2009 In Review Part 1

Last night I had a slow start to 2010's coin searching, 240 quarters, 150 dimes, 80 nickels and 250 pennies only produced one Canadian penny. Oh well.

Here's 2009 in review, first the books:

As for books, I read twenty-two books in 2009, that's two fewer than 2008. This past year I read way more exploration/adventure books than the year before. I didn't read much else. I also read a lot more books about Asia than I thought I did; so many I had to break them into two categories. This year I hope to read even more original source material, more books about North and South America, more straight non-fiction and hopefully some books about some artists I like. The books were:

Far East Adventure

A Description of the Kingdom of Siam by Engelbert Kaempfer*
Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan by Giles Milton
River Road to China: The Search for the Source of the Mekong, 1866-73 by Milton E. Osbourne
Mad about the Mekong: Exploration and Empire in South -East Asia by John Keay
Travels in the Central Parts of Indo-China (Siam), Cambodia, and Laos, during the Years 1858, 1859, and 1860 by Henri Mouhot*
Nathaniel's Nutmeg: How One Man's Courage Changed the Course of History by Giles Milton
Kaempfer's Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed by Engelbert Kaempfer*
The White Headhunter by Nigel Randell

Central Asian Adventure

Aurel Stein: Pioneer of the Silk Road by Annabel Walker
Aurel Stein On the Silk Road by Susan Whitfield
Through a Land of Extremes: The Littledales of Central Asia by Nicholas and Elizabeth Clinch
My Life as an Explorer by Sven Hedin*

African Adventure

White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves by Giles Milton
Caliban's Shore: The Wreck of the Grosvenor and the Strange Fate of Her Survivors by Stephen Taylor
Two Early Maps of Southern Africa: A Discovery in Sweden by Christer Blomstrand
Lake Ngami, or Explorations and Discoveries during Four Year' Wanderings in the the Wilds of South West Africa by Charles J. Andersson*

American Adventure

Humboldt's Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Epic Journey of Discovery that Changed the Way We See the World by Gerard Helferich
Maya Explorer: John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Cities of Central America and Yucatán by Victor W. Von Hagen
The Lost City of Z : A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

Other

Odd Tom Coryate: The English Marco Polo by R.E. Pritchard
The Voyage of the Beagle by James Taylor
Coins of England and the United Kingdom 2009 by Philip Skingley

*original source

Found: 1 dime (outside the Shell)