At the end of 2010 i set a goal for myself to finish 12 books in 2011. I’m happy to say that i did meet that goal. Here’s my lineup, courtesy of goodreads.com:

And because you probably can’t read the titles, here’s the list (in order of when i finished them, from the most recent on down):

1. Marley and Me by John Grogan
2. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
3. The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
4. I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage by Susan Squire
5. Lying by Sam Harris
6. French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano
7. Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It by Gary Taubes
8. Bossypants by Tina Fey
9. Naked by David Sedaris
10. Letters To A Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens (may he rest in peace)
11. Remaking Eden by Lee M. Silver
12. The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and some other guy

I grabbed Marley and Me at a used bookstore in California when i finished Water For Elephants too quickly. I thought the former was a little too much of a writer-writing-about-being-a-writer type of memoir (you remember how i hate those, don’t you?) but i was suffering a pretty bad bout of puppy fever when i picked it up, so it entertained me. Water For Elephants was a really good piece of fiction—and by “good” i mean “entertaining.” DO NOT watch the movie until you’ve read the book! The movie will ruin the book for you, much moreso than other movies ruin other books. I can’t tell you anything more than that without giving too much away. Also, the movie is pretty much just bad all around, whether you read the book or not.

I Don’t was very dull. Lying was very intriguing and very short. Naked started off quite funny and quickly turned very weird. Remaking Eden was interesting if a little slow and sometimes far-fetched. It makes some really good points about why the “life begins at conception” argument is scientifically incorrect. I wish i could remember them.

Letters to a Young Contrarian was a little over my head, but it deepend my admiration for Hitchens. The book really made me feel like he was a champion of truth, and that that’s a very worthy thing to be even if it means ruffling a lot of feathers. He was still alive when i read it, and now that i’m reading his memoir, he is gone.

I expected Bossypants to go one of two ways: very funny, or very intimate. It was neither. It leaned more to the funny side, but i kind of felt like she was just addressing the major questions that she gets asked all the time (Why do you have that scar? How did you get a job writing for SNL?) rather than trying to communicate an original idea. I still liked it and i’m still a huge fan of hers, i just think her talent for writing is put to better use on scripts.

So, for 2012 i’ve made it my goal to read 13 books (although 15 would make for a nicer layout in that goodreads screenshot, hm?). I think i’ll try not to read more than one memoir this year, and this time i mean it. I want to read more about UI and other sciency things. And in keeping with last year, i probably won’t read more than one novel.

Any recommendations? Come be my friend on Goodreads so i can see what you’re reading!

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I blogged even less this year than i did last year, so i need to at least do a wrap-up for my own sake so that i can remember what happened this year. In order to keep it short, i’m going to experiment with more of an organized format.

January

In January of this year we suddenly decided that interest rates looked like they’d be rising sharply soon, and so we went one night to a seminar about buying a first house. We wound up being the only two people there. Two days later we went visiting homes in the area with the realtors who taught the seminar. The first house had a crappy basement. The next three had tiny kitchens. But the fifth one had a roomy kitchen, two fireplaces, a finished basement and an enormous shower with two showerheads. We fell swiftly in love with it, even though we had almost passed the house by because it was further north than we wanted to be. We made an offer that day, and within about a week the deal was sealed. We were on our way to purchasing our first house.

(The doors are different now, this is an old photo)

February

In February we took a trip to Chicago and moved into our new house!

March

In March Nathan traded in his BMW 1-series for a BMW Z4 M. He was a happy, happy boy. I was a stressed-out bride-to-be (but i don’t regret agreeing to let him make the switch. he really loves the car).

April

In April i had my bachelorette party. It was a blast! We went to Appare for dinner, had oreo balls at the house and then went to Uncle Buck’s for some dancing action. The ladies bought me drinks and i danced until i got all sweaty and gross. It was awesome.

May

In May we got married!!!

June

In June we went to Cancun for our honeymoon. After all that stress with the new house and the new car and planning the loveliest wedding, it was absolutely fantastic to just sit on the beach and do nothing.

July

In July Dustin visited before he went back down to Oklahoma to start his internship. We went to an Iowa Cubs game with Mom and i made the game seem pretty fascinating in comparison to my talk of the books i’d been reading.

August

In August i turned 26. My guy friends had a party for me at their place. We ate BLTs and stayed up late watching Twilight with the RiffTrax on, and then we went out to a park to watch the Perseids meteor shower. I had been warned that it was going to be crappy this year because of the full moon, but we went anyway and each of us saw at least a couple of shooting stars. I want to make this an annual birthday tradition, and hopefully the skies will be nice and dark for me in 2012.

