2016 was the first time since I started writing about movies on the internet that I averaged less than one film watched per day, with somewhere around 320 movies seen over the course of the year. Some of that is schedule-related: my kids are at such an age that watching a single movie in one sitting is difficult, let alone the two or three per day I could squeeze in when they were less ambulatory. But some of that is also a shifting of priorities: I read (and finished) more books this year than I had in all my five plus years of parenthood put together. And since this is the end of the year, and since I love to make lists, here is a ranked list of all the books I read (and finished) in 2016:

1. Where I Was From – Joan Didion

2. Slouching Towards Bethlehem – Joan Didion

3. A Death in the Family – James Agee

4. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

5. Annals of the Former World – John McPhee

6. The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin

7. The Proud Tower – Barbara Tuchman

8. Harmonium – Wallace Stevens

9. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

10. Lyrical Ballads – William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge

11. The White Album – Joan Didion

12. White Teeth – Zadie Smith

13. The Souls of Black Folk – WEB DuBois

14. Eminent Victorians – Lytton Strachey

15. A Collection of Essays – George Orwell

16. Meditations in an Emergency – Frank O’Hara

17. Lady Susan – Jane Austen

18. Salvador – Joan Didion

19. Justine – Lawrence Durrell

20. Violet Energy Ingots – Hoa Nguyen

21. Kora in Hell : Improvisations – William Carlos Williams

22. 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed – Eric Cline

23. Love & Friendship – Whit Stillman

24. The Silk Roads – Peter Frankopan

25. A Galaxy Not So Far Away – Glenn Kenny, et al