Happy New Year!!!

2025. We were supposed to have flying cars and teleporters and food pills by now (so we can stop cooking all the damn time!), and instead we have…*gestures vaguely out the window* whatever all that mess is. But we still have books, and for that, we can be grateful. (Until all those are banned, and then I riot. Join me.)

(Sorry, feeling a little cynical today, I guess.)

This has been a year of growth for me, of major revelations, and long-term goal setting. It’s been the first year of what will be a lot of years of hard work, but I’m here for it, and I’m ready for the challenge. I’m also ready for a year of great reads ahead, although I know my reading is likely going to look a little different from here on out. And that’s okay. To everything there is a season, and if I put in the work now, there will be time to read more in the future. : )

But anyway.

Let’s get this recap started, shall we?

Books I Read in December 2024

1. The Summer Place by Jennifer Weiner

2. What’s Wrong?: Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine by Erin Williams

3. Hoot by Carl Hiaasen (read out loud to my daughter)

4. The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh

5. The Comic Book Guide to Growing Food: Step-by-Step Vegetable Gardening for Everyone by Joseph Tychonievich

6. Hatchet by Gary Paulsen (read out loud to my daughter)

7. Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital by Eric Manheimer

8. The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare (read out loud to my daughter)

9. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (read out loud to my daughter)

10. Kantika by Elizabeth Graver

11. What She Knew by Gilly Macmillan

12. Medical Billing and Coding for Dummies by Karen Smiley

13. Good Harbor by Anita Diamant

14. The Covenant by Naomi Ragen

The biggest book I’m not counting here is the anatomy and physiology textbook I read in its entirety (and finished this month!) and took notes from (148 pages of typed notes, which, handwritten, filled three and a half subjects of a notebook). I’m now studying 1-2 chapters of notes per day in order to more fully understand the material, but as you might suspect, this took a LOT of my reading time this year. I’m more than okay with this, though! It’ll pay off in the future.

The Lost Year is a middle grade novel I discovered at work when I checked it back in from the book drop. It tells, in dual timelines and multiple narratives, the story of the Holodomor (haven’t heard of it? Yeah, neither had I, which was the instant I knew this book would be coming home with me). It’s an excellent, if extremely sobering read. The Summer Place was great; Jennifer Weiner is always a win for me. The read-alouds with my daughter were good; we read in the mornings instead of her watching television while she eats, and that helps us get through a lot of books together.

Fourteen books total this month, bringing my yearly total to 202 books. Ten fiction; four nonfiction (or at least close enough to it); two of these were graphic nonfiction. Nine of these came from my own shelves! 

Speaking of which, I read over NINETY BOOKS from my own shelves this year! I’m REALLY proud of this. It was my goal this year, once I finished up with my monstrous TBR list, to start reading down my own shelves, and so far, so good. I’ve dumped so many books into nearby Little Free Libraries, which makes me happy. More knowledge and shelf space and less clutter for me, more knowledge and enjoyable reading for my neighbors. Everyone wins. : )

Bookish Things I Did in December 2024

I worked at the library! And worked. And worked. And SHELVED. Y’all, we are SO. BACKED. UP. in terms of shelving. It’s utterly insane. The way people read around here is NUTS. When I left work the other night, we had all our shelving carts filled and ready to shelve, and almost all of our return carts full and unsorted. We quite literally cannot keep in any meaningful way, or even come close to keeping up, with the flood of returns. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good problem to have, but it’s still exhausting!

State of the TBR

Still looking good! So far, I’ve got the book I’m going through day-by-day as it’s intended (I’ll finish it up in, I believe, February, and then it’ll be off the list), one book I’m on hold for (a co-worker has it checked out right now, haha!), and another book that doesn’t come out until mid-February. Three books total. Not bad.

Books I Acquired in December 2024

…I don’t think I got any for myself. I did get my younger daughter a bunch of books for the holidays, but…I don’t actually think I got myself any. 

Weird!

