2016 - The Good Stuff

It will come as no surprise to you that the last few months of 2016 have been tough for me (largely for the same reason that they've been tough for a lot of you). As the year comes to a close, I'm trying hard to focus on what was good this year. And for my family, there was so much to be happy about! I'm taking this time to look back and remember what was great about 2016.

Favorite Podcasts

* Reading Women: a bi-weekly show hosted by two women I "met" through Litsy who discuss books by or about women. They are so passionate about the books they talk about!

* Happier with Gretchen Rubin: filled with suggestions and plans to bring more happy into your life. I'm especially found of the quick tips in each episode. 

* Radiolab: Jan Abumrad and Robert Krulwich tackle one big idea every week, ideas no one else is covering. For instance, did you know that there was not even a word for the color blue until, relatively speaking, not that long ago? There was an entire show about color and it was fascinating. 

* Best of the Left: feeding the beast, to be sure, but the podcast really looks deeply into a wide variety of issues. I always feel so much smarter after I listen!

* Nerdette: how I missed these ladies while they were on hiatus. Sure they are nerds but the great thing is that they are female nerds interested in so many things that are traditionally thought of as more "guy" things.

Sports Highlights

* Attending the U. S. Swim Trials. Omaha has hosted the trials three times and we love going to see the future of the U.S. Olympic swim team.

* Watching those same swimmers succeed in the Olympics. Oh heck, watching all of the Olympics coverage. I'm an addict!

* Attending the College World Series. Oh lordy, was it ever hot but so much fun to watch the games and see the enthusiasm those young men bring to the sport.

* Watching my beloved Oakland Raiders clinch a spot in the NFL playoffs for the first time in 14 years. I've been a fan since the 1960's, the glory years. It's been a long time since we had something to really cheer about.

* All of the wonderful tributes to Nebraska punter Sam Foltz, who was killed in a car accident over the summer. From the opening game missing player formation, to the tribute on Senior Day, to all of the wonderful things competing teams have done in his memory, Sam has never been far from our minds.

Best Books of the Year

Fiction:

A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles

Miller's Valley by Anna Quindlen

Salvage The Bones by Jesmyn Ward

Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleve

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

Nonfiction:

How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran

Behind The Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

Butter: A Rich History by Elaine Khosrova

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

Audio:

Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day by Winifred Watson

And The Moutains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

The Absolutist by John Boyne

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

Personal Highlights

* Watching our greater family grow: one niece got married, one nephew got engaged, and another nephew and his wife welcomed The Princess, my parents' first great-grandchild.

* Our trip to Milwaukee, especially all of the time we spent on the shore of Lake Michigan.

* Miss H returning to college, finding her calling and making the Dean's List.

* Mini-me's terrific thesis art project and graduation with honors, as well as Miss S's hooding and graduation with her doctorate. So proud of both of them!

* THE highlight of the year was the engagement of Mini-me and Miss S. We couldn't be happier that they found each other and can't wait for their wedding in 2017.

The List: Books I'm Looking Forward To In 2017

On the assumption that I'm also reading my own damn books and clearing off my Nook and iPad as well, these are some of the book being published in 2017 that I'm looking forward to reading. Of course, you know me by now and know that I'm more likely to finally get around to most of these in 2018!

Books By Authors I've Read Before (and the books I've previously read by them):

The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova (The Historian and The Swan Thieves)

South and West by Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking)

Selection Day by Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger)

Manderley Forever by Tatiana De Rosnay (Sarah's Key)

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia and The Reluctant Fundamentalist)

Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge, The Burgess Boys, My Name Is Lucy Barton)

Books By Authors I've Been Wanting To Read:

Difficult Women by Roxane Gay

A Book of American Martyrs by Joyce Carol Oates

Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders

The One Inside by Sam Shepard

The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan

Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips

Victoria: The Queen by Julia Baird

So this is a start anyway. You KNOW I'll be adding a lot more to the list as the year goes on. What are you looking forward to in 2017?