September

In September we went to Iowa City for Nathan’s birthday. We got burgers and beers at The Vine and stayed at a weird little eco-friendly/vegetarian/salvaged-everything bed and breakfast. In the morning we went to Wilson’s orchard and picked apples for pies and apple dumplings.

October

In October we went to Grinnell to see Ume. The show was in the basement of a dormitory, and for a long time it didn’t look like anyone else was coming. North America opened with some spooky instrumental music, and then the college kids (who had all brought their own beverages) really started rocking out when Ume took the stage. It was a really good show, and it was free! I got Lauren’s autograph before we left.

November

In November we learned that my brother has cancer. It’s not really my place to talk about it much, but i can say that for a minute there i was truly scared and i thought that my extreme luck in life was about to run out. It turned out not to be quite as bad as some of us had feared, but still something that was very serious and needed to be dealt with as quickly as possible. My brother came and stayed with us over Thanksgiving and it was wonderful to see him. Shortly thereafter he began his treatment. So far he’s feeling extremely well despite everything, and we’re really hopeful that this will all pass without even being terribly difficult. I can’t express what a relief that is.

December

Earlier this month we went to California to celebrate my grandfather’s 90th birthday. It’s always nice to go down there, especially in the winter since it’s still warm enough to walk around in a light jacket. My grandparents seemed to be doing really well—even better than the last time i saw them, i think—but my great aunt did happen to be in the hospital with some grave-sounding infection. She’s 92, herself. I was glad to be able to go down there and see everyone, including my Dad and his wife.

So, that about wraps it up. What a year! One of the best possible things and one of the worst possible things happened in rapid succession. I still feel incredibly fortunate. I have a husband who is wonderful is so many ways, and a dear little house in which to live with him. I did not change jobs this year, which is a first for me. And my brother is going to be fine, which i’m eternally thankful for. It was a terrible thing that he got cancer, but i’m a lucky, lucky girl to have always had him in my life and to be able to continue on that way.

I don’t want to make any promises i can’t keep, but in 2012 i hope to be a little more social and a little more creative. I’m starting to miss my creative outlets, and i plan to take some classes and/or make some time to get back into making beautiful things. I’m not sure what yet, but hopefull you’ll see.

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My company is closed today, so i have the day off work. Nathan is working, so i’m home alone. Here’s how i entertain myself (once i’ve finally rolled out of bed):

I photograph the sugar cookies i made at my cookie decorating party.

Merry Christmas!

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I’ve recently become interested in a field of study called User Experience; it’s kind of a mashup of psychology and design, which is right up my alley and highly applicable to and important in the realm of web development, which (as you may know) is my profession. I don’t know why i’ve never really learned anything about User Experience (or UX, as it’s called), but i think reading about it might give me renewed passion for what i do. So, i’ve started a to-read list of some UX books, and i began my research with The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz, which turned out to be more applicable to my everyday life than to my career.

I expected this book to be primarily about consumer culture and how the overwhelming array of choices in any given retail environment actually scares off customers. I thought it was a book about UX, but it actually only touched on the consumer aspects of overwhelming choice. It focused more on people and how too many choices tend to make many of us miserable; it turned out to be more like what i wanted Blink and How We Decide to be. It explained how there are two types of people when it comes to making decisions: maximizers, who agonize over choosing the best thing and often keep looking once they’ve made a decision, and satisficers, who start a search with a set of criteria and stop searching once they’ve found something that meets those criteria. I’m definitely a maximizer. And as it turns out, maximizers are more prone to depression, regret, and dissatisfaction with their decisions.

Schwartz’s central argument in the book is that the increased number of choices that modern people face for just about every aspect of life actually leads us to be less satisfied in life—even though we have it better in almost every objective way than any previous generation of humans ever has—because most of us tend to be maximizers. I saw so much of myself in this book; this is why planning the wedding was so difficult for me, this is why i constantly compare my physical appearance to others, this is why i still don’t know what i want to be when i grow up. The world is too wide-open; i have too much freedom, i’ve been encouraged to want perfection and i blame myself when i don’t think i’ve achieved it. If i were a satisficer, life would be so much more—well, satisfying. Which is not to say that i don’t feel extremely privileged and grateful for the wonderful life that i do have. I just don’t focus on that gratitude as much as i should.

I thought this was a really insightful, useful book. My only criticism is that it almost felt more like a self-help than a science book. I think it could’ve been backed up by more research. I do think i was in need of the help it offered, though. I need to go shopping for boots soon, and when i do i now know to get my expectations sorted out beforehand, not set them too high, and only look at a couple of different shops. Wish me luck.

