Two Hectobooks: Looking Back, Part 9

It's hard to believe, but I actually posted the previous Retrospective post in April of this year. I'm amazed that I managed to keep getting posts scheduled on time, and that I haven't caught up to myself. I guess the lesson I should take from this is that if I ever want to try a project like this again, I need a way bigger backlog and also that I need to map things out much more thoroughly in advance. Oh and also that it's seldom really worth it to finish books I'm not enjoying. If I've taken one lesson from The List, that's it.

But I'm going to be reflecting on all of that a bit more thoroughly next week and over the next few months. Today, we're specifically looking at the previous twenty books.

Top 100 So Far

I'm very excited to see where I stand with only ten books remaining on The List. I've clawed less than one additional percentage point overall toward the 3/3 rating, which is disappointing to say the least. I would've liked to have 50% be 3/3 at least!

Two of these books were written by women, To the Lighthouse and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and I really liked the latter. I think my overall "favourite" of the group was Native Son which wasn't so much a favourite as simply the most striking and memorable of the books, which I still think about on a regular basis, particularly with the events of the summer and Black Lives Matter demonstrations. I don't think I always mention this in my round ups, but the books again have an average publication date before 1950 - specifically 1939, with Slaughterhouse-Five and Invisible Man being the two books in this set that were published after 1950.

Here is the usual ugly tabulation of these results: