Last New Years I set a goal to read 30 books in 2011. I nearly got there, with a total of 22 under my belt. That compares with 2010's total of 17 books; a 22% increase.
I moved over to goodreads to keep track of my books a bit better:
"The Medium is the Massage" by McLuhan was my top book of the year, with "The Exploit" by Galloway as my least favorite. (Anything with 3 stars or above I would generally recommend). Philosophy was the most tagged category, with infosec and military right behind it.
Interestingly, reading 30 books introduced some logistics problems. Assuming each book's average cost was $15 I would have $450 sitting on my bookshelf. Instead, I did a mixture of using Project Gutenberg and borrowing through the public library to balance things out. Going through that, I repeatedly failed to have the 'next book' ready, and several days or weeks would pass before it would ship or I could get it from the library. Finally, reading interfered with other activities (computer tinkering, listening to podcasts, etc) more than I anticipated.
Here's my final 2011 reading list:
Five Star:
"The Medium is the Massage" by Marshall McLuhan
Four Star:
"Strategy" by B. H. Liddell Hart
"The Book of Five Rings" by Musashi
"Gangleader for a Day" by Sudhir Venkatesh
"Kingpin" by Kevin Poulsen
"America the Vulnerable" by Joel Brenner
"Dragon Bytes" by Timothy Thomas
Three Star:
"Analects" by Confucius
"The Firm, The Market, the Law" by Ronald Coase
"Soccer War" by Ryszard Kapuscinski
"Managing Humans" by Michael Lopp
"What Technology Wants" by Kevin Kelly
"On China" by Henry Kissinger
"Tiger Trap" by David Wise
"Tempo" by Venkatesh Guru Rao
"Worm" by Mark Bowden
Two Star:
"Starfish and the Spider" by Rod Beckstrom
"Finite and Infinite Games" by James Carse
"Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell
"Cyber War" by Richard Clarke
"Cyberdeterrence and Cyberwar" by Martin Libicki
One Star:
"The Exploit" by Alexander Galloway
I'm not making a goal for 2012 but I do enjoy reading. Already on my bookshelf for 2012:
"The Logic of Scientific Discovery" by Karl Popper
"An Introduction to Information Theory" by John Robinson Pierce
"Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman
"Military Orientialism" by Patrick Porter
"The Regulatory Craft" by Malcolm Sparrow
"Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson
"The Republic" by Plato
"The Brewmaster's Table" By Garrett Oliver
Two new releases I'm looking forward to in 2012:
"Inside CyberWarfare" (2nd Edition) by Jeffrey Carr (Just released a few days ago)
"Liars and Outliers" by Bruce Schneier (To be released in February)
I'm always looking for good books, feel free to leave recommendations in the comments!