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- Romy

The Guardian Weekly

I was talking to Callum at the beginning of this year about how I felt I wasn’t really up to date with international news. We wake up to ABC News Breakfast every morning, but they repeat the same stories every half hour and tend to have a bit of an Asia-Pacific-centric view, which is hard to take for the woman whose only online news source is still NU.nl. Anyway; enter the Guardian Weekly, which is a weekly round up of the major international news stories, along with in-depth articles as well as reviews of books and movies. In short, it’s exactly what I need, and since it only takes me around 2.5 hours to read each issue, I can finish it over breakfasts on the weekend.

Instapaper and Longreads

For months I ummed and ahhed over whether or not to buy an iPad, and I’m so glad I did in the end. Granted, I spend an inordinate amount of time on it online window shopping and drunk tweeting, but for the most part I use it to read. With Instapaper I can save any text-based page to read it later, which is great if you are like me and are always coming across good reads but then forget to bookmark them. A good source for interesting articles on all kinds of topics is Longreads, which gathers all the best (you guessed it) longer reads that are published online. So you get to read the most acclaimed articles from printed and online publications. Together these two websites are unstoppable.

Google Reader

I couldn’t not include this in a 2011 recap, because I spend at least an hour every day reading RSS feeds through Google Reader. My subscriptions are mostly lighter reading, ranging from fashion blogs to xkcd, Jezebel to the NYT books feed.

FYA Book Club

This year I finally did what I have wanted to do for years: I joined a book club. Whenever we meet up I feel woefully inadequate because my knowledge of Young Adult lit is basically zero, but I love the conversations we have, and learning about new books!

Abookaweek

The juggernaut. I’ll admit that at times it felt like more of a chore than something I did for fun, but that was mostly during the few weeks when I was way behind schedule. On the few occasions that I was actually ahead, or had finished more than one book in one week, I’d be beaming and congratulating myself on reading two books in one week and keeping the house clean and cooking dinner every night! (Just kidding, that has never happened in this house. It’s the impossible trifecta.)

I couldn’t pick one favorite book, but these ones stood out for me:

Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers
Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis (but only if you’ve read his other books)
Teachers Have it Easy, by Daniel Moulthrop, Ninive Calegari and Dave Eggers
The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, by GW Dahlquist
The Passage, by Justin Cronin

I loved doing abookaweek and I loved writing about it, so I’ll be doing it again in 2012! More details to follow soon.

As a reformed nail biter I get so much pleasure out of seeing my nails long and nicely filed, with interesting nail polish. I have far too many glitter polishes, and I also love printing newsprint on my nails, using sticky tape to make interesting stripey designs, and sticking little colored studs on them!

Love and marriage

Probably the thing that changed the least was our relationship; everyone likes to ask “how is married life?” but that is like asking “how does it feel to be 26 now?” and the answer is that it is exactly the same, except that now when I get angry because he dumps his dirty undies next to the hamper, I know it is useless because I will still stay with him for the rest of our lives.

Work

I haven’t written much about it on here because I don’t enjoy talking about it, but it has to be mentioned: I started my own editing and translating company, and failed miserably! There are definitely things I should have done better, but ultimately I think the time just wasn’t right for it. I’m happy I gave it a go, though!

Gym

I had not set foot inside a gym in some 10 years when I decided to join one here a few months ago. I had a bit of a break after the honeymoon because I was working too much, but I am getting back into it, and with that I have surpassed all expectations I had of myself! It is hard work and I still don’t enjoy it, but I’ll get there.

My favorites in 2011:

I have the biggest platonic crush on Mindy Kaling. She’s as funny as Tina Fey, but more relate-able. And she knows how to write a coherent book that isn’t all over the place.

I came across a few preview chapters of this book earlier this year, and found myself snort-laughing on the tram, while other passengers looked on, helplessly caught on the same vehicle as a nerdy, inappropriate girl. Needless to say I pre-ordered the book as soon as I got home, and it is one of the most anticipated and over-delivering books I have read this year.

It’s a collection of essay-cum-memoirs that every girl should read, and then tell everyone else about, like I just did.

Zone One, by Colson Whitehead

This is technically a book about zombies (and admittedly that is the main reason I picked it up) but it is a lot more intelligent than you’d expect, considering the amount of zombie-related entertainment that has come out in the past couple of years.

