1/3 of my New Year’s Resolution is to read more.  I did pretty good in 2009 (after I spent a few days reflecting what books I actually read), here’s at least 90% of the actual books I read:

• Hitchhiker’s Series (Douglas Adams): funny, zany, totally unbelievable, sometimes laugh out loud funny, but mostly just fun.  The 1st book is not out done by any of the subsequent stories and is my favorite by far.  But “So Long…” was a close 2nd.
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
  • The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
  • Life, the Universe and Everything
  • So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
  • Mostly Harmless
• Lord of the Flies – William Golding: kid on kid violence, but it’s a classic I never read in HS.  I recommend it.
• Paranoia (free on DailyLit) – Joseph Finder: pulp entrepreneurship fiction.
• Pizza Tiger – Thomas Monaghan (I think my copy is signed): it’s about Domino’s Pizza and how Tom made billions of dollars.  It was actually quite a good read.  Much better than The first billion is the hardest by T. Boone Pickens (where the writing was crap and the subject jumped all over from sentence to sentence).
• Generation Kill – Evan Wright: the book and the HBO series were both great.
• The Next 100 Years – George Friedman: in the next 100 years Japan is going to hurdle rocks, from the moon, towards our world-watching networks of satellites and we’re going to send marines in exoskeleton suits against them and Poland and kick their asses.  Mexico is our friend, China falls apart and Russia goes to the poor house.  Yes, it was interesting.
• Blackwater – Jeremy Scahill: want to feel bad about what we’re doing in Iraq?  This book will get you there.  It will also piss you off about the recent dismissal of the case against some Blackwater operatives.  Someone should be held accountable.
• The Associate – John Grisham: I found this at the airport (and after I finished it 2 legs of my journey later, I left it at the airport).  Shitty ending.
• Call of the Wild (free on DailyLit) – Jack London: I can’t believe I hadn’t read this.  Excellent.  Buck is like my new man’s best friend.
• Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (free on DailyLit) – duh: sometimes these old farts are hard to read.  Ben probably had a little bit of a selective memory, but his life was pretty awesome (considering he retired in his late 20s and then everyone kept giving him money and cool projects which he slam dunked).  A few lessons learned: be a vegetarian, don’t drink ’til you’re 40s (after you’re retired), make friends with just about every important person in history and start one of the 1st modern universities (if possible).
• Post American World – Fareed Zakaria: I blame John Stewart and Stephen Colbert for adding this to my book list.  Overall, I thought it was a little bit to hard on the good ol’ USA (I think our future’s a lot brighter).
• Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card: bored at the airport, this $6.99 book was good and entertaining throughout.  There’s a whole series (the Ender Quartet?) of them about a genius kid (who you meet at age 7) and how he defeats space invaders.  No joke.
• I am Legend – Richard Matheson: way different than the movie popularized by Will Smith.  A really interesting take on the zombie/vampire genre in my humble opinion.  Not very long and worth the trip to the library.
• UPDATED 1/5/10: Money Ball – Michael Lewis: very cool book, even if you don’t like baseball like me.  Premise: there is more to baseball than athleticism, and Bill Beane (GM for the A’s) figured out the equation, literally.  Awesome look at how statistics trump whatever “gut” feeling a scout/coach/GM might have about players.
• The Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell: I like his writing style and his ideas.  Do I think he’s always right?  No, but the best point of the outliers is that it takes time and effort (and sometimes luck) to become an expert in anything.
• Reefer Madness (Sex, Drugs and Labor in the American Black Market) – Eric Schlosser: did you know Marijuana grows in the wild in TN and KY?  neither did I.  The book was an in depth look at three of the US’s dirty little secrets and how they’ve thrived despite efforts to crack down on them.
• UPDATED 1/20/10: Midnight Club – James Patterson: paraplegic cop takes down baddies (I didn’t buy this book).
• Fareinheit 451 – Ray Bradbury: this actually kicked off me reading a bunch of classic fiction…great book if you’ve never read it.

I read a lot already online (I probably read about 50 pages of online text a day through blogs I follow), but my night time reading has fallen to occasionally.  In ’09 I read a pretty good list of books (above) but I definitely want to improve on how many real (as in tactile, bound, published books).  So my goal is to read a total of:

52 books (a book every week!).

…and go.

1/20/10 update: note that I originally said I was going to read 26 books, but after compiling the list of books I read in 2009, I realized that I had read about 26 books.  So, I’m taking the full on challenge: 1 book per week.