A Month of Faves: Challenges

Today's prompt is Challenges: The Year End Update on Reading Challenges, Personal Goals, and Resolutions. Let's kick this off with the reading challenges, where I was more successful than usual.

In 2016, I signed up for just four reading challenges (because I know myself and know that the 13 I signed up for one year was never going to happen), the Nonfiction Reading Challenge, Diversity On The Shelf, Women Challenge #4, and #ReadMyOwnDamnBooks.

My goal for the Nonfiction Reading Challenge was to read 11-15 nonfiction books in 2016. Despite feeling like I had read as many nonfiction books as I wanted to read, I did end up reading 13, which is more than I usually read so I'm pleased. As usual, though, I'm fairly certain that I didn't once link any of the books I'd read back to the challenge page. It's my biggest drawback as a challenge participant! I'll likely participate in this challenge again in 2017, likely with the same goal just to make sure I'm at least reading a nonfiction book a month on average.

For the Diversity On The Shelf challenge, my goad was to read 1-6 books by and/or about persons of color in 2016. Which is a pretty lame goal, I must admit so I'm pleased to report that I ended up reading 11 books that qualified. Although, also slightly embarrassed to admit that I only read that number. I will definitely be signing up for this challenge again but I will not be letting myself off so easily in 2017.

I really don't need a challenge to remind myself to read books written by women, I tend to read a lot of books written by women anyway. But, just in case, I did join the Women Challenge #4 to make sure I pushed that number high. I set my goal to read 20+ books written by women in 2016 and stopped counting months ago when I reaching 25 books. In the end, well more than half of the books I read in 2016 will have been written by women. In 2017, even though this doesn't seem like much of a challenge for me, I'll probably sign up again, this year with the idea that I will really push myself to read books by women that address feminist issues.

Finally, the #ReadMyOwnDamnBooks challenge, where I challenged myself to read 40 books in 2016 that I already owned at the beginning of the year. You know, to clear off shelves. To reduce the number of books I bought. Picture me hanging my head in shame when I admit that I only read 21 of my own damn books in 2016. And that includes three plays. Which I read on the Serial app, not even from the books I already owned. Although most of the new books I actually bought in 2016 were ebooks or audiobooks, I still didn't read enough books off my shelves to make up for the new ones I put on them. My husband says this is a clear sign I own too many books. Which, as we all know, is not a thing. Still, it's a good idea to try to at least keep up so this will be a perpetual challenge for me. Maybe I need to keep that little icon at the top of my blog page to remind myself not to get carried away with shiny new books for review?

As for personal goals, let's just say I was more successful with the #ReadMyOwnDamnBooks challenge. To be fair to myself, I didn't really set a long list of personal goals for myself in 2016 but I had a list of things in my head that I wanted to work on, largely tied to my one word for 2016, happier.

Topping that list was to eat healthier and become more fit. Yeah, that did not happen. But, with just six months until my son's wedding, it absolutely IS happening in 2017.

The second goal was to become more organized. In working toward that goal, I started a bullet journal. It's still a work in progress but after four months, I'm ready to commit to a real journal book, not just a makeshift one. I know what I want out of the journal now and what I can do without. I'd liked to have had only one book for everything but think I will likely use three, one for life, one for blogging, and one for the wedding. In the coming year, I'd also like to "schedule" a time every week that is solely devoted to staying organized - shredding, filing, keeping the fridge cleaned out. Surely I have an hour a week to do that, right?

