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I love reading. Reading is my favorite. But I never read as much as I want to, partially because I get lazy, but mostly because no amount of reading will ever actually be enough for me. More books, always more books.
| 5. Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein
I really loved Moonwalking with Einstein, which was actually kind of surprising since I didn’t realize it was memoir/non-fiction when I bought it. Because even though I love to read, maybe my reading comprehension isn’t great?
It was funny and fascinating and easy to read and full of the kind of inane trivia that I really love. I like Foer’s voice and the weird characters/champions available to him on the memory circuit. I liked that even as the methods worked for him, he remained skeptical and self-deprecating and that even though he thought it was goofy, he grew to respect and admire the competitors. I love the anecdotes about historically well-memoried individuals!
Most of all, I know I liked the book because I do a lot of my reading at the gym and I kept pulling my headphone out to lean over and tell my girlfriend about all the fascinating things I was learning. That’s a good book.
Also! I can still do a decent job of recalling the first list of items he learns even now, months later1, which is amazing if not utterly useless. |
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| 4. Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Where’d You Go, Bernadette was the first book I thought of when I started making this list and I distinctly remembering being about halfway through reading it and thinking, “OH, this is totally going in the Totally Top Five.” And it being at number four on the list is really only a sign of how much I loved the things I read this year. Love on top of love on top of love.
The narration is great and the story being structured around documents (emails, etc.) made it feel really fresh and exciting. It had an actual plot! That was engaging! And surprising! And complex, likable characters who I really wanted to spend time with. I don’t know that you’re necessarily supposed to like Bernadette, but I love her and I empathize with her and I kind of want to know her. At least for a little while. I’m not sure that Bee is straight likable either, but you watch her grow and you in turn grow to love her even with her faults. Magic.
Sharp writing, a real story, and characters you care about? Amazing. |
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| 3. Libba Bray, The Diviners
I don’t remember a lot about The Diviners to be honest. I read it really quickly, over the course of maybe two days, because I absolutely could not put it down. The world was engrossing, the characters flawed but engaging, the plot well-timed, and the mythos built carefully and casually without running into overly long passages of description and exposition. It had a nice, solid resolution despite being the first in a series and it made me want to read more of the world, rather than just leaving me with a million unanswered questions.2
Evie is complicated and she can be annoying and frustrating, but somehow Bray manages to keep her from falling irretrievably from favor and just lets her hover around, figuring out who she is and you end up liking her more than you expect for it. Secondary and tertiary characters can be a little weak, but with Evie so powerfully centered at the heart, that’s not really all that bad.
The Diviners is a coming of age story with a bunch of gory supernatural stuff happening in and around it and it rules. |
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| 2. Gavin Extence, The Universe VS Alex Woods
I cried so much reading The Universe VS Alex Woods and I loved it, both the crying and the book. It’s smart and it’s painful and it’s frustrating and funny and it deals with a topic I have never, ever seen addressed by a young adult novel before and it deals with it deftly and honestly without ever veering away from its humanity into an “issues story.”
It reminded me in voice — in all the best ways — of King Dork and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl except it’s smarter than King Dork and more empathetic than Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.
Alex Woods is a good person and a wonderful narrator. Alex Woods is smart and kind and never particularly condescending. Kids have so much to learn from Alex Woods. Adults too. Alex Woods is a little bit my hero. |
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| 1. Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys
I loved The Raven Boys. I loved it in a way I haven’t loved something in a long, long time. A long time. It is so lovingly written and so well-plotted and just wonderful to read. Maggie Stiefvater understands and exploits the female gaze like I have never, ever seen a writer manage before. Her descriptions of the boys are tender and beautiful and she manages to make Blue soft and unique without ever making her weak or “not like other girls”3 which is a huge relief.
I liked that it carefully walked the line between otherworldly and realistic, that it felt like I was really experiencing something new as I got deeper into the story, that I was compelled by not only the solid plot, but the rich inner lives of characters I really liked and cared about.
