A couple days into December, I was innocently updating my GoodReads (be my friend!) when I happened to realize that I was absurdly close to having read one hundred books this year. According to my GoodReads, I had read ninety. And you know how I love a challenge, especially one that seems to be waving a big red flag at me. I’ve been reading non-stop ever since, trying to make it to a hundred, and yes, I’ve been reading smaller books. Some might call this “cheating,” but I say it’s my game and I make up the rules.

So I did it, and I feel very empowered. I think I might make this a yearly thing. Now that I know it’s possible, and now that I have it as a goal, it’ll make it much easier to regularly achieve. When I told my family and Alison and a couple friends that one hundred books was my goal, they all gave me this look like, THAT IS A LOT OF BOOKS, but it’s really not, especially when you have it all listed out. And maybe it is a difficult thing to do and I should be proud of myself or whatever, but it didn’t feel difficult. For all the wonderful (and not so wonderful) books I did read this year, there are literally like seventy-five still on my shelf that I have yet to touch.

But anyway, my favorites. I discovered the joys of Neil Gaiman this year. I’d read Stardust before and loved it, but I hadn’t read any of his other stuff. Anansi Boys was actually my favorite, but I also read and enjoyed Good Omens, The Graveyard Book, and Odd and the Frost Giants. I just love his voice as an author. He seems so sure of himself, and if you’ve read as many fantasy books as I have, it’s incredibly refreshing to read an author with so many original things to say. He just has this way of making ordinary things fantastic, and in turn, regularly makes a habit of making the fantastic seem real. I love it, and can’t wait to tackle American Gods and Neverwhere in 2010.

It’s amazing, looking back, that I had time to read this many books, what with all the TV watching and schoolwork I was doing. But it’s easy to make time for good books, if you can find them, and nothing is easier to slip into when you’re stressed than comfort reading. And for me, comfort reading means fantasy. The best straight up fantasy book I read this year was by far The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss. Rothfuss is another original thinker, but he sticks to more traditional stories. The Name of the Wind is the first in a trilogy which he has called The Kingkiller Chronicles, and I am very eagerly awaiting the release of its sequels. I also read a few classics that I’d somehow missed reading as a child. The BFG and A Wrinkle in Time were both equally fabulous. Right up there with Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher (which, the last time I read it a year ago, made me cry).

Other books I highly enjoyed: The City of Thieves, by David Benioff, which tells the story of two young men during the siege of Leningrad, except it’s funny (also: sad). I fed my Abraham Lincoln fetish with Manhunt, by James L. Swanson, a fantastically researched account of the search for John Wilkes Booth (Seeley’s ancestor) written like a novel. And in the vein of accessible history writing, I also read The Wordy Shipmates, which was my first Sarah Vowell, but it won’t be my last. I’ve got a signed first edition copy of another of her books, The Partly Cloudy Patriot (which I found accidentally in a used bookstore) marked to-read in 2010. Gilead was also a satisfying read, and I guess it has to do with history, too, although of a much different kind. There were many others, of course, but I’d be here all day, so you’ll just have to investigate for yourself.

And of course, dishonorable mentions to the following, for sucking on various levels of the sucktastic: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, What I Was, Brisingr, Home, and Sailor Moon, Vol. 1.

Here is the full list:

1. The Beginning, K.A. Applegate
2. It Sucked and Then I Cried, Heather Armstrong
3. Cactus Thorn, Mary Austin
4. City of Thieves, David Benioff
5. The Anatomy of National Fantasy, Lauren Berlant
6. The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown
7. Storm Front, Jim Butcher
8. Fool Moon, Jim Butcher
9. Grave Peril, Jim Butcher
10. Enchantment, Orson Scott Card
11. The Horse’s Mouth, Joyce Cary
12. Heat Wave, Richard Castle
13. My Antonia, Willa Cather
14. The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau
15. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
16. The BFG, Roald Dahl
17. I Love You, Beth Cooper, Larry Doyle
18. Captured By Texts, Gary Ebersole
19. The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde
20. Lost in a Good Book, Jasper Fforde
21. The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
22. Inkdeath, Cornelia Funke
23. Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman
24. Odd and the Frost Giants, Neil Gaiman
25. Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
26. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
27. Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt
28. Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
29. Marley & Me, John Grogan
30. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
31. She, H. Rider Haggard
32. King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard
33. The Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
34. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
35. Ramona, Helen Hunt Jackson
36. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
37. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
38. A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid
39. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
40. A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L’Engle
41. A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Madeleine L’Engle
42. Many Waters, Madeleine L’Engle
43. An Acceptable Time, Madeleine L’Engle
44. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence
45. Critique of Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre
46. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
47. Scarlett Plume, Frederick Manfred
48. Renshaw Fanning’s Quest, Bertram Mitford
49. The Sign of the Spider, Bertram Mitford
50. A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor
51. 1984, George Orwell
52. Brisingr, Christopher Paolini
53. Mhudi, Sol T. Plaatje
54. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
55. Reading the Romance, Janice Radway
56. Naked in Death, J.D. Robb
57. Glory in Death, J.D. Robb
58. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
59. Home, Marilynne Robinson
60. Loving With a Vengeance, Tania Modleski
61. What I Was, Meg Rosoff
62. The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
63. Canticle, Ken Scholes
64. The Story of an African Farm, Olive Schreiner
65. Gardens in the Dunes, Leslie Marmon Silko
66. A Space on the Side of the Road, Kathleen Stewart
67. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
68. Manhunt, James T. Swanson
69. Sailor Moon #1
70. Y: The Last Man, Brian K. Vaughan
71. V for Vendetta, Alan Moore
72. The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Amy Tan
73. Savage Ecstasy, Janelle Taylor
74. Cheyenne Song, Georgina Gentry
75. Grey Eagle’s Bride, Jessica Wulf
76. Night Raven, Elaine Barbieri
77. The Captive Heart, Cheryl Reavis
78. Silken Savage, Catherine Hart
79. The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell
80. A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
81. The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
82. War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells
83. Memories of the Future, Vol. 1, Wil Wheaton
84. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
85. Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams
86. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles
87. Julie & Julia, Julie Powell
88. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
89. Waterland, Graham Swift
90. The Perfect Spy, John Le Carre
91. Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer
92. The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan
93. The Sea of Monsters, Rick Riordan
94. The Titan’s Curse, Rick Riordan
95. The Battle of the Labyrinth, Rick Riordan
96. The Last Olympian, Rick Riordan
97. The Demigod Files, Rick Riordan
98. Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie
99. The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
100. Dancing Barefoot, Wil Wheaton