(I wrote this a few days ago, thinking I'd be able to get online sooner. It's therefore a bit outdated; I've actually finished reading Moby Dick now, and a post about that is forthcoming. In the meantime, I'm leaving this post as it is.)

Contrary to what most people think, I'm not actually a very prolific reader. At all. In fact, I've read exactly ten books this year -- or eleven, if I finish Moby Dick before January -- and that includes three short children's novels. I mean, I read pieces of other things… I read about half of a collection of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories, several chapters of The House of the Seven Gables, the first quarter of The 1,001 Arabian Nights (which I'm still reading; at the moment I'm about halfway through the story of Aladdin), and a few chapters of The Iliad, The Red and the Black, and Nietzsche's Antichrist. I intend to finish reading all of these at some point... hopefully within the coming year...

In any case. Some of you have been trying to "read your height" in books, or read a book for every week of the year, or something of that sort, and then commenting on those books in your journal in little blocks. I've entered on no such ambitious enterprise, but now that the year is out, I figure I'll take a moment to comment briefly on the books I did manage to read this year. No spoilers, or at least only very minor, oblique spoilers. In the order in which I read them, then:

( The Master and Margarita )
( Lolita )
( One Hundred Years of Solitude )
( The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger )
( Number the Stars )
( The Devil's Storybook )
( The Devil's Other Storybook )
( Lord of Light )
( Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows )
( Guards! Guards! )
( Moby Dick )

I finished reading The Master and Margarita about a week ago, but this is the first chance I've had to actually say anything about it. I'm still not sure exactly what I think of it, and this is bound to come out as more of a barely coherent stream of ramblings than an actual discussion of the novel, but I'll give it a shot anyway.

( Warning: Spoilers for The Master and Margarita, and also for Goethe's Faust and Stephen King's Needful Things. )

So, anyway, if anybody has any insights, or just wants to chat about the book, I'd love to hear your thoughts.