My top reads for 2012

Not necessarily books that were released that year, but my favorites of the many many books I read in 2012:

  • Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter
  • Little Century, Anna Keesey
  • Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, Mark Harris
  • Forgotten Country, Catherine Chung
  • Binocular Vision, Edith Pearlman
  • The Secret in Their Eyes, Eduardo Sacheri
  • Please Look After Mom, Kyung-Sook Shin
  • Cold Magic, Kate Elliott
  • Wild, Cheryl Strayed
  • The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table, Tracie McMillan
  • The Influencing Machine, Brooke Gladstone
  • Accidents of Providence, Stacia M. Brown
  • Daughter of the Forest, Juliet Marillier
  • American Grown, Michelle Obama
  • Midnight in Austenland, Shannon Hale

The list on Amazon!

All the books I read in 2012 (minus the romance novels I read but don’t keep track of on Goodreads).

As I come to the end of 2012, two events.

As if the holidays weren’t crazy enough, here are two events that have happened to me in the past two days:

1) My car got hit Thursday morning as I headed to work, seconds after I left my complex driveway.  I am okay, my car is mostly okay, but it was still a shock.  I surprised myself by screaming when it happened, instead of using my horn.  It really freaked me out.

The other driver claimed fault and Geico (her insurance) is taking care of me.  I took my car into the shop yesterday afternoon and picked up my rental car (much much fancier than my quaint Civic).  They couldn’t give me a time estimate because of the holidays, but since I’m not paying for the rental, I’m okay.

I drove home afterwards to discover that

2) my cat had locked me out of my apartment.  How would a cat do this? you may wonder.  Well, I had a bookshelf by the door because I liked that Panda would be sitting on it when I walked in the door.  NEVER did I consider his nefarious plot to one day paw the privacy deadbolt slightly over a tad so that I couldn’t get into my apartment.

Luckily the management staff hadn’t yet left for the day and we were able to get the door open without breaking anything or it costing me any money.

Needless to say I had to do some furniture rearranging last night.  Now there is no way my cat can reach the top deadbolt, unless he grows some inches taller anytime soon.

I called my friend S yesterday evening to tell her about it and she invited me to come look at lights that night, but I confessed I was afraid to leave my apartment.

However, I left this morning to run some errands and no out-of-the-ordinary events occurred (besides a deli-worker distracting me with conversation so much that I ended up buying $10 worth of chicken salad), so maybe that is it for bizarre, worrying events to close out my 2012.

LET’S HOPE SO