I haven’t read the next book in the series yet — because I am lazy — but I am so looking forward to its turn coming up on my reading list this year. I can’t wait to see the weirdness that’ll come from the story as the magic and mythos starts to really take shape and come to life. |
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Honorable Mentions
    
1. Mostly I just like picturing my girlfriend in a giant tub of cottage cheese and that’s what really counts, right?
2. Looking at you, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
3. Okay, I will be TOTALLY honest and say that this is a very fine line, but I think Blue manages to stay unique without entering MPDG territory because 1. She was created by a woman, and 2. She is so damn likable.
Previously: 2K12 | 2K13 | JAMZ | MOVIES | BATH & BEAUTY | TV | ALBUMS
Resolution culture is garbage. It is a New Year, but you do not have to be a New You. You are wonderful and you don’t have to change jack shit if you don’t want to.
But if you want to make a change, the New Year isn’t a bad time to, right? New Year, fresh start, all that stuff. You’re the same person you were last year, but with maybe a little extra motivation.
I spent 2014 making some very big and serious changes to my life partially because I got The Cancer, but also because I was well enough to have a full-time job and sort of behave like an actual Adult Human for the first time in my life, which is kind of cool.1
So, since 2015 is upon us and I did pretty damn good making changes last year, I’m taking my New Year’s Motivation and making some resolutions and sharing them with you. Fun, yeah?
1. Write More
I’m a writer! But I basically forget to write. I cram blogs in at the last second and I forget how much I actually enjoy writing them. When I write one blog, I feel urged and excited to write more of them. I should, you know, follow that instinct. I also write fiction! And, to be fair, I verbally and text-message-ually write almost every single day because I tell my girlfriend stories of all shapes and kinds, but I don’t write enough of those stories down. I have a finished novel I should edit and try to, like, sell and another that’s got a solid shape and tons of ideas scribbled down in a million places. I want to do something with them. I love words. I need to write more of them down.
Concrete Goal: Write 100 words a day! Edit/re-write my MFA book.
2. Consume More
I read and watch a pretty fair amount but I want to consume more and I want to consume things more intentionally. I like liking things and I want to find more things to like. Simple.
Concrete Goal: One new movie every two weeks, three new episodes of TV a week, 50 books this year, and more comics! Update listography and goodreads regularly, including a small review for each book I finish this year. Try to hit at least some of these diversity challenges.
3. Keep Moving and Feeding This Body
I work out frequently — sometimes six times a week! — and I have gotten much better at feeding myself in a way that satisfies my body and doesn’t make me miserable. I want to eat burgers and fries for every meal, but it turns out that my gastrointestinal system doesn’t exactly feel great when I do that? Crazy. Also, I kind of like how I feel after I work out. Gross, right?
Concrete Goal: Keep food journaling, meal planning, and going to the gym. Keep on keeping on.
I also want to be less envious and subtweet-y. I hate how often being cranky makes me think everything is dumb, but it’s kind of hard to resolve to like, be an entirely different human being than you are? And to come up with goals more concrete than “Be less of a dick.”
I am going to try to ask myself “Do you really want to say that?” before letting things loose on the world via social media. And also try to think, “That’s nice” when someone is enjoying something, even if I’m not into it. I love enthusiastic and joyful people! I don’t need to be a passive-aggressive bummer. I want to lift people up whenever possible or at the very least try harder not to drag them down, indirectly or otherwise. I am not a beacon of sunshine and I will never be, but I can strive to, you know, shut up a little more frequently when I’m in a mood.
Are you making resolutions? Are they as boring as mine? Did you resolve to become a superhero? That’d be pretty cool, to be honest.
1: I would way, way rather be sitting on my couch marathoning TV shows, but we can’t have everything.
This is a quick update! To report that I am alive and very well!1 and that instead of being wildly busy with being sick and miserable all the time, I am instead very busy with a very boring but fairly well paying full-time job! Where my fiancée is my boss! Which can get kind of weird, but is largely okay!
