6 Month Book Review

What have I been reading during the first half of 2020?

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8 Minute Read

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The end of June marks the half way point in the year and presents me with the opportunity to do a 6 month book review! For those of you who’ve been following Walk Wild since December you’ll be aware of my pledge to read one book a week (at least 50 in total). So how am I doing so far? What has impressed me and what has left me wanting more?

In this 6 month book review special I’ll give you a breakdown of the sheer number of words I’ve read so far (it’s in the millions), how many pages, how many hours spent reading, and some of my thoughts on it all. The full list of reviews is below – click on the link to find the individual reviews and enjoy my summary of the rest!

1. Between Here and the Yellow Sea – Nic Pizzolatto ★★★★
2. Jaws – Peter Benchley ★★★★
3. The Penguin Guide to Punctuation – R.L. Trask ★★★
4. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft – Stephen King ★★★★★
5. Men Without Women – Ernest Hemingway ★★★
6. Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut ★★
7. Pet Semetary – Stephen King ★★★★★
8. The Body: A Guide for Occupants – Bill Bryson ★★★★
9. Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas – Adam Kay ★★★★
10. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos – Jordan Peterson ★★★★
11. The Picture of Dorian Grey – Oscar Wilde ★★★★
12. Unnatural Causes – Richard Shepherd ★★★★★
13. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner ★★★★
14. Moby Dick or, The Whale – Herman Melville ★★
15. The Whisper Man – Alex North ★★
16. Getting Things Done – David Allen ★★★
17. All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy ★★★★★
18. The Shining – Stephen King ★★★★
19. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck ★★★★★
20. The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs – Tristan Gooley ★★★
21. The Crossing – Cormac McCarthy ★★★★
22. Bushcraft 101: A Field Guide to the Art of Wilderness Survival – Dave Canterbury ★★★★
23. Normal People – Sally Rooney ★★★★★
24. Elements of Style – William Strunk JR. and E.B. White ★★★★

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Facts & Figures:

So, let’s get into the breakdown. I tried to work all these figures out but I’m terrible at maths and most of them are probably quite inaccurate. Anyway, they were consistently calculated poorly so I’m sure it averages out.

In the last 6 months, I read 24 books – as you can tell from the list above. This means I’m one behind my 50 book challenge. I’m not concerned though as I’m sure it will even out by the end of the year. These books totalled 8,004 pages. Although it’s debated, the longest novel ever written is considered to be Remembrance of Things Past (French: À la recherche du temps perdu) by Marcel Proust, which is 4,215 pages long. Therefore, reading at my current speed, I could finish the longest novel in the world in around 3 months. Now that’s pretty cool.

The next thing I worked out was the number of words I actually read. After a bit of researching and some dodgy calculations I came up with 2,405,194 words read. Nearly 2.5 million words. That just seems like an enormous number. It’s hard to imagine what the number would be if you consider all the other words you read during a working day or at school. But just reading in leisure time this figure seemed massive to me!

I tried to imagine what it would look like, lying 2.5 million words alongside each other in a straight line to visualise the distance. So I worked that out too. The average width of a paperback book is 135mm and there are, on average, 35 lines per page. (I know that doesn’t account for the margins, but come on, humour me). That’s 4,725mm per page, and multiplied by the 8,004 pages I read, that’s 37,818,900mm in total. In other words, you could say that in the last 6 months my eyes read a list of words equivalent to 37.8 kilometers.

Hopefully I’ve not just humiliated myself with poor calculations.

Next, I worked out the time I committed to doing all this reading. The figure that came out was 223 hours spent reading. So if you’re looking to up your game, read constantly for more than 9 straight days/nights and you’ll be on track to reading your book a week. Then you’ve done the work and you can take the other 5 and a half months off. Easy really.

This number averages out at 1.2 hours a day. And really, that’s the most important number of all. If you want to up your reading rate, that’s all you need to do. That is complete, undisturbed reading though. So, let’s for arguments sake say you need to read for an hour and a half a day. That’s the aim. To read a book a week, you need to read no more than 1.5 hours a day.

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My Least Favourite Book:

“A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read”

Mark Twain

Let’s start off with a fun one. Which book have I hated the most? Looking at it practically, there are 3 contenders, all rated 2 stars, 2 of them classic novels: Slaughterhouse Five, Moby Dick, and The Whisper Man. I hate having to include The Whisper Man alongside those other classics, even if it is about which is the worst. I’m going to straight up eliminate Moby Dick, because despite it’s gruelling length and archaic language and horrific structure, there are certainly glimpses of brilliance – even if I found it hard to appreciate them.

The Whisper Man is easier to hate because it’s really just a generic crime thriller, but one that has very good ratings for some reason. I’m sure if I picked any number of bestselling crime novels off a Waterstones shelf I’d have disliked them the same. It’s the mechanised, formulaic structure I despise. Sort of in the same way that X Factor is the corporate hell hole for music where songs are churned out on a production line of mediocrity to appease the senseless masses.

