It's like...magic.

I suppose the thing about reading a new book for the first time, or even an old book for the eightieth time, is the anticipation that maybe, just maybe, my life will never be the same by the time I’m finished. When it’s over, I’ll have new ideas, new perspective, new insights because of a stack of paper bound in plastic covered in black smudges.

If that isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.

Best Book of 2009

I cringe to write this post. I have thought seriously of just skipping it and hoping no one notices.

I don't know if you know this about me, but I read for a living. Reading words is how I pay my rent, put gas in my car, keep food in my belly, and clothes on my back. Unfortunately, it no longer pays for beautiful haircuts.

So I worry that people are going to expect some crazy amazing and profound book that I thought was the best book of 2009. Now, it's not for want of opportunity that I can't think of anything. I belong to book clubs, surround myself by English major or degree holding friends who are constantly recommending great books like The Life of Pi by Jan Martel, My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok, or A Mercy by Toni Morrison, all of which I have in my possession and am determined to read as soon as the thought of reading doesn't make me carsick.

Still, the book I thought of first was this. (Don't worry: it wasn't written by Stephenie Meyer, but I think it may have had at least one reference to a vampire.)

I don't deserve to know how to read.

Best Article of 2009

Thanks to Google Reader, I go through thousands of articles in the course of a year. You probably do, too. Think about it, if you read just 5 articles a day for 365 days, that's 1,825 articles, and in all honesty, I read at least twice that.

I've been thinking about articles that have struck me, and there are two in particular that I'd consider the best.

Coming at #2: "Helping to Write History," from the Washington Post. It's a profile of Jon Favreau, 27, President Obama's head speech writer. I have a ton of respect for this guy who's only a year older than I am, and who will write some of the most historically significant speeches before he hits 30. (Author's note: It's come to my attention that this article was published on December 18, 2008 and will therefore be disqualified from the ranking. Take that, Favreau.)

The Best Article of 2009: "Vanish: Finding Evan Ratcliff," Wired.com. A good article sucks in the reader, causing him or her to become emotionally invested. When I read this article, it read like a short story; I found myself rooting for the unlikely protagonist, a writer who was sponsored by Wired to go "off the grid" and to see how easy it would be for readers to find him with all of the electronic resources at their fingertips. A truly fascinating read.

Photos found here and here.

Good reads.

I've decided to celebrate my triumphant return to the blog-o-sphere with a week's worth of Austen themed posts. Remember yesterday's Emma post? Yeah, I do too. It happened like it was 10 minutes ago.

Anyway, here's a book I believe to be a Tuesday-worthy Treat.

Nevermind how gorgeous that cover design is. This book contains essays from writers like Virginia Woolf and C. S. Lewis on various aspects of Jane Austen's imperfect genius. I can't wait to get my hands on a copy. Christmas is a-comin'!

Image found here.

BBC One has my unswerving devotion.

Every now and then I go through an Austen Renaissance of sorts. Something or someone will remind me how much I love Jane Austen.

This time the someone was my old roommate Alicia, who posted a link on my facebook wall, introducing me to the newest addition to the BBC One literary adaptation library.

Feast your eyes, lovelies:

Now, I will forever love the Gwyneth Paltrow version from my teenage years, but seriously folks, there are no words.

It doesn't hurt that the three potential suitors--Mr. Knightly, Mr. Elton, and Frank Churchill are all glorious to behold.

I just can't wait until they show it on Masterpiece Theater, because then it will be available on Yankee-friendly DVD, and I will buy it.

Also? Happy birthday, Mom!

Me and Lorelei or, the BBC 100 Books Meme

I spent far too much time trying to rip a clip from the episode of Gilmore Girls that aired today. Lorelei pretends to be a book editor while making small talk with some guests at the world's most heinous bed and breakfast. So here's what they say:

Lorelai: I published Good Night Spoon... and the Horse that wanted to Bark.

Guest: Oh, I've read to my grandson! The horse really wanted to bark, and it finally does, and... (to Lorelai) How does it end?


Lorelai: It dies.


Rory: But... the horse learned to bark and achieved its goal, so it was really a happy ending!


Well, Lorelei Gilmore is merely a pretend person who pretended to be a book editor. I, on the other hand, am a real person who really is a book editor! This week I was offered a position at a tiny little publisher down in Springville, Utah. I'm so excited, and I feel so blessed to be able to work in my chosen profession.

However, since it is Thoughts for Thursday and I feel like I ought to prove to the world that I do more than watch Gilmore Girls, I will now try and prove that I am worth my salt as a reader.