So, since I have been a very bad blogger and very, very absent and also, to be honest, pretty boring in general — Truly. Are you an insomniac? Let me lull you to sweet sleep with wild tales of reorganizing an entire employee file system! Let me tell you about entering hundreds of insurance claims at a time and then submitting them! Over dial-up! You’ll sleep like a baby. — I thought I’d steal a meme from the awesome Kimmie at That Girl in The Wheelchair that she posted and I saved about a million years ago!
Currently…2
Loving:
To be perfectly honest, the first answer that came into my head was sleep, but that’s boring, so I’m going with 1. Lumosity since breaking up my work day by playing games that are supposed to make me smarter is actually much more enjoyable and useful to me than taking a lunch. 2. This Smith’s Minted Rose Lip Balm because it’s like, the second lip product I’ve ever tried that I thought actually made a difference to my lips. And 3. Bath & Body Work’s Sweater Weather. I know I’ve talked about how much I love this before, but dude, I really love this scent. Soon it will be too wintery to burn any longer and I will mourn it. It is so strong (such a good ~throw) without being overpowering and the scent lingers forever without getting stale. Oh and also, my new glasses!
zennioptical.com3
Reading:
| Just Finished |
Right Now |
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| FUN! |
WEIRD! |
GREAT! |
TRASHY!4 |
Watching:
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To be honest — and to my dismay — I honestly don’t even know what I watched on purpose last. I haven’t intentionally watched an episode of TV since the end of September and I haven’t seen a movie in theaters since we saw Guardians of the Galaxy on August 1st. Tragedy! We did however manage to get through an entire movie on Netflix last weekend! And a documentary no less! I Know That Voice was super delightful! And fascinating. And definitely worth watching if you have even a passing nostalgia or interest or enjoyment of animated movies. I’m interested in voiceover work anyway, so it was particularly interesting to me. Love seeing the faces that go to the voices. And we’re going to see Big Hero 6 tomorrow! And also I watched a bunch of eps of The Mindy Project and that is pretty fun.
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Oh, and also this. On repeat.
Listening to…
  
  
  
Working on…
The answer to this question should be: my finished book that needs editing, my next book that needs writing, the book after that that’s in need of conceptualizing, my screenplay, my other screenplay, the dozens of projects I have in lists everywhere, but mostly I am working on trying to get better at adulthood. It turns out that managing time is really hard and trying to have a life while working 8-10 hour days is, like, actually difficult? Last time I had a full-time job, I was too depressed to care if I ever had any fun or leisure, so this time around it’s at least an improvement!
I am also working on a post about what I’ve been up to since my last update (The Twin Cities! Great food! Yellowstone! A new puppy!) and the Totally Top 5 series for 2K14! Oh, and I’ve also been posting the #holidayjamz I normally upload to my tumblr (who Cease-and-Desisted me to death! Thanks, Stevie Wonder!) as Youtube links to my twitter instead with #holidayjamz2k14 because the holiday season begins November 1st and if you can’t take that… well, suck it.
1: Cancer treatment is going very well! Can’t use the word remission until I have a hysterectomy, but my oncologist is very chill about waiting for surgery and very confident that we caught the stuff early. Woo!
2: What I’m currently reading/watching/listening to is always over there on the right hand side of the site. I update it fairly regularly even!
3: I am ~feeling a LARGE number of the frames from Warby Parker, but I didn’t like any of the ones in my first home try-on (at least on my face, they looked great off) so I am hesitant to take the plunge and order the ones I really want, since they don’t even have a home try-on option. Free returns and all, but nail-biting! We’ll see how the next box goes.
4: “Her [REDACTED] became a gourd of hot syrup, spilling into Dominik’s mouth.” So, yeah.
It’s time to talk about books! Like last year, this was inexplicably difficult to do? I read a decent amount but when it comes time to talk about what I’ve read, I seem to just go totally blank. I stare into the ether, hoping something magical will work it way around my head and I’ll suddenly be really good at talking about books, but it just never happens. We all suffer for it.
| 5. Grounded by Kate Klise — previously
I read Grounded as part of the Casual-Ass Internet Book Club and Ms. Klise was kind enough to actually email me when she saw the post saying that I’d chosen her book which I thought was just incredibly sweet.
