Auditing the Books

My Audible account says that I've been using it since October of 2016. It feels like less time than that, but as one gets older, one's sense of time speeds up. I started listening because a YouTube channel I follow was sponsored by Audible. I thought it would be cool to support the channel, and at the same time I could possibly better myself in some regards. A few months ago, I discovered that I could also borrow audio-"books" from the Chicago Public Library. Things were almost in place for the listening binge I've been on for  the past two years. The next puzzle piece came during a party where a friend of a friend who studied economics talked about listening to podcasts at double-speed (hey, it doubles the ROI of your time!). The final piece has been my lowly adjunct lifestyle, in which I spend at least five hours per week in the car. This gives me lots of time to listen, and I've been going through my list at something more closely approximating the pace some of my friends do their actual reading. 

So in an effort to keep track, I'm putting together a list of the "books" I've been auditing (I just can't bring myself to call it reading, so maybe this will catch on). I had a short chat with my wife's grandmother, who has also discovered the wonderful world of audiobooks, and we agreed to send each other our respective lists. Of course I had her list in my hands three days later, which was sometime in August? Here, then (finally) is my list:

In the last months of 2016, I listened to three audiobooks:

1. Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: The Dictator's Handbook
2. Nick Bostrom: Superintelligence
3. Some other popular nonfiction book that made so little impression on me that I don't even care about looking it up. I later traded it, once I learned that you could do that. I traded it for:
4. Ernest Cline: Ready Player One

2017:

1. Ernest Cline: Ready Player One (again)
2. Neal Stephenson: Anathem,
3. Quicksilver (Baroque Cycle),
4. King of the Vagabonds,
5. Odalisque
6. The Confusion,
7. Solomon's Gold,
8. Currency,
9. The System of the World,
10. Diamond Age,
11. Cryptonomicon, 
12. Reamde, 
13. Seveneves, 
14. Zodiac
15. Hesse: Glass Bead Game
16. Tolstoy: War and Peace
17. Octavia Butler: Blood Child and Other Stories
18. Cixin Liu: Three Body Problem, 
19. Dark Forest, 
20. Death's End
21. Brahm Stoker: Dracula

2018: (Which started in roughly the order I listened to them, but then became a mishmash because I'm using multiple platforms)

1. Neal Stephenson: Anathem (again), 
2. Quicksilver (again),
3. King of the Vagabonds (again),
4. Odalisque (again),
5. The Confusion (again),
6. Solomon's Gold (again),
7. Currency (again),
8. The System of the World (again),
9. Snow Crash (this was actually my first exposure to Stephenson, and I actually read the book-book, but I wanted to round out my audio collection of Stephenson's oeuvre), 
10. The Big U, 
11. Rise &Fall of D.O.D.O. (coauthored with Nicole Galland), 
12. The Mongoliad, Book 1 (coauthored with Greg Bear and Friends)
13. The Mongoliad, Books 2 (coauthored with Greg Bear and Friends)
14. The Mongoliad, Book 3 (coauthored with Greg Bear and Friends)
15. Cixin Liu: Three Body Problem, (again)
16. Dark Forest, (again)
17. Death's End (again)
18. Phillip K. Dick: Man in the High Castle, 
19. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
20. Dostoevsky: Poor People, 
21. The Brothers Karamazov
22. Paul Strathern: Dostoevsky in 90 minutes
23. Melville: Bartleby the Scrivener and Other Stories, 
24. Moby Dick
25. Austen: Mansfield Park,
26. Emma, 
27. Northanger Abbey, 
28. Pride and Prejudice
29. Chesterton: Orthodoxy (I finished it as I was pulling out of the parking lot for a long commute, so I immediately started it again and re-listened!)
30. Homer: Iliad, 
31. Odyssey
32. Dante: The Divine Comedy
33. Milton: Paradise Lost
34. Shelly: Frankenstein
35. Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
36. Cather (Willa - i.e., the famous one -- possibly related): My Antonia
37. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: The Mote in God's Eye
38. Arthur C. Clarke: Rendezvous With Rama
39. Richard K. Morgan: Altered Carbon
40. Annalee Newitz: Autonomous
41. William Gibson: The Peripheral
42. Isaac Asimov: I, Robot
43. Gene Wolfe: The Shadow of the Torturer
44. The Claw of the Conciliator
45. The Sword of the Lictor
46. The Citadel of the Autarch
47. The Urth of the New Sun
48. Gary K. Wolfe: How Great Science Fiction Works
49. Arthur Conan Doyle: The Complete Sherlock Holmes (technically, this includes four novels, so in those moments when I admit to myself that I feel like I'm keeping score, my ego wants the acknowledgment that this was more of an investment than a single episode. 
50. Stanislaw Lem: Solaris
51. Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land
52. Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go
53. China Mieville: Kraken
54. The City & The City
55. The Last Days of New Paris
56. Embassytown
57. Henry James: The Turn of the Screw
58. James Joyce: Dubliners
59. The Song of Roland
60. Graham Greene: The Quiet American
61. Robert Louis Stephenson: Treasure Island
62. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
63. Malcom Gladwell: David and Goliath
64. Rudyard Kipling: The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories

Audiobooks I haven't finished (currently in the process of auditing, or that I've already checked out), but plan to finish before the year's end:

1. Phillip K. DIck: Ubik
2.  ̶S̶a̶u̶l̶ ̶B̶e̶l̶l̶o̶w̶:̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶A̶d̶v̶e̶n̶t̶u̶r̶e̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶A̶u̶g̶g̶i̶e̶ ̶M̶a̶r̶c̶h̶ (finished! see update below! about which, I hope to have something to say in a while)
3. Herman Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (again)
4. Whatever the last two audible credits get me this year (recommendations appreciated).

Audiobooks I was unable to finish for various reasons:

1. Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter
2. The Power and the Glory (I have The End of the Affair in paperback, and I'll be reading it once the semester ends. I just couldn't get into these two with the same interest as The Quiet American.)
3. James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
4. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (I'm about half way through, and while I haven't given up on it yet, it keeps getting pushed further down my list)
5. David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest (I don't get what the deal is. I like his non-fiction. I've audited War and Peace, and Moby Dick, for crying out loud. I just couldn't do it). 
6. Richard Matheson: I Am Legend and Other Stories
7. Cather: Oh, Pioneers! (This was a timing thing. I checked this out at the same time as My Antonia, which I finished, but I didn't have enough time to finish this too, and I've been involved with other things, so I just haven't gone back to it.)
8. A Bunch of Shakespeare Plays (They were meant for reading or for watching, but the audiobook format doesn't do it for me here. Maybe I'll try again later).

My resolution for the end of the year is to come back and list the book-books that I've actually read, and perhaps provide some commentary on the lot of them, since, as it turns out, I have opinions!

UPDATE:
 I went on a Saul Bellow kick:
65. The Adventures of Augie March
66. Herzog
67. Mr. Sammler's Planet
68. Humboldt's Gift
and then a Michael Lewis stint:
69. The Big Short
70. The Undoing Project
71.* Don Quixote (Part One) -- I ran out of time before I could finish part two, and the Chicago Public Library repossessed the book. Thanksgiving break was great, but it meant less time in the car, and so less time with El Caballero de la triste figura.