Reading log, 2012

Here's this year's list of books I read.

In addition to the books, I began reading a lot of magazines. This was born out of my increasing frustration with the poor quality of most free content on the Internet—as with such sites as the one you're reading now—which pushed me into a conscious willingness to pay for better content. Consequently, I bought a subscription to The New Yorker and to The American Scholar, which together average an issue a week and have kept me perpetually inundated with interesting material to consume. What's the mark of good writing? For me it's finishing a piece about a topic I wouldn't otherwise be interested in reading about. By that standard, both magazines are full of well written articles, and so this year I read with greater diversity, though that diversity isn't reflected in the following list.

• Stephen King
  Firestarter

• Keith Devlin
  The Math Gene

• Jane Austen
  Sense and Sensibility

• Paulo Bacigalupi
  Windup Girl

• Isaac Asimov
  The End of Eternity

• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
  Dragon Wing

• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
  Elven Star

• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
  Fire Sea

• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
  Serpent Mage

• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
  The Hand of Chaos

• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
  Into the Labyrinth

• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
  The Seventh Gate

• William Poundstone
  Prisoner's Dilemma

• William Poundstone
  Priceless

• Stephen King
  It

• Walter Tevis
  Queen's Gambit