Sunday Salon: The end (of the year) is coming!

I finished and reviewed my 50th and 51st books of 2010 last week, although the reviews have yet to post here (LibraryThing is all caught up, though). I'm excited to have crossed that threshold this year - and with time to spare! - since I've fallen short of it for the last two years; I didn't even crack 40 books read in 2008, which was dismal. Dismal by book-blogger standards, at any rate;  I blogged more that year, but wondered if it was right to even call myself a book blogger when I seemed to have less and less time for books.  I had to remind myself that my perceptions are skewed by the company I keep, and that even 40 books is a helluva lot of reading compared to the general population!

Image by margolove via Flickr

However, my excitement is slightly tempered by a nagging feeling that my reading productivity is tied to the recuperation periods from my shoulder injuries - stretches of time when I wasn't up to doing much other than reading or writing much more than reviews of what I'd read. If that's the case, it's probably not something I can repeat next year - or that I'd want to, really, under those circumstances! Then again, I could be overthinking it all...

I have just one more piece of "deadline" reading in 2010, and one blog-tour date in January, so I'm hoping to wrap up this year with more "at-will" reading. I've cut back on review requests and acceptances, and realized that too many review books back-to-back wears me out - three or four at a stretch seems to be about my limit. I've just finished a short themed-reading jag with the second of two popular histories of modern feminism, both from my own TBR stacks. I'm back to fiction with my current read, but one of my reading goals for 2011 is to do a better job of getting nonfiction into the mix - I've fallen short in that category this year, and I've missed it.

But apparently I haven't missed out on good fiction this year - 17 of the 20 books I've rated 4/5 or better are novels, and because of that, I'm going to have a very difficult time choosing a Fiction Book of the Year! I'm seriously considering not doing it, to be honest, but I still have few weeks to decide. And the quality of a year's reading really should matter more than the quantity, shouldn't it?

Have you begun contemplating your year-end wrap-up yet? Are there any books that are must-reads for you before the end of 2010?