The book is about a man named Viktor who is a writer that is incapable of writing anything of length. He adopts a penguin when the local zoo gives away animals that it can no longer afford to feed. Viktor submits a sketch to a local newspaper and then lucks into a job with them. He is to write obituaries of notable people that the newspaper can have on hand, in case something unfortunate happens to them. I was okay with this premise because I’m pretty sure this is something that actually happens.

Then the story takes an interesting turn, the people in the obituaries start turning up dead. At first, Viktor doesn’t think anything of it. But, as the tale goes on it becomes more and more clear that the people Viktor rights obituaries for are people who have been marked for death by some secret organization. During the tale, we are introduced to Sonya, a little girl that ends up in his care, a local militiaman named Sergey and Sergey’s cousin Nina.

It was an interesting little book that, if I’m being honest, I liked at the beginning and at the end but I didn’t really care for in the middle. Viktor doesn’t seem to know what he wants out of life and would have no direction if it weren’t for his job and the people who enter his life. Viktor’s attempts to play house and into involve himself in the lives of those around him seem half-hearted and wasted. And, reading this book I felt a little lost sometimes myself. I think it was meant to be funnier, satirical, and either I didn’t get it or the humor didn’t quite translate. The ending was unexpected and a little abrupt, but provided an interesting conclusion to the novel. I have Penguin Lost and I will read it soon, but I’m not dying to dive into the book.

The format of the tales was also nice because it presented each case separately, allowing me to read a tale or two before going to bed. I love when author’s create works that conveniently fit into my own habits. I liked the tales so much I bought (for a whole 99 cents) the complete Sherlock Holmes collection for my nook. I haven’t decided which nookbook to read next. I have it narrowed down to three: North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (I just finished the mini-series starring Richard Armitage on Netflix), Silas Marner by George Eliot (from the rolled over book challenge) and by George Alan England (about which I know nothing other than it is the book that immediately follows Sherlock Holmes in the collection.) Any thoughts, my dear readers?

This was a no-brainer. I really wanted to pick something that I cooked, but this meal jumped in my head the moment I thought of what I’d made an posted about this year. This wasn’t my recipe and I wasn’t involved in the cooking. I am, of course, speaking of the OhEmGee Chop. It was so tasty. The creaminess and the wine with the shallots. Ah. I’m drooling just thinking about it now. Onto books, we go!

Divergent by Veronica Roth was the best book I’ve read this year. (Non-school book, clearly). It is the story of a girl living in a dystopian future in a destroyed city of Chicago. Society is broken up into factions and she has to choose which faction will be her faction. But, there is a war coming. She needs to make her choice and keep herself safe and alive. I really enjoyed the main character and the relationships she developed. I am looking forward to the next books in the series. This leaves us with knitting.

While this probably shouldn’t count as the best thing I’ve knitted this year for two reasons: the first one is that it didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to. The second reason is that it is crocheted and not knitted. This wrap is much thinner in the middle than it should be (if I’d followed the pattern and not added and deleted stitches) but that actually just makes it a nicer scarf. I really like the colors and it quite soft and warm. I’m proud of my first big crochet project.

This year I’ve done a lot of cooking, reading, knitting and socializing. I’ve almost gotten so-close-I-can-taste-it to being done with my Qualifying Project and I’ve written and handed in what my advisor called a pre-dissertation-proposal proposal. It has been a busy year!

So, what’s on deck for next year? I’m hoping to move into more budget friendly vegetarian cooking. I also am planning on knitting garments. Oh, so many garments, starting with pairs of socks. I received a bunch of sock yarn a book on how to knit socks two-at-a-time. I also have all the materials to make my first sweater. My human-beings-can-be-terrible-too-post-Christmas-book this year is going to be Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. Finally, I will be starting a new feature that I’m going to call, “Seriously! The Brain!” that features the fun and interesting things I learned last semester in my neuro-anatomy class. And, obviously I plan on moving forward with my PhD. I hope everyone has a lovely and safe New Year’s Eve. I look forward to the awesome things that 2012 will have in store for us all.

So, this was a fun little book. It is mostly about Connie, researching, living in this little town, meeting an interesting man, and being tormented by her advisor who may or may not have gone completely off the rails. But, there are interludes in the book that go back in time to look at Deliverance Dane and her descendants who are introduced to us in the present through dry documents as Connie tries to hunt down the book. I really enjoyed the idea the discussions about what life must have been like before the scientific revolution and how if you’re not making the distinction between correlation and causation that the world would truly be a mysterious and hazardous place. And, I liked the feminist take on the Salem Witch trials and the idea that all of these women describing their worlds in the idiom of the time and that what looks like hocus-pocus or silly to us was a real way of organizing and understanding the world for them. If I have any complaint, I think it would have to be that Connie, who was really on the ball, didn’t seem to catch on to the connections between the present and the past as I’d have liked her to. But, we all have those moments where we realize something that is completely flipping obvious and that we’ve overlooked or taken for granted.

This was a pretty quick read, and you have to love that if you don’t have a lot of spare time to invest fiction.