I lifted this from a friend's blog, who in turn lifted it from a friend's blog. Also, my sister also did this on facebook.

"The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?”
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X (So many times. Sooooo many times.)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X (I'm pretty sure I've read it all. I took Bible as Lit and went to seminary.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X (I'm really surprised that you haven't read this, Rachel.)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot X
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (My cousin's favorite book. I own it and it's on my list.)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X (Right now, it's tied with P&P for my favorite story.)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X (One of my least favorite books that I had to read every year from 8th to 10th grade.)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (I've borrowed it from one of my sisters. It is swimming in the sea of books next to my bed.)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (I remember that one of my sisters used to LOVE this book.)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X (I think I did. I may of fudged my way through it in high school.)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
TOTAL: 35. Now, I have a degree in English, but last I heard, 35 was more than 6. I think I'm in possession of at least 5 more, so I'll keep on going.

Triple Treat Tuesday

I feel like I need to confess: sometimes, I miss a day. So I cheat, and under "post options" put the date it was supposed to show up. So before you blame your RSS reader, blame me.

Because I'm mildly late posting this, I decided to give you not one but three treats this week.

Here are a few of my favorite things:

1. My Pride & Prejudice bracelets from brookish.
2. My earrings from Jenna via Calla Lily Jewelry.
3. My earthenware jar from my visiting teachers in my Lehi branch.

Bonus Treat:
My damask drapery from my roommate, Maren via Target.

Bibliophiles: Commence jealousy now.

I decided recently that I needed something enriching to fill my time in the evenings. Something that I would enjoy, something that would potentially help out others, something that got me out of the house when I wasn't at work. (I love my house, don't get me wrong, but everyone gets cabin fever. I think the proved it on Mythbusters one time.)

Anyway, I also love the public library here in SLC. Love it. It's beautiful and wonderful. So I filled out an application to volunteer. On Monday I met with the volunteer coordinator, and she matched me with two programs I'm really excited about.

1) Mov'n: Once a month I check out books and deliver them to a resident of a local elderly home who can't make it to the library themselves. It's kind of like being the iTunes Genius, but with books (e.g. if they like this book, then perhaps they'll like this book and this book and this book.

2)Friends of the Library Organization: For this job, (and this is where the jealousy comes in) I use my new magnetic key card that gets me into the Library's. Inner. Sanctum. And let me just tell you, the back end of the library is just about as cool as the front end. Then I go in to a huge room of books. Shelves and shelves of books that have been donated and that are usually sold for a $1. Once I'm there, I go through and find the ones that are worth more than a $1. And then I get to read through them, write a mini review of them, and then list them on Amazon. Gloria, the lovely woman who was training me, told me I get to be as creative as I want.

This may not sound super exciting for some of you, so let me clarify. I have key card access to normally closed doors. For any of you who know me, you'll know that I love key card access to anything. The only thing that would make it cooler is this access required a retina scan. Then I skim books and write about them. This is a wonderful, wonderful thing!

So, next time you're on Amazon.com Marketplace, find the books sold by The Library Store. Chances are you'll find listings written by Yours Truly, so you can depend on their dependability.

Resolutions Revisited

The most important part of setting goals is accountability. This is what they told me on my mission anyway. I've meant to revisit my resolutions each month and while I've done so internally, I see no reason why I shouldn't let everyone else in on the fun.
Mind

• My friend Ben is going to write for a half hour every day. I think I will join him. When I look at it now, this one is almost laughable. However, there are still 9.75 months left in the year to get better.
• Write a novel. Not yet. And I probably won't revisit this one until October as I get ready for NaNoWriMo.
• Write a screenplay. Getting ready. Script Frenzy starts next month, and I'm going to give it ago. Don't worry, I won't ask for your help like I did last year. Doing so turned out to be a fiasco. (Thanks for the 3 of you who did help. I appreciate it.)
• Read 36 books I've never read (3 a month) I think I'm at 5. I should be finishing up 15 this month. I had better get cracking.
• Enroll in an independent study British History course. Not yet. I'm thinking probably in the summer time. I have to save my pennies, in times such as these.
• Learn Adobe Flash and make a short cartoon. Luckily, this is happening because work is endorsing it. I can make a glass of soda fizz, and I can sync audio with video. I would show you examples, but unfortunately the lesson on how to share and host video doesn't come until later in the book I'm working from.