Current Podcast Love

Still listening to Big Mad True Crime, mostly as I fall asleep/wake up in the middle of the night, but when I get some knitting done, I’ve been listening to the Craftsmanship podcast, which has a lot of interesting episodes on various earth-loving topics (soil building, sustainable textiles as they relate to environmental health, rewilding, etc), all stuff that’s very much up my hippie alley.

Stephanie’s Read Harder Project

Still no movement on the Whitman. I WILL get back to this, hopefully soon, especially since I’ve finished the A&P textbook and am now just studying from my notes. Surely there will be a FEW minutes in there between note studying and medical terminology for poetry, right??? 

Real Life Stuff

It was a seriously busy month at work. I passed my Passport Agent test (yay me!), so next up is shadowing appointments with other Agents at my workplace (no solo appointments until I get the groove of it, fortunately!). But remember a few years back, when my town got the new library building? It’s PHENOMENAL…but the community is definitely using the new space very differently than they used the last building, and that includes checking out WAY more physical materials. Our library year wrapped came out at the end of November (so these numbers don’t even include the whirlwind that was this month!), and by then we’d already circulated over 499,000 PHYSICAL ITEMS. We’ll *easily* have hit over half a million physical items this month, and boy, do I believe it. The amount of returns we get and thus have to reshelve is just pure insanity some days. Again, excellent problem to have (Oh no, I live in an extremely literate community! Help!), but it can be daunting when you’re the sole shelver for a shift, you walk in to see 8+ full carts, you’re also on the schedule to cover for other co-workers’ breaks during that time, AND you hear books being returned all night long in the book drop. 

See what I mean? So if you ever go to the library and look up a book, and then find it’s not on the shelf like it says it is…be kind. I promise you, we’re absolutely doing our best to get it back out there. It’s not easy. 

That said, I LOVE this job. I adore my co-workers, who enjoy the library insanity as much as I do; I love my patrons, especially the ones who are so super excited when a hold comes in (high five to the guy who shouted “YES!” when he saw that his SECOND inter-library loan had come in along with the first the other night; the delight I feel when I have patrons who are just as enthusiastic as I am when my holds come in is extreme); I love the kids, especially the toddlers who, upon realizing that their little toddler voices echo in our entryway, make all kinds of fun vocal noises, and their parents, who are desperately trying to shush them (it’s okay! We get it, and we find it adorable); the oversharer kids (sorry about your dead parakeets, little friend!); the English-language learners, who have put up with my terrible Spanish and who enthusiastically communicate back and forth with me via Google translate; the patrons who just want to chat, about books or otherwise; and the ones whom I can help with book- or author-related questions without having to look anything up (shoutout to the girls looking for books by Saadia Faruqi, Sarah Mlynowski, and Barbara Park). There’s something new and fun and interesting every single shift, and I enjoy it all. I’ve had absolutely CRAZY days at work, but I’ve never had a bad day at work, and that says a lot about what a great place this library is, I think. : )

In between work, it’s been a lot of studying for future back-to-school, and my determination here is off-the-charts. I have notes, books, apps, programs I’m using from my library, Google docs, flashcards. They’re never going to know what hit them when they get me as a student! I’m bringing the same enthusiasm and determination to this as I am to my work at the library (one of my co-workers referred to me as ‘the Energizer bunny,’ so). 

What will January bring? More information, hopefully; I’m planning on contacting the head of the program I want to do at my local community college and seeing about setting up a meeting to discuss the program and what I’ll need to do to enroll with her (she invites this; she may punt me over to an advisor, and that’s fine too!). Work, of course, and more studying. Weather’s not looking good for this next weekend off – I’m only able to get to the garden where I volunteer every other weekend these days, and if it’s too cold, our workdays are cancelled, so if that’s the case, I’ll use that as extra study time, though I do miss the garden when I’m not there, I miss it terribly. But it’s a temporary sacrifice; all things here are for a greater purpose, and temporary sacrifice now means greater gains in the future. And I’m ready for an excellent future, no matter what the rest of the world looks like out there.

Happy New Year to all of you! I wish you all a year of peace, good health, love, friendship, and excellent reads. Be kind out there; we need each other to make it through.