The 78 Books I Read As A Corporate Lawyer

In the 3+ years I was working hard at corporate litigation, I managed to find time to read 78 books. I can thank SF Muni's slow service on the J-Church for giving me some reading time each morning.

Now that I have a bit more free time, I plan to post a short review of all 78 books I read during my time at the firm. These reviews will be fairly cursory (especially as I read some of these books over 3 years ago). My goal is to give a quick sense of how I felt about the book, whether I think it's any good, and whether the limited readership of this blog might want to check it out.

As I finished each book, I posted it to an app and gave it a rating out of five stars. I'll be giving the rating I gave right after reading the books, even if I have changed my mind a little in retrospect. Here's a rough sense of what the ratings mean:

5 = beyond fucking amazing
4.5 = fucking amazing
4 = excellent
3.5 = very good (this is my default rating for a book I enjoyed a lot)
3 = good
2.5 = ok (might be worth a read if it's your kind of thing)
2 = not good (2 and below should be avoided)
1.5 = shitty
1 = very shitty
0.5 = lowest ranking that can be given (if you gave yourself a paper cut with each page, you'd have a more pleasant experience than actually reading the book)

My ratings averaged 3.3 with a mode of 3.5. My reading list reflects my taste and thus the ratings trend high. Here's a complete break down of the ratings for all 78 books:

5 stars = one book
4.5 stars = five books
4 stars = thirteen books
3.5 stars = twenty four books
3 stars = twenty books
2.5 stars = ten books
2 stars = one book
1.5 stars = three books
1 star = zero books
0.5 stars = one book

I'm going to post reviews one at a time with a goal to post them all within a hundred days or so. I'll post them in the same order that I read them.

So, here goes. My first review . . .

Review One: Dogs of Winter, Kem Nunn

2.5 Stars

Nunn's fiction is sometimes described as "Surf Noir." I don't think that anyone else who reads this blog will be jumping out of their chair to hunt down some Surf Noir. And I didn't even like the book all that much.

Dogs has plenty of surfing (check) and North West scenery (check). But it also has some very unpleasant violence and I don't feel like Nunn ever does anything (i.e. characterization of the perpetrators) to justify (if that's the right word) the violence. It's just there. Some bad dudes come along and do bad things. The end. It feels like the book equivalent of the low-budget cable thriller (but with surfing and cool scenery).