Body

• Continue on the weight-loss journey. See below.
• Go to the doctor. I've gone to the doctor, had echocardiograms, blood work, even had my saliva tested for Cushing's Syndrome. (Sound familiar? It was featured on House! Don't worry, not one of the life threatening ones.) I wanted to know if there was an internal reason for the rapid weight gain I experienced late in 2008. It turns out there might be some cause, but mostly it's going to take the ol' elbow grease to get back down to where I want to be. This week I'm signing up for a membership at the city athletic center. They have nice facilities and a swimming pool, not to mention Pilates classes on Tuesdays. Also, now that the days are getting nicer and longer, I'll be more likely to walk around this beautiful neighborhood I call home.
• Swim in the Deer Creek Open Water Swim. We'll see.
• Establish a regular sleep schedule. Getting better all the time. Part of this is keeping my room clean. The more of my floor I can see, the sounder I sleep.

Spirit

• My friend Jenna is going to read an Article from the Ensign magazine each week. I think I will join her. I've been reading my Ensign, but perhaps not as regularly as I should.
• Study Conference talks. Have plans to finish up before April.
• Enroll in Institute. Done and done. I'm thoroughly enjoying it. It took me a couple of weeks, however, to get over the fact that the Institute instructor is a cross between my Uncle Stan and Benjamin Linus from Lost.
• Increase my temple attendance. Between the ward temple nights, stake temple meetings, and once-monthly visits with my family, this one resolution has probably made the single greatest difference in my health and happiness. I love the temple.
• Go visiting teaching in the first half of the month. This is true for half of my route. My companion is getting married in less than a month, so it's sort of hard to corral everyone together. However, I have become good friends with one of the girls I visit teach. How great is that? We even went out for ice cream after the above mentioned stake temple meeting with some other people in the ward. See Mom? I am making friends.

Well, for those of you who have read this far, thanks for letting me be accountable to you. As a bonus, I'll let you in on my goal for March: No reruns or repeats! This means no TV on DVD (unless, of course, it's a new-to-me show) and no movies I've already seen! I'll admit, I already fudged this a little bit by watching Two Weeks Notice last night with my roommate for our Saturday night in. There might have also been a lunch time viewing of Gilmore Girls. But no more, I say! This will also pertain to books. I have this pesky habit of rereading books. I really don't see much wrong with this, but this month, it's all new all the time!

How about everyone else? Still resolved?

For auld lang syne...

Well, 2008 has past, and I've taken to perusing the blogs of friends and family for an account of all the excitement of the year. At Christmastime, my dad asked my brother and me what the high point of the year was. For me it was a close race among my birthday fortnight, graduation, getting a job, buying a car, and finding my enchanting new Avenues home. (I know some of you are wondering where American Idol auditions rank. I'll let you ponder that quandary.) It truly is miraculous that everything ended up the way it did, and trust me, I give credit where credit is due.

During the month of December, I spent a lot of time pondering my 2009 New Year's Resolutions. I generally am of the mind that if I make a ton of resolutions, one of them ought to take, right? I've looked at my friends' blogs about this too, and I'm impressed by their resolve, and I hope that some of them don't mind if I borrow some of that resolve.

Mind

• My friend Ben is going to write for a half hour every day. I think I will join him.
• Write a novel
• Write a screenplay
• Read 36 books I've never read (3 a month)
• Enroll in an independent study British History course
• Learn Adobe Flash and make a short cartoon

Body

• Continue on the weight-loss journey
• Go to the doctor
• Swim in the Deer Creek Open Water Swim
• Establish a regular sleep schedule

Spirit

• My friend Jenna is going to read an Article from the Ensign magazine each week. I think I will join her.
• Study Conference talks
• Enroll in Institute
• Increase my temple attendance
• Go visiting teaching in the first half of the month

So there you have it folks. I really think 2009 is going to be a banner year. In January I'm always excited to see what the year will hold, and by December am always awed and grateful at all of the blessings. So here's to you and here's to the new year.

Wishes really do come true!

In addition to the four aims of a BYU education, I've had my own personal three aims: 1) Gain access to a key-coded lab of some sort; 2) Get an A-Lot sticker; 3) Climb that tall ladder up the smoke stacks and then rappel down the side.

Two out of three ain't bad, folks.

Yes, as of today, I'm the proud possessor of an A-Lot sticker! No more parking in the boonies for me! No more parking tickets from when I didn't want to park in the boonies! No more living in fear of the possibility of getting a parking ticket. Those darn Lovely Rita's are unpredictable.

What a great day.