Once again, my annual list of the books I’ve read this year. Going over this list, I see there are several that I enjoyed. So, instead of naming my favorites, let me this year name three books read that I found terrible or boring (or both). They are Actual Air, The Watchmen, and World War Z. You may be asking, “Why read a book if you think it’s so bad?” The answer, in two words: book group. And yes, I know there’s a couple more weeks left in the year. I thought, though, I’d go ahead and put this list up now and get ahead on reading books for next year’s list. If my goal is 52 books a year, then I’ve already safely met it. Time to move on to 2010.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter

High Windows by Philip Larkin

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

Ma Rainey’s  Black Bottom by August Wilson

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Miss Julie by August Strindberg

The Medea by Euripides

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare

The Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

Temptation by Vaclav Havel

Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories by Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe (editors)

Bash: Latterday Plays by Neil LaBute

Telling True Stories by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (editors)

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Reasons to be Pretty by Neil LaBute

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

In a Dark Dark House by Neil LaBute

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn

The Dead Lecturer by LeRoi Jones

How to Read Novels Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays by David Ball

Tiny Geniuses by Emily Feldman

26 Miles by Quiara Alegria Hudes

True West by Sam Shepard

The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh

Management Rewired by Charles S. Jacobs

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes by Jim Holt

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter

Art by Yasmina Reza

Actual Air by David Berman

World War Z by Max Brooks

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

A Village Life by Louise Gluck

In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders

King Dork by Frank Portman

The Physicists by Friedrich Durrenmatt

Mojo by Jez Butterworth

The Choephori (or The Libation-Bearers) by Aeschylus

Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser

Here, Bullet by Brian Turner

My Children! My Africa! by Athol Fugard

Dinner With Friends by Donald Margulies

The Maids by Jean Genet

Sum by David Eagleman