Told from the point of view of a zombie-apocalypse survivor who is now part of a unit clearing parts of Manhattan from the last remaining zombies in that area. There is very little action, so don’t expect stories about groups of survivors holing up inside shopping centers, but instead you’ll find a take on society after a zombie plague, sort of like what The Road did for environmental apocalypses.

However, I wouldn’t compare it to The Road, which shines in its bleakness and authenticity. Zone One feels a bit more forced, and suffers from an overly complicated plot revealed in flashbacks and internal monologues. I had to put in a bit too much effort for what I got out of it, but it was a good read nonetheless.

Looking for Alibrandi, by Melina Marchetta

My YA book club recommended this book to me, as a seminal Australian young adult book, and it really is an Australian take on the YA novel.

Having had three big glasses of sparkling wine tonight, I can’t for the life of me say anything meaningful or funny about this book. Sorry, Melina Marchetta.

The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had to, by DC Pierson

I don’t know what I was expecting when I bought this, but I don’t think this was it – which is not necessarily a bad thing!

Imagine if you never had to sleep, the extra hours you’d have every night to do as you please while the rest of the country is sound asleep. Sounds awesome, right? So why didn’t this book delve more deeply into that?

Instead this is sort of a coming of age story of the main character, Darren Bennett; boy discovers his artistic ability, boy discovers friendship, boy discovers girls and sex and heartbreak, boy discovers what it means to betray and to be betrayed. Which is interesting, and the friend who can’t sleep gives it an interesting spin, but it isn’t exactly groundbreaking.

That said, Darren was portrayed so realistically, with such authentic voice, that that really makes up for it.

So we come to the end of the year and the end of this challenge. I figured I’d be one book over or under, but in fact I am eerily on par with my challenge: as of December 26th, I have read 52 books!

I really enjoyed doing this, and I would feel a great sense of accomplishment and satisfaction if it wasn’t for Callum pointing out to me that over this year, I have acquired as many books as I’ve read. Which kind of defeats the purpose of this ordeal! But never mind that; I got to take a lot of books off my ‘to read’ list (though not all), and gave up on reading a number of books that, to me, just weren’t worth the time and effort I had been putting into them (Atonement, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, the Year of Magical Thinking, and We Were the Mulvaneys, for example).

I was going to leave you with my favorite out of the 52 titles that I read, but it seriously is like Sophie’s Choice. It cannot be done.

Highlights:

• Celebrating my friends’ weddings (even if it was loooong after the fact!) and seeing friends twice in one year;
• Finally visiting the US for the first time, after having studied its literature and history for years;
• Walking around Portland and Seattle;
• Food! Oh my god the food! A gourmet walking tour in Seattle, bread with every meal in Paris, and Dutch treats, I miss all of it already.

The plan for next year is to do some travelling in Australia itself. I can’t wait to see places like Adelaide and Perth, and to spend some time at local wineries in countryside Victoria.

Callum and I spent three and a half weeks in Europe without taking a single picture, so I thought it might be fun to narrate the trip with other people’s photos.

I loved our honeymoon, but if I had a chance to do it all over again I would cut out some of the crazy traveling we did. All in all, we stayed in eight different places over 24 days, which means we had to re-pack our bags every three days, on average. We saw too many trains and airplanes, and had too many multiple-course meals. But we had a wonderful few weeks, and got to spend time with people we’ve been apart from for far too long.

We landed at six o’clock this morning, and after taking a shower, going out for breakfast, unpacking our bags and cleaning up the house, we now find ourselves in a post-holiday depression where all you want to do is nap, your body does not have the energy to pick up semi-unpacked items from the floor, and the Sunday blues never go away. As of my writing this I still have to stay awake for 7 more hours, and I don’t know how I’m going to do it.

abookaweek, the lightning round

If you thought I was going to spend those 7 hours writing about what I read, you need to re-read the part about napping and not having any energy.

In chronological order:

The Dark Volume, by G.W. Dahlquist: did not live up to what the first novel promised, but was fun nonetheless.

Spoiled, by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan: a perfect YA novel.

Old School, by Tobias Wolff: like Dead Poets Society but with so much more intelligence and humor.

The Leftovers, by Tom Perrotta: interesting premise, really well executed.

Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris: the first novel I’ve ever read that’s written in first-person plural; amazing literary feat.

The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkas: my first look into contemporary (Greek-)Australian life; too many wogs, though.

Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice, edited by Alia Malek: fascinating and gripping.