Hot apple juice is an excellent substitute for hot water when making tea on a cold morning. And, even though Martha Stewart recommended the Earl, I’m quite happy with the Lady (and even happier with Republic of Tea’s Vanilla Almond). Sweeten your mornings!

And, then I didn’t get around to picking it up until the following December.

And, then I put it down again in January and didn’t pick it up until the summer, at which point I decided that I needed to read at least five pages a day in order to not take a whole year in finishing the thing. The book starts out slow. Since it is an autobiography, Mandela starts at the beginning and, maybe this makes me a terrible person but I was looking for the action, the politics, the rebellion, the prison term which you don’t get to until at least 100 pages into the book. But, as I read further I was glad to have had all of that background. First of all, because I know nothing, less than nothing, about African history or family structure, unless you count the occasional paper on kinship terms one reads in Linguistics classes. I don’t know how the tribal system works (Mandela was originally brought up and trained to be an advisor to the King) and I certainly wasn’t aware of how bad it got in South Africa before apartheid was actually ended. The government opened fire on unarmed civilians non-violently protesting. And, in later years factions of the apartheid government covertly funded organizations opposed to unity that went out and slaughtered civilians. That is horrifying. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to live through that. And, to have been in prison for 27 years, missing the childhoods of your children, not being there to take care of your Mother before she died, not being able to go to family funerals, all because you wanted a government where every person, regardless of the color of their skin, has a vote. So, I guess the answer to the question is Nelson Mandela an amazing forgiving machine or is he a man is this: He is a man, a stubborn man, but a man who wanted the freedom that was his. But more than that, Mandela wanted freedom not just for himself but for every South African. As he says at the end of the book:

“It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness.”

Freedom is something that must be protected and we must be mindful of all of the things that we do or say that can take that freedom away, from others and from ourselves. This was an amazing book and Nelson Mandela is a truly inspiring man.

In general, I tend to have trouble with novels (or movies or TV shows) narrated by women.  And, the trouble is this:  I can’t stand Carrie Bradshaw and Meredith Grey and don’t even get me started an the ultimate waste of literary space Isabella Swann.  So, I approached this novel with some caution.  But, Thursday Next bucked the trend.  She is well-read (Of course, she works as a Literatec in the London office at the beginning of the novel).  She is smart and funny.  She is strong and has a moral compass that actually points north.  Additionally, she has some believable hang ups that make her a character one can relate to (instead of a character you want to punch in her stupid, fictional face.)

Additionally, I liked many of her colleagues.  Her new partner, whom she is assigned about halfway through the book is also smart and a little funny.  The other SpecOps that work in her office are endearing as well.  (I really enjoyed Spike!)  And, the premise of the novel was wonderful.  She has to hunt down a maniacal criminal who has the means to enter novels and change their narratives.  At first, spoiler alert, the Baddy succeeds.  But, Thursday and the other characters are clever and won’t let it happen again.  Thursday Next first has to hunt him down in her world and then in the England of Jane Eyre before he does something to Jane and forever changes the beloved novel.  This was a lot of fun, even if it wasn’t the mind-blowing literary experience I was hoping it would be.  I may even read the other books in the series.

This has meant, by and large, that my largest sources of protein are eggs, milk and soy. I got back into milk drinking five years ago mostly by tricking myself into thinking the organic milk didn’t have the hiccups I was worried about with milk in general. And, from a certain standpoint that is probably true. Organic milk won’t have any of the hormones and antibiotics typically fed to animals. But, now I’ve come to realize (thanks to Michael Pollan) that this doesn’t mean that this is milk from cows that have ever actually seen a pasture and that they aren’t over milked. I can’t decide what the best course of action is now that I have this information. Maybe I should try getting my milk straight from a local farmer? I am open to suggestions.

I’ve been getting my eggs from the Farmer’s market and when that wasn’t feasible, I try to buy eggs that are labeled organic and cage-free. This was something I happened on in the past year sort of by accident; it wasn’t a big political or personal decision. I just really, really like eggs (I’m making myself deviled eggs as we speak), and thought that the farmer’s market eggs tasted really nice. Also, it just seemed to be that cage-free chickens probably have a better life. And, thanks to Michael Pollan, I have some confirmation of this. In his book, he describes what can only be called “chicken madness” where laying hens freaks out and rub themselves featherless and raw against their cages. And, that’s just not okay. We may have dominion over animals, but we shouldn’t drive them crazy.

And, I think it may have an effect on what I eat. But, I like being part of the system. I love eating things like mangoes and pineapple and, while it is possible to grow these things organically (I visited an organic farm that grew mangoes in India), you don’t often have a choice in the supermarket. Also, these things have to come from someplace. The only time one of these has ever been “local food” for me was when I actually lived in India (and they were out of season the six months I was there anyway.) It would be irresponsible to grow these things locally any of the other places I’ve lived. So, at least part of the system suits me. So, the first change I’m thinking about making is giving the old college try to actually getting things that are grown around me from people who live around me.

But, as I mentioned earlier on, I need to not feel guilty about this. If I’m hungry and I give in and buy a bag of salad driven cross-country from California, I am allowed to let it slide. We’ll see how this goes.