It immediately panicked me, however, because what if she came back to check out my review and I ended up hating the book?! Luckily for me, she’s an incredible writer and Grounded was an absolutely delight. I thought it was really engaging and intriguing and exactly the kind of book I would have absolutely loved when I was a kid. My casual-ass review of it is one of my favorite things I’ve written this year and one of the only times I feel like I’ve ever managed to really convey what I wanted to about a book. It was a joy to read and a joy to write about. |
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| 4. Make Lemonade & True Believer & This Full House by Virginia Euwer Wolff
I first heard of/read Virginia Euwer Wolff’s Make Lemonade trilogy way back in 2008 when I was substitute teaching. I always showed up to work with at least two books so that I’d have something to do while my students were, inevitably, watching a video/taking a test/whatever but one fateful day, I’d already read through everything I’d brought with me. Luckily, I was subbing an English class, so there were books all around me and, conveniently, True Believer was sitting right in front of me on the teacher’s desk. I used the last couple periods of the day to read through it and was so, so impressed and moved, even though it’s the middle of a trilogy.
I’d had all three books on my Amazon Wishlist since that fateful afternoon, but finally got the urge to buy them early this year. They were a truly remarkable read. They’re complex and hard and written in free-verse that is at turns agonizing and artful. LaVaughn is one of the strongest characters I’ve ever experienced in fiction and what she is able to learn and overcome is unbelievable. She makes you want to fight for her and alongside her and even more importantly, she makes you want to fight every single one of your own battles until you can’t fight a second longer.
These books are beautifully rendered and filled with engaging characters who are exceptionally well-fleshed and honest. What a painful joy to experience. |
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| 3. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews — previously
I really loved Me and Earl and the Dying Girl when I read it in September and it’s held up as one of my favorites for the year. Though I love it largely for its humor, I also think it’s a story with a good heart that touches reality in an honest way, even when it’s hard. I like Greg as a narrator and his good heart carries the story much farther than a different narrator might have. Earl is bombastic and exciting to read about and Rachel is nicely drawn and feels really genuine. I particularly like Greg’s realizations that surround her illness and the unfair — to her — role it takes on for him and Earl. Greg’s self-awareness never seems phony and is really refreshing to see in a young, white, male narrator.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is also unique in that it has the best cover design I’ve seen in forever and also made me laugh out the loudest and most frequently. It was also an unhappy ending that I not only didn’t hate, but admired. And it has one of the very best teacher characters I’ve ever read in a book.
I still think about Greg and his regretful polar bear noises frequently. Such a delight. |
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| 2. Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt — previously
I loved Tell the Wolves I’m Home when I read it back in August and I spent a lot of time thinking about it after I finished and even long after I’d already given it a glowing review. It’s a smart and painful book that hurts in all the right places and hits you with the immense weight of youthful awkwardness in ways that you could’ve never even imagined. It’s funny and raw and the language is just transcendent in places.
June is a remarkable narrator with a gift for observation and articulating heartache in ways you’d never think to and she grows and changes and learns from her mistakes right in front of the readers’ eyes. There is so much heart in this and so much complexity about family and siblingship and the struggle to do the right thing for the people you love. It’s exhausting and tearful and wonderful.
I was worried about reading this one — hype is deadly — but I am so, so glad that I did. |
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| 1. Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell — previously
Eleanor & Park was like a gift from the book gods this year. It was another one that hype tried to drive me away from — that tricky bastard! — and another that I am so, so glad I read anyway.
Eleanor & Park is rich and funny and filled with wonderful characters, thoughtful narration, and great dialogue, which is something I can’t say for most of the books I read this year. Both Eleanor and Park are fantastic narrators who wear their hearts, thoughts, and observations on their sleeves. It is so, so nice to be deep in the heads of characters who have things to say and see the world in ways that are interesting and engaging and fresh.
It does such a great job capturing what it’s like to be young and scared and unsure and enamored of someone new and an even better job of precisely and evocatively encapsulating the thrill and torture of new love. Eleanor & Park is romantic as hell and sexy in a way that feels true and acutely age-appropriate. It is a wonder of a book and I am so glad that 2013 brought it to me.
