A Baudelairean predilection for rotting meat.

The Exposition

2010 marks the sixth year of my 52 Books in 52 Weeks meme, where I challenge myself to read a minimum of 52 books in the coming calendar year, and then briefly review each book here on A Modest Construct.

The Others

Other bloggers doing this meme or some variant:

The Books

John Esposito • Fire in the Grove Fire in the Grove
by John Esposito
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Year: 2005
Pages: 288
№1
Tom Robbins • Still Life With Woodpecker Still Life With Woodpecker
by Tom Robbins
Publisher: Bantam Books
Year: 1980/1990
Pages: 277
№2
George Carlin • Last Words Last Words
by George Carlin
Publisher: Free Press
Year: 2009
Pages: 320
№3
John Green • An Abundance of Katherines An Abundance of Katherines
by John Green
Publisher: Speak
Year: 2006/2008
Pages: 272
№4
Orson Scott Card • Ender's Game Ender's Game
by Orson Scott Card
Publisher: Tor
Year: 1985/1994
Pages: 384
№5
Masha Gessen • Perfect Rigor Perfect Rigor
by Masha Gessen
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Year: 2009
Pages: 256
№6
Neal Stephenson • Snow Crash Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson
Publisher: Spectra
Year: 1992/1993
Pages: 480
№7
Dave Eggers • The Wild Things The Wild Things
by Dave Eggers
Publisher: McSweeney's
Year: 2009
Pages: 300
№8
A.J. Jacobs • The Guinea Pig Diaries The Guinea Pig Diaries
by A.J. Jacobs
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Year: 2009
Pages: 256
№9
John Perkins • Confessions of an Economic Hitman Confessions of an Economic Hitman
by John Perkins
Publisher: Plume
Year: 2004/2005
Pages: 303
№10

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5

§4804 · January 1, 2010 · Tags: , , ·

7 Comments to “52 Books in 52 Weeks, 2010”

  1. Alyna says:

    Love the new layout! Looks great!

  2. I’ve just stumbled upon your site and wanted to tell you how great I think your layout is. I too review books at my website – not sure I’ll manage 52 in 52 this year but I do have a big stack of books to get through and I’m taking part in lots of reading challenges.

    Always good to find another book blogger :)

    • Ben says:

      If you mean the current, theme, I can’t take the credit for that. It’s Renegade, by Matt@FrostPress, with some minor customizations by me.

      Always glad to see more book-bloggers, especially those undertaking 52-in-52.

  3. Kegan Ball says:

    I found your ‘Now Reading Reloaded’ plugin and just love it! I have been wanting a way to share what I am reading/have read with others on my blog. I plan on adding reviews as well. I am still working on entering in the books first. It’s a good start though. I think I may take up the same challenge as you have: 52 in 52.

    I have a couple questions.

    How do you format the book listings as you do on your site? When I install the plugin on my site, it only shows the author and title. Yours is laid out much nicer and includes more information (Publisher, Year, Pages, cover image). How do I get that info to show up? Can I also get an excerpt from a review to show up on the book list? I even installed the same theme you are using to see if that would make a difference, but it doesn’t show the same as yours.

    On your page ‘http://heliologue.com/52-books-in-52-weeks/’ you have a list of different years and the stats for each year. How did you get this to display? Is it automatic using a script or a plugin? Or did you do this manually?

    How do you get only the books for each year to show without showing the rest of the years?

    And lastly, is there a way to have the books show for different categories?

    Thank you for sharing such a great plugin and for any help you are able to offer.

    • Ben says:

      Hi, Kegan. Glad you like the plugin. The book listings you see on my site aren’t part of the NRR plugin; they’re a custom thing that I maintain, specifically a set of shortcodes to separate the presentation into a single place, and they’re entirely separate from my library display, etc.

  4. Charles says:

    How’d you set up the yearly index? Is that using WP’s ‘add option’ or is it something that could be packaged with NRR?

    • Ben says:

      No; it’s just me manually entering books into a standard WordPress post. You could, I suppose, approximate something using the standard NRR facilities, but it would need to be expanded to accommodate all this other information.

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