Since I’ve added a few more reviews than usual to the site, I have installed a new plugin that will allow me to rate the books and movies via a five-star system. This is how it will look, and I already used it in my review of the movie, “Agora“:
[rating:4/5]
Also, I plan to make a concerted effort to keep track of the books I read this year. I’ve never done this pragmatically, so it will be interesting to see how many I can get through. I’m not John Milton (He supposedly studied from 6 a.m. until midnight and then repeated the cycle), and I probably have more hobbies than good ol’ John (Learning and writing being his main pursuits), so I will likely be a little disappointed in the result come December 2011, but I’m at least going to give it a ago and try to top my numbers for 2010. I’ve got quite a few in the cue and began a new one, “Positivist Republic” by [[Gillis Harp]] today. Next up will either be, “Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years” by [[Carl Sanburg]] or possibly, “1421: The Year China Discovered America.” I have read negative reviews on the latter, so I may defer to something else when the time comes.
That said, and since I didn’t make a concerted effort to keep track of what I read this year, here is an annotated and approximate list of books that I read in 2010 based on memory, listed more or less chronologically from most to less recent:
- Nixon’s Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washingtion to Clinton by [[Kenneth O’Reilly]]
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein
- On the Origins of Species by Charles Darwin (audio book)
- The Portable Atheist, edited with an introduction by [[Christopher Hitchens]] (audio book)
- A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 by Paul Langford
- A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603-1714 by Mark Kishlansky
- Basic Writings of Existentialism, edited by Gordon Marino
- The First World War by John Keegan
- The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins
- 1776 by David McCullough
-
Andrew Johnson and the uses of constitutional power by James E. Sefton
- The Stranger by Albert Camus (reread)
- Islamic Imperialism : A History by Efraim Karsh
- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (audiobook reread)
- Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
- Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli
- God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (audiobook reread) by Christopher Hitchens
- Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson