Current Distractions, Slightly Belated December 2011 Edition

Hello everybody and Happy New Year! I spent last night watching Star Trek: TOS with my bff, and it was awesome. We're almost finished the first season, finally. (There are no fewer than twenty-nine episodes, which is ridiculous.)

Ok, so my distractions for December should be pretty obvious: the stuff I mentioned last monthish, plus holiday preparation and participation. When I wasn't buying stuff to wear to my office Christmas party, I was buying Christmas presents, wrapping Christmas presents, baking, and finally hanging out with family and friends. My holidays were pretty successful overall, so now I just have to go back to work tomorrow and get my boss to approve the holiday request I made a month ago, instead of firing me. (I don't think he'll actually fire me.)

A few other things to mention:

1. I wrote a couple of reviews yesterday that will be going up over the next few weeks, as I finish reading other books and get around to doing the editing of said reviews written yesterday.
2. Might as well sum up everything I read this last year, because it's probably too late to dedicate a post to that all by itself.  Here's a table of all the books I read in 2011 (there are 30 of them, averaging 378 pages each):

I'm too lazy to correct this on the table, but The Evolution of God is technically non-fiction depending on your opinion of evolutionary psychology.  I think you can click to embiggen.

I know this is an ugly table, but the very last thing I am is a visual artist, so you'll have to just deal with it.  Mainly I just wanted to make a spreadsheet to count up pages I read this last year, and the total comes to 10,964!  This averages to about 30 pages read per day, which isn't too bad considering some of the hours that I've been working this I worked last year.  (This number also isn't completely accurate, not just because of not being able to adjust for things like words per page, but simply because I don't know how many pages there were in Kick-Ass.)

• Longest book: The Soldiers of Halla by D. J. MacHale (The surprising conclusion to a pretty sweet YA series.)
• Shortest book: Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson (A picturesque and thoughtful middle-gradeish novel dealing with race, religion, family, etc.)
• Best book: The Magicians by Lev Grossman (So-called "Harry Potter for adults" that also owes a lot to C. S. Lewis and was just so, so good.  The sequel came out this year, but I'm waiting to buy it in paperback because that's what I have the first book in, and I'm crazy like that.)
• Worst book: The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (This is probably some kind of blasphemy to some people, but this book was just so boring.)

I think that covers everything and my laundry is done now, so I have to move on to buying groceries and so on.  I hope you all had good holidays, and keep reading my lame but beloved (i.e. by me) blog in 2012! :)