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Honorable Mentions
    
Previously: 2K12 | JAMZ | MOVIES | ALBUMS | TV
I want to talk about Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares first because I read it first and because it made me angrier/more annoyed so I probably have more to say about it.
I did not like Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares. I found it readable-ish and compelling-ish just enough to pull me through, but otherwise really kind of lazy and smug? The writing was good enough and there was some nice placemaking but the characters were both pretty bland and well, I wouldn’t normally say cliché because I think it’s a cheap criticism generally, except for how Dash really was and Lily verged real close to it. The entire book somehow managed to bemoan hipsterism while having two leads who would be classified by the general public as being kind of hipstery*. It wasted my time on multiple tirades about how terrible everything about Christmas is — boring! done a million times! who cares! — and made the character that likes Christmas sound like an infant? And even in the end, I don’t understand why these characters end up together/feel that they only do so because they just don’t know each other at all. Dash is a whiny, angsty pain in the ass who hates Christmas fundamentally. Lily is a mollycoddled crybaby optimist who thinks Christmas is the greatest. Neither of them change significantly enough to warrant mention and yet somehow I’m supposed to believe they’ll ever get along because they… saved a baby kind of and got arrested? I just do not get it.
Plus the little things! There is a fundamental misunderstanding of Pixar movies from both Dash and Lily in totally different ways and it ends up reading like neither Levithan nor Cohn has ever actually watched one, which is a shame as it’s some of the best storytelling going on in pop culture right now. Cohn calls Hermione Granger, Hermione Potter which is so egregious on her part and the part of every single person who let it go through to print that I cannot even start talking about.
I’m going to be totally real and say that I did not really enjoy Let It Snow but that after how irritating Dash & Lily was it was a straight-up relief.
I liked Maureen Johnson’s section/story quite a bit. I thought the Flobie stuff was really funny/cute and Jubilee’s a good narrator. She’s funny and a little bit clever and a lot honest, which makes for a nicely entertaining narrative. I thought the rambling about Jubilee being a stripper’s name and the sort of shame-y talk about strippers was weird but then she cut it with a kind of vague “I don’t mind strippers!” and it felt slightly better? But then she spent a lot of time hating cheerleaders (like most of the girls in the book) and it was just such a bummer. It’s the least awful in this section though, so I’ll take that for what it is. I like Stuart and his family — especially his mom, despite her weird trying-to-get-my-son-laid vibe — even though I am so, so deeply creeped out by any teenage girl deciding to go home with a stranger? Like, get back on the train or stay at the Waffle House! Don’t get murdered!
I didn’t enjoy the other two sections even like, 1/10th as much as I like the first and that’s not saying all that much, since I wasn’t that impressed with it either. I thought John Green’s section was really, really gross and relied on so many miserable stereotypes that I don’t even really want to start. I know a lot of people really love John Green and I think that he can tell a good story, but I think that his depictions of women are often super sexist and rely heavily on that tired “I’m not like other girls” trope and his story in this collection was just rife with it. Gross, gross. Lauren Myracle’s section didn’t fare much better and I found almost every character in it unbearable. I also don’t understand the way people treat Addie? I know we all have That Friend who is super self-absorbed and dramatic, but I don’t really feel like Addie is like that? At the very least, we don’t see enough of it in the story. She’s just gone through a break-up and that’s when everyone is at their worst! And everyone around her seems deeply unsympathetic. You can say “She is always like this” as much as you want, but when your readers don’t see it and you’re in the dramatic characters point of view, we just end up thinking other characters are jerks.
Happy Boxing Day! Sorry I hate everything. Kind of. ♥
*: “Hipster” is neither a criticism nor a judgment coming from me. It’s 2013, hipster 1. has almost no meaning whatsoever, and 2. could describe pretty much every person I’ve ever met under the age of 40. I just mean, you know, people who are a little disaffected and cool while pretending they’re not trying. Everyone is trying. It’s okay, guys.
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