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I read eighty-some books last year and tweeted every one of them under the #readin2010 tag.

Actually, I left out some technical books that I spent quite a bit of time in at work.  I was trying to make myself pay attention to the kinds of reading I did.  Also, I was just plain old curious about how many books I read in a year.  I’m sure that there have been years in which I read many more books; there were whole months in which I felt I didn’t read at all, whatever the twitrecord says.  After all, I wrote at least a couple hundred thousand words last year, mostly during the times I would normally have been reading.

The best part of tweeting my reading, though, was how it affected what I chose to read.  Especially at the end of the year, I was making a conscious effort to find books I’d never read before.  I’m sure I never had a year before in which I reread fewer books, or in which I read so many books by authors I’d never read before.  By the end of 2010, I’d resolved to go a year without rereading a single book.

March is almost over, and so far I haven’t even been tempted.  At this point, it feels like I haven’t reread anything in ages; it might be six months already, for all I know.  I’ve got some great stuff lined up to read next:

1. Felix Gilman, The Half-Made World
2. Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
3. Thomas Mullen, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers
4. John Locke, Saving Rachel
5. Richard Kadrey, Sandman Slim and Kill the Dead
6. Keith Jeffery, The Secret History of MI6
7. Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory
8. Alex Butterworth, The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents

Dan Wells’s I Don’t Want to Kill You will come out soon, and it will go immediately to the top of the list.  As much as I’m enjoying Half-Made World, Dan Wells’s first two books were among my favorites all year.

Of course, I’ve completely dropped the ball on the reading and tweeting thing, but then, it turns out that Twitter is a totally crap way to keep track of anything – if you try to search for #readin2010 – go ahead – my tweets are now one with the neiges d’antan.

It’s been more than a year and a half since I’ve written anything here, but I aim to change things around here. A lot has happened- I wrote another novel and signed with an agent. I coached a middle-school Lego robotics team. I gave my first public presentation for my company.

All that, and so much more, and not one blog post.

That’s just got to change.