Some time around August of last year, I really got into www.goodreads.com. I’d seen that a co-worker of mine had set a goal of 52 books to read in 2012. To set the stage, Nikki is smart and pretty and – at the time – also very, very pregnant. This got me to thinking, if Nikki can handle a full-time job, morning sickness and 52 books this year, I gotta be able to read like at least a friggin’ hundred books!

In reality, it was August. I had read 10 books by then. And my ego only gets the nerve to compete with people who don’t actually know that I’m competing with them. Nikki kicked my ass.

I scaled down my goal from 100 to 52 some time around October when I finished book number 25. By the year’s end I cruised in with a cool 48 books for effort. Silent competitors never prosper… Sigh…Nikki, on the other hand, had a beautiful baby girl, who she and her husband curled into a ball and dressed up like an Anne Geddes baby all through the holiday season. (Competition aside, I thoroughly enjoyed each and every rendition.) And she read all 52 of her books.

This quest to read a crap ton of books in an absurdly short amount of time says a lot about my commitment to really stupid, stupid benchmarks. It also shows that this is something I would never do for any physical competition, because… well… I’m so nerdy, I pretend to be above all that. The positive result, however, was that I ended up reading a bunch of books I never would have picked up but for the love of competition with a pretty pregnant Hawaiian lady who turned out to also be a darned fast reader.

Here are the top 5 books of my quest to 52. Read them at your leisure:

Brave New World – (Classic Fiction) How did I miss this one in high school? Or college, for that matter? I went to a women’s college. We were taught to care about fiction novels, and Natives, and the objectification of women, and sexual liberty, and code words for Marx, and “family planning”! I mean I just don’t understand how this one slipped past me.  This frightening view of our present day vices manifested at their extremes kinda sounds about as realistic as melting polar ice caps. Psshhaww, we all know that’ll never happen!

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – (Non-Fiction/Autobiography Memoir) My mother is about as close to being like Amy Chua, as Tupac is to being alive. But, I thoroughly remember my classmates who had ‘Chinese moms’ (Read the book to define the term. Don’t assume I’m being racist) and how strangely anti-social those kids seemed at the time. Like, they knew they could be perfectly normal kids, but their weirdo parents wouldn’t let them. Now, I look at their facebook pages and they look happy and well-integrated into society – so maybe their mothers were on to something. More than once I wanted to call my mother to tell her that she acts more like a Jewish dad than a Chinese mom. But, I knew she hadn’t read the book and would think that I was just being racist.

We Need to Talk about Kevin – (Contemporary Fiction) This is probably one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read. While I was reading it, I was visibly depressed and often called my friends saying things like ‘I really need to finish this book. I’m pretty sure I’m showing signs of PTSD.’ It is a timely read with the most recent mentally disturbed American socially awkward boy with a gun episode known as Adam Lanza. This book seems to support the notion that these screwy kiddie killers have families that are tormented by their inability to contain these deranged seedlings. While they can see disaster coming nobody ever lends credence to the lady that says ‘my kid is really fucked up. No, really. I’m not kidding.’ Anybody who says that has got to be a bad parent, right? Or it is possible that she was handed a bad kid at birth?

What Young India Wants – (Non-Fiction essays) You don’t need me to tell you that India’s got problems. Aside from the ones I constantly bring up over red wine, there are others that Chetan Bhagat points out in this book: a corrupt and elderly bureaucracy, high youth suicide rates, a broken education system, identity issues up the wazoo. So, just this once you don’t get to act like I’m being a jerk for saying these things, because this time I didn’t say it. Chetan did… finally!

Bookends – (Contemporary Fiction) I wasn’t trying to like this book, but it just kinda happened. There is a book store, love after 30, a lesbian liaison, awesome real estate and… did I mention there is book store?! Set in contemporary England, this book feels like what would happen if Ross, Rachel, Chandler and Monica moved to London and decided to open a public lending library. It’s not meant to be thought-provoking, but it’s a feel good story with a few moral nuggets of wisdom. Certainly, it’s a good read for a commute or a beach vacation… did I mention there is a book store?!

Other recommended reads:

In Our Time (Hemingway), 2 States (Bhagat), Women & Money (Orman)

Dud reads:

Bossypants (Fey) – This should be funny. It’s not.

Madras on Rainy Days (Ali) – This should be hard-hitting, but it drones on and comes across as trite. The premise is great, but the writing is poorly executed.

Three Continents (Jhabvala) – Yet another 300+ page rich-kid melodrama about how India does not hold the answers to the world’s problems (a duh!). #anotherPTSDinducingbook