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Email me792 books I have read
Obviously, I can’t remember every book I ever read, but this list represents my best attempt. It should be largely complete from late 2006 on, when I started logging books in this list. I only include books I’ve read in their entirety, however: Books (e.g. most textbooks) that I’ve read only select chapters from, even if this amounts to the very great majority, are excluded.
Details, authors, and series
Click titles to get more information about books, including ISBNs (when available) and links to find the books, or buy them via Amazon.com|ca|co.uk, Chapters, or AbeBooks.
Ratings and reviews
Ratings are vague and personal; don’t read too much into them. Reviews and notes are also personal, but feel free to read into them as much as you wish. Some books have reviews or other notes. Click the title (or the rating icon) to find them. In rough terms,
- + means I think the book is good and deserves to be read;
- ± means mediocre, and you can probably give it a miss;
- − marks bad books and you’re better off not reading them;
- The greener the better; the redder the worse.
If you like my reviews you can subscribe to them by clicking here.
Sorting
Click table headers to sort by title, first listed author, series/volume, or rating. Hold down the Shift key to sort by more than one column (e.g., click “Rating” to sort by rating, then hold shift and click “Title” to sort secondarily by title). I used Tablesorter, if you’re curious.
The List
Useless statistics
- The list contains 792 books by 389 authors. 192 of the books belong (in some configuration) to 49 series.
- I own roughly 414 of these books. Some may be misplaced. Some were loaned out and lost. Some I own but failed to mark as such. I also own a number of books I haven’t read cover to cover, so this is not the total number of books I own. In particular, I own a whole whack of textbooks where I’ve generally only read sections required and/or relevant for class.
- Out of the 389 authors, there are 138 by whom I’ve only read one book each. For each of the remaining 251 authors, I’ve read an average of 3.2 books.
- The three authors whose work I have read most of—at least in terms of sheer number of books—are Terry Pratchett (23 books), J.R.R. Tolkien (22 books), and David Eddings (22 books).
- Looking at authors by whom I’ve read and rated at least 3 books, my three top-rated authors are Philip Pullman, J.R.R. Tolkien, and George R.R. Martin. Keep in mind, though, I’ve only rated 274 / 792 ≈ 35% of the books.
Nitpicky footnotes
In the course of making this list, I had to make some arbitrary decisions. Generally, these decisions were made to preserve some reasonable measure of how many books I've read, or just for the sake of simplicity.
- Some of the titles are probably wrong. Some may be translations, where I do not know the original title; several are books I’ve read in Swedish but that were never translated and so have no proper English title at all.
- “Multi-part” books like The Lord of the Rings are listed as several books (so The Lord of the Rings itself is not in the list; The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King are. It might make more sense to list both the complete work and its constituents, but that would make the count unreliable.
- Omnibuses are counted as multiple books.
- Authors who are known primarily by their pen names (such as George Orwell, Robert Jordan, and Robin Hobb) are listed by their pen names. Authors who, like Stephen King, are famous under their real names, are listed by their real name only, with no elision to the pen names. I'm listing books, after all, not providing biographies (or even bibliographies).
- It is my nature to be as precise as I can. If I list an ISBN, it means I have read that edition of a book. This accounts for why so many entries are unfortunately missing ISBNs, but I would rather omit any number of entries than list ISBNs of books that I haven’t actually read in the stated versions.
- I'm not listing graphic novels, even though some that I’ve read make good reads (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and a few Sin City graphic novels spring readily to mind; The Dark Knight Returns was also good). I don’t, in fact, list artists at all—there are some children's books on the lists, and these, of course, were often illustrated, but I'm not listing artists here.