After a month and a half of moaning and groaning, I’ve finally reached the end of my backlog — the last four books I read in 2009, for a grand total of 244.

I realize the problem now– reading the 244 books is easy; reviewing every one of them is another matter. I’d be happy if I can blog half as fast as I read, but try as I might, it’s a tall order. I can multi-task reading, but blogging about them takes my full attention, and I try to squeeze it in when I have time to spare, a luxury I haven’t had much of since the year started. I’m definitely not complaining; blogging has its own rewards, and I’ve enjoyed a whole year of blogging about the books I’ve read; but I think I’ll have to strategize better to achieve my next goal: to catch up on blogging my January and February readings by March.

Here are the last four books for 2009 (and a big sigh of relief from me!), all of them comic in nature. As you may have noticed, I steered clear of text-heavy books towards the end of the year, and this is the last batch of them:  Chas Addams’ Half Baked Cookbook by Charles Addams; Fruits Basket by Natsuki Takaya (leftover from the October 24-hour readathon); and the first two volumes of the detective Conan manga, Case Closed 1 and 2 by Gosho Aoyama.

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I’ve thrived on a steady diet of trivia books since childhood,  because I’ve always been a sucker for useless information.

The compulsive book-finisher that I am, I like trivia books because I can read them in fits and starts, and I don’t have to worry about losing the storyline. They’re also great for cleansing the palate in between books, warding off boredom  in the middle of a book thats difficult to finish, or getting some breathing spac (erm, procrastinating much?) while taking on a tedious task — in my case, that’s often writing, or painting.

I just finished four of these books around roughly the same time: Lang’s Compendium of Culinary Nonsense and Trivia by George Lang; The Book of General Ignorance (A Quite Interesting Book) by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson; The Monopoly Companion by Philip Orbanes and Rich Uncle Pennybags; and How to Become Ridiculously Well-Read in One Evening: A Collection of Literary Encapsulations compiled and edited by E.O. Parrott (books #162-165 for 2009). (more…)