It looks as if my last bookish review was almost two years ago. I was motivated to read all the moldy books I had rescued from my mom’s house, and all the books I had acquired while traveling, from friend recommendations, free books from on campus, and the stack my dad had gifted me or let me borrow. I had a ton of reading material with no end in sight – and I liked it that way. But as much as I bragged about all the books I was reading I wasn’t sharing any reviews or other proof of having done so.

I feel partly inspired by BreezyK for her ability to read more than me AND still find time to write about it and post plenty of GIFs in her reviews. And I should’ve taken my dad’s advice in December of 2012 when I read lots of books to post more about them then, but I didn’t – so I’m doing it now. Most of my 2012 reading happened pre-April, with no summer reading – WHAT?!, and a strong finish in December as a way to pass the time while I worked at Indo-Euro Foods.

I reread The Little Prince to get back in touch with my childish imagination – something all adults should do more frequently in a more responsible way. I did not attempt to turn my living room or the grocery store into an outer space playhouse. I would read A History of the World in 100 Objects twice – that’s how good and informational it is. It was about the how, why, who, when, and where these things were made. And about what survived, and what was taboo for a while, and what is still very popular today. The book made me ask a lot of insightful questions about our species – I love that.

My dad gifted me with Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You about Being Creative – a quick book that can easily be read over a very long lunch break, but that should be read again for dinner, breakfast with mom, tea with your neighbor, and over the holidays. It tells you to create and stop making excuses not to. The next book, The Happiness Project was a great influence on me. It inspired me to come up with mantras on how to live my life better, and in turn making the lives of those around me happier too. “The only person you can change is yourself.”

Sense and Sensibility is an old story of two sisters finding happiness with elegant prose – if only my sister and I could be sophisticated and kept our problems so simple. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern  is a 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner and for good reason. It’s able to tie together thoughts over 1,000 years old to more modern ideas that may have been lost because of their heresy or a monks ability to write legibly. Definitely an interesting read. A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living is one that I need to reread to better understand, but what I grasped was – Don’t live in the nostalgia of the past or the hope of the future, but live in the present.

Lone Survivors: How we Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth would be the last book of 2012. It was thought provoking with lots of dates and facts about some creative evolutionary ideas. Perhaps it was too much book for me, but it’s better to have gained even one thing from a hard read than to have not read at all. It sounds like a familiar love quote, “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” – Lord Tennyson, 1850 – that came from reading. These books and more helped me read 32 in total, 9,424 pages, in the year of the Dragon – because everyone knows that reptiles love to read.