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I’m finding that i only really remember the books i write reactions to, while everything else i read fades pretty quickly from my memory. Thus, my triumphant return to book reviews. I hope you enjoy.

I recently read a couple of books about—well, fat. And they were both good, to different degrees and for different reasons. The first was Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It by Gary Taubes, and the second was French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano. While the former was well-researched, well-argued and smart, i thought the latter was anecdotal, nonscientific and a little bit boastful, but still for the most part worth reading. And, in fact, i felt i was able to glean the best advice from Guiliano’s book having read Taubes first and knowing where the text was probably flat-out incorrect.

I really think everyone ought to read Why We Get Fat. Everyone in America, especially, including the dietitians, personal trainers and doctors out there (hear me, family? ). If you disagree with Taubes, that’s perfectly fine. But you might want to do some research of your own to decide whether you disagree because you’ve been told otherwise, or because you can find evidence that contradicts the stuff he’s found.

Basically, Taubes argues that what we all know about weight management—that you must balance calories in/calories out, that saturated fat causes heart disease, etc.—is almost certainly wrong. I first heard about Taubes when i read his article for the New York Times entitled Is Sugar Toxic?, and i realized that he wasn’t just restating the obvious nutritional advice that we’ve all heard a thousand times, but was actually doing real research on the subject. So i sat up and paid attention, and i wasn’t too happy to learn what i did from his book. Meat is one of the best foods for us. Carbs, especially highly-processed ones like sugar and white flour, are almost certainly the worst. And while the book is very focused and sticks nearly exclusively to explaining the question raised by its title, it is quickly mentioned toward the end of the book (with no less convincing evidence) that carbs are probably also what cause many cancers, heart disease and diabetes. So even though i’m not a fat person, i feel like i should cut that crap out of my diet as much as possible for the rest of my life.

Have i started to do so? Absolutely not. Nathan and i have probably consumed more doughnuts since i read that book than ever before in our lives. But we’re thinking really hard about it.

French Women Don’t Get Fat was a different animal entirely. Guiliano cites nary a source nor study in her text, though she does refer to a whopping three individuals for whom her method has made a little bit of difference, in addition to her own fat-to-skinny tale. The basics of her philosophy are: enjoy what you eat as much as possible but eat moderate portions, especially of treats like bread (carbs), chocolate (carbs), desserts (carbs), fruit juices (carbs) and alcohol (carbs); walk a lot; and drink a lot of water.

Interestingly, there’s a lot of overlap between her approach to staying in shape and Taubes’s, despite the fact that Guiliano dismisses the low-carb approach to food as “ridiculous” and thinks that to practice that way of eating is to “risk heart disease” (not true). Everything that she says to eat in especially small amounts is a high-carb food (with the exception of meat). She and Taubes both advocate drinking a lot of water and eating plenty of greens. Both authors recommend eating plenty of soup as well, and limiting the intake of alcohol (especially beer, *sniff*) to a very low amount. Both advocate eating large meals and disdain snacking, and neither of them sees the point of intensive exercise as a method for weight loss when the result of it is almost always an increased appetite and calorie intake.

But from reading Why We Get Fat i can tell Guiliano that walking twenty minutes each day is not going to help anyone lose weight, either. It’s certainly not a bad idea and nothing ill is going to result from it, but it’s the diet that’s going to reduce a person’s waistline, not the evening stroll. She claims that those few extra burned calories “really add up,” but as Taubes points out, that can’t possibly be true unless everyone whose weight doesn’t fluctuate at all is consuming a very perfect number of calories every single day. Consider that if a person ate just twenty extra calories each day, it would take only a couple of decades for those calories to add up to an extra fifty pounds if the calorie balance imperative is true. Conversely, if a person were undereating by just twenty calories each day, she would steadily waste away over the years.

The body handles different types of calories in different ways. I’m not going to attempt to re-hash the science in Taubes’s book, because i didn’t take notes and i’d probably get it slightly wrong. But it made perfect sense to me. You should read the book, especially if you think what i’m saying is a bunch of bull.

And i think there’s a lot of truth, too, to the French idea that while Americans enjoy gorging on huge portions of food, we might actually enjoy it more if we stopped thinking of it as “sinful” and took the time to really think about and taste what we’re eating. I also thought Guiliano’s advice to cook a lot, avoid processed foods and try to eat a lot of local, seasonal produce was sage advice that would do a lot for our country. If only it were as cheap and easy to shop a farmer’s market as it is to hit up Subway, eh?

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