JANUARY MISCELLANY

January 19: This week, I started reading the last two library books that stand between me and Reading Project 2007. Luckily, they’re both great, so I can’t resent them. At home, I’m reading Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert, and as always, marveling at how he conveys his opinions with such clarity and efficiency without sacrificing humor or intelligence or enthusiasm. On my lunch breaks, I’m being steadily amazed by Dave Eggers’ gorgeous, egoless, truly heartbreaking What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achek Deng, a novel based on the true story of a Sudanese refugee. Even if you’re an Eggers hater (I’m not, but I know they’re out there), it’s worth reading.

Though I may not get going on it for another week or so, I’ve posted my 2007 reading list so you can follow along (ha) at home. Also, just in case anyone was waiting for incontrovertible, quantitative proof of my dorkitude, here it is: I have created an Excel bar graph of my annual reading volume for the last 13 years. I don’t know…I was curious, and I had the data, and I like to play with Excel, so why not? Looking at the dips and spikes is pretty funny. Lord knows what I was doing with 106 books in 1994, my junior year of high school—they were just shorter than what I read now, I hope, because I’m pretty sure I had homework, extracurricular activities, a boyfriend, and at least a semblance of a social life at the time. The numbers sink their lowest during my later college years; ironically, I was reading more then than at any other point in my life, but they were massive books (Barnaby Rudge, anyone?) and writing papers about all of them detracted from my recreational reading time. (Still, I managed to hold my own somewhat while working boring jobs during my idle J-terms and summers, much as my dad made his way through thousands of paperbacks, carrying them around in his back pocket, during a stint as a hospital orderly post-college.) The numbers rise after graduation, dip mysteriously in 2003, then become consistently middling starting in 2004, the point at which I moved in with a boy and two cats who can all be highly (though adorably) distracting.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out right now how to paste said graph into this post. Perhaps on Monday, after a weekend of fun (I have many happy social plans, hooray), my mind will be fresher.

January 26: I had a highly uneventful week, mostly due to the fact that I’ve spent all my free time with my nose buried in What Is the What—both because it’s riveting and because I have to return it to the library tomorrow. During the time that I’ve been reading it, it’s been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, an honor it fully deserves. (Also nominated? One of my favorite books of last year, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.)