But on the flip side, Slaughterhouse Five is a bona fide classic in many critics’ eyes. So from that point of view, it made me hate it more. I mean, I certainly don’t get along with all classic novels. There are quite a few I don’t like. But Slaughterhouse Five was maddening; I was perplexed as to how anyone could consider it a novel to read before you die. Maybe I just didn’t “get it”. That old thing.

Both books however, I did enjoy aspects of. And I’d have to say I enjoyed slightly more of The Whisper Man, particularly in the first third. Which leaves the last man standing to be sent to the gallows. The worst book I read in the last 6 months was Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

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My Favourite Book:

Now this is tricky. I’ve read many great books in the last half year. A quarter of the books I’ve read were given 5 stars. That seems too high but that’s the way it was. To begin with, we have 2 Stephen King books: his non fiction autobiography On Writing, and his nightmarish Pet Semetary which is the scariest book I’ve ever read. Although I loved them both, they’re being eliminated as I didn’t realise I’d given them 5 stars until I re-read this list. Which says a lot.

Next up we have Unnatural Causes, which could well be one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read. If I was going to give an award for favourite non-fiction book it would be this (followed closely by Mindhunter, but that was read just before the new year and is not applicable on this list). Some of the chapters in this book certainly have stuck with me, but I wouldn’t say in any significant way other than being macabre and fascinating.

The next to be eliminated from the list is Normal People. It was an incredible book, one which I can’t stop thinking about. I could happily see myself reading it again. But there were a few small issues I had with it about some characters and minor clichés that weaken it’s position on this list. So, although I loved the majority of it, it’s not my favourite of 2020 so far.

Now we have the final 2 choices, vying for pole position. All the Pretty Horses and The Grapes of Wrath. Both classic Southern Gothic American novels. Both stark portrayals of human nature, examining relationships and interactions between family, friends, and lovers. Both raw in their depiction of human morality and lavish in their description of wilderness and its beauty.

There can be only one winner, and If I had to choose it must be The Grapes of Wrath, but only just. That’s really because Cormac McCarthy already has a couple of books in my top 10 favourite novels of all time and my love for his writing may blind me slightly. So it makes sense to reward another author with a book I consider to be one of the finest novels I’ve ever read.

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Biggest Surprise:

My biggest surprise was quite easily Jaws. I don’t really know why I decided to read it. I’d only recently found out there was a book and for some reason I assumed it wouldn’t be good. But I was seriously impressed! It’s actually quite different from the film. There is a particularly interesting depth of conflict between its characters. Their relationships, behaviours, and interactions were well fleshed out and believable in every way.

Lots of times I forgot there was a murderous shark on the loose because the scenes and dialogue between the main characters was so interesting. I won’t say more than that because I don’t want to spoil anything as there are some big differences between the film and book. I would recommend reading this on holiday or sometime throughout the summer as it’s a surprisingly riveting read.

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Hardest to Read:

Moby Dick.

Is that really a surprise? I mean it was hell to read – hell. I keep getting asked, why did you keep going then? Why didn’t you just give up and move onto something else? That’s not so easy to answer. I think because I always want to see the work through to the end, no matter how hard it is to get through.

I feel like I owe it to the writer to give their work the same appreciation I would want someone to give to mine (if I ever get around to writing anything). But I suppose if I was only reading for joy and nothing else it probably wouldn’t have been worth it. As I’m also reading to learn about the craft it made sense to keep going, even if it was to understand what it was I didn’t like about it and how I should avoid these areas in my own writing.

Maybe that sounds pretentious – I don’t know – that’s just what my thought process was. Anyhow, if you want a longer breakdown of the book, check out my full review here.

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Fastest to Read:

If you’re looking at this list and wondering what you can whizz through then this section is for you. One of the things that always surprises me is how easily you can race through a book you enjoy. If you try to do the same with a book you can’t get on with, it’s a real struggle.

I was even surprised when going through the length of these books. Some of them I was sure I’d read in only a few days but they were much longer than expected. And vice versa for some short books I didn’t much like.

2 books on this list I read in the space of a weekend: Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas and Normal People. Both great books but in very different ways. Normal People isn’t particularly short I just loved the characters and was desperate to keep reading to find out more. I think you could easily read Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas on a long, rainy Sunday. Maybe keep that one on the book shelf until this winter. It’s equal parts tragic and hilarious. That’s a mean feat to pull off in any book, so I have a real admiration for Adam Kay, the book’s author.

Another mention would be to Unnatural Causes. This is not a short book, in fact it’s really quite long. But purely based in it’s subject matter, it was riveting. It was one of the books I read during my 12 hour reading marathon and it made the hours fly by. I felt irked that I was too tired to keep reading at the end of the day because it was so absorbing. For that reason it has to be the winner of this section!

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Last Words

Right I’ve waffled on for long enough. You get the gist of it. 6 month book review = a lot of reading.

If you want to take a look at the full reviews for all the books that have been mentioned, head over to my book review section of the website. Alternatively, I post all these ratings on my Goodreads account, so you can also have a look there.

To stay tuned with my monthly book reviews you can check back on my website on the first days of each month, or follow me on twitter and subscribe to my newsletter to get regular updates.

Cheers for reading and happy reading 📚