inkling as an ignorant, Zenophobic, dullard. Being of the stock of analytical philosophers as Plantinga is, one should brush up on probability calculus (though it isn't necessary) and the arguments offered between Hume (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) and Kant (Critique of Pure Reason). In my estimation, Plantinga offers a solid argument for the Christian to retain intellectual integrity. See my review of this one.

4. The Goldfinch
For a long time, I turned away from this novel, knowing I was setup for disappointment after the sensation and experience that is The Secret History. But, finally, I took the plunge. Philip Roth's prose is consistently lauded for its concision and splendor--and rightfully so--but how one can maintain beautiful syntax for 776 pages like Tartt can I'll never know! See my review here.

5. Consciousness Explained
This was a stop on the tour on my self-guided philosophy of mind campaign, and it led me to The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (I agreed with Demasio's thesis more than Dennett's, but I enjoyed reading Dennett more) and The Mystery Of Consciousness (haven't read yet). Dennett, in my opinion, has the rare talent of extreme erudition and pedagogical acumen. He makes dry land fertile, dense subjects palatable, and complex "intuition pumps" simple. His writing is concise and voluble. I read this over a series of busy weeks: in mountain cabins, on planes, in a hotel in Poland, and some at home. It was like having a good, learned friend around, to whom you enjoy listening. In the end, I had to reject his argument, but this was an impactful and important text nonetheless. See my review here.

An honorary mention would have to be The Selfish Gene. I have some notes on this one here. Not only is Dawkins's prose on such a complex subject a joy to read; this is a major text in the development of thought on evolutionary biology. It also happens to be the source of the term meme!

In addition to these stand-out books, I re-read some old favorites: The Iliad, Leaves of Grass, The Book of Job. I surveyed a handful of books on reading: Great Books, The New Lifetime Reading Plan: The Classic Guide to World Literature, Revised and Expanded, How to Read Slowly, The Library at Night, and How to Read Literature Like a Professor How to Read Literature Like a Professor . All of these were, of course, a treat. I love reading about something that is my passion. There was also a spate of books I let Goodreads randomly select for me: A Room of One's Own, The Glass Menagerie, Darwin: Portrait of a Genius, Daisy Miller, and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

I attempted to enhance my feeble grasp of mathematics with books such as Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension, Fermat's Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem, and A Mathematician's Apology, but, according to my GRE quant score this did little to improve my mathematical praxis. Oh, well, they were still delightful books and contributed more to my knowledge of the history of mathematics than anything else.

There were also the few oddball books, with The Morning of the Magicians: Secret Societies, Conspiracies, and Vanished Civilizations being chief among them. This book was a recommendation from a highly trusted source, a friend who also introduced me to The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity, one of the best non-fiction books I've read, a few years ago. I look forward to reading Pauwel and Bergier's other work, Impossible Possibilities, in the near future.

Overall, as I think back on a year's worth of reading--not only the material read but the manner in which they were read and the retention of the content--I have come to the conclusion that I want to calibrate my choices for 2017 to be commensurate with those that yielded the highest quality of payoff. Based on the last couple years, it seems that I tend to get more out of longer, denser works than otherwise. Though James Salter's Light Years, for example, which I consumed in a day (nearly in a single sitting), was an aesthetic delight, I don't remember much other than a snazzy line here and there and a thoroughly depressing plot. It seems that books are quite like friends in that one must spend ample time with a book to really get to know it. This, then, has led to my decision to read more "doorstops" in 2017 than in previous years. I agree with Nietzsche's insistence on reading slowly. Therefore, I aim to read the fewest but greatest books this year than previous years.

My tentative list for 2017 includes:
> The Anatomy of Melancholy (currently reading)
> Europe
> The World as Will and Presentation, Vol. 1
> The World as Will and Presentation, Vol. 2
> War and Peace
> Against the Day
> The Brothers Karamazov
> Harlot's Ghost
> Atlas Shrugged
> J R
> The City of God
> Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
> Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
> The Life of Samuel Johnson
> Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
> From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

Here's to a great year of reading behind us and another great year ahead!