As for resolutions, I didn't set resolutions for 2016. They never work. Instead, I chose my one word with the idea to pursue the things that would make that word happen in 2016. My word was "happier." I joined an online challenge to help with that, which I neglected to realize lasted only 90 days so that was a failure. BUT...I did listen to Gretchen Rubin's podcast, Happier, on a fairly regular basis to help me find little ways to make my life easier and happier. I read her book, The Happiness Project, which may yet result in me setting up my own happiness project in 2017. I put little notes on my refrigerator, my desk at home, my desk at work that said, simply, "happier." A lot of what I do at work is talk to customer's on the phone. It's easy to let that really get me agitated. I'm not going to say that little note stopped that from happening entirely, but it helped. It helped remind me that I was not going to let someone else's anger make me angry or ruin my day. At home, it helped remind me that it was okay to sit and read if that made me happier but also to reorganize the pantry when it was starting to get out of control because I know that opening the doors to that and finding it all neat and tidy will make me happier. Lots of great things happened in my family in 2016; in that way, it was easier to be happier in 2016. It's certainly a word I could use again in 2017. It's never a bad thing to work to be happier.

The Boys In The Boat by Daniel James Brown

The Boys In The Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest of Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown
Published June 2013 by Penguin Books
Source: purchased for my Nook

Publisher's Summary:
It was an unlikely quest from the start. With a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the University of Washington’s eight-oar crew team was never expected to defeat the elite teams of the East Coast and Great Britain, yet they did, going on to shock the world by defeating the German team rowing for Adolf Hitler. The emotional heart of the tale lies with Joe Rantz, a teenager without family or prospects, who rows not only to regain his shattered self-regard but also to find a real place for himself in the world. Drawing on the boys’ own journals and vivid memories of a once-in-a-lifetime shared dream, Brown has created an unforgettable portrait of an era, a celebration of a remarkable achievement, and a chronicle of one extraordinary young man’s personal quest.

My Thoughts:
The title of this book may be a little misleading. This book is about far more than just the nine young men who rowed to victory in 1936; it's also about the coaches who made them ready for that shot (and one competing coach who pushed their coaches) and the guru who made their shells and who probably knew more about rowing than all of the rest of them put together. But it's also, at its heart, the story of just one young man whose life had been anything but the stereotypical life of a rower. By focusing on Joe Rantz, Brown almost gives the story a David versus the Goliath German war and propaganda machine feel.

This book's been getting great reviews since it came out but I kept putting it off, partly because I  clearly wasn't reading reviews (or, for that matter, the title) closely enough. For some reason, I kept thinking it was a survival story and as it came to my attention so soon after I read Unbroken, I just couldn't make myself read another survival story. Just as I finally realized what the book was really about, one of my book club members suggested the club read it, just the push I needed.

While I have some issues with the book, I'm glad I finally got that push. The story of those young men is as much their story as it is the story of the United States during the worst of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, events that you have to understand to really grasp what life was like for the young men competing for the University of Washington's crew teams.

The story wouldn't be complete unless readers also understood what the boys were up against when they finally made it to Germany. I keep thinking there's nothing new for me to read about World War II (well, at least anything I'm interested in reading about) but then I find there is, in fact, something new to learn. Sure, I knew that the 1936 Olympics were a major bit of Nazi propaganda, ruined to some extent by the incredible performances turned in by the United States track and field team. But I wasn't fully aware of how deep that effort had gone or how much emphasis they had put on their dominance in the rowing events.

Likewise, I had no idea how big rowing had been in parts of the United States at the time. It's long been overshadowed by other sports; certainly it's never been a major sport in my lifetime. In the 1930's, rowing was big news, especially considering how few teams even competed. This was the chance for a group of boys who'd led tough lives to really become somebodies. Making that varsity boat, winning those races, getting to the Olympics - Brown really makes readers understand why it was so important to all involved.

Sometimes the book dragged for me. I could have done with fewer details about each individual race and about how the shells were made. Although, I understand, too, that knowing the strategy of races was important to understanding how the Americans were able to prevail in the end. The good news for readers like me, is that it's easy enough to skim those parts and get back to the parts that keep you turning pages. I could also have used a who's-who list - there are a lot of names of and I sometimes  lost track of who was who.

The Boys In The Boat gave me everything I hoped to get out of a book about little guys defeating the big, bad guy and then some. It's a well-researched nonfiction work that tells its story with real heart.

Merry Christmas!

From my family to yours, we wish you a very Merry Christmas and hope you are able to spend it with people you love!