1. I have once again lied to you, my reading public. I apologize to all fifteen of you. It has been over two months since my last confession post. P.S. That was inappopriate Catholic humor, for those of you who aren’t in the know. P.P.S. I feel like if I have to explain it it’s probably a bad joke so I apologize again. I’m just going to start throwing out apologies. APOLOGIES, APOLOGIES, APOLOGIES FOR EVERYONE! Did you guys know that ‘apology’ derives from the Ancient Greek ‘apologia,’ meaning to speak in defense of a cause or of one’s beliefs or actions? I only mention this because I find it slightly weird that a word that can now be used to mean the same thing as ‘SORRY I WAS A GIANT DICKBAG’ evolved from a word regularly used to explain the benefits of like, poetry and shit. Words are weird, you guys.
2. Most of you won’t have any idea what I’m talking about, so this is mostly for Jennie and Gretchen, but Lizzie and Darcy finally hooked up in the latest episode of the YouTube series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (which you should totally watch, BTW) and it was both amazing and YESSSSS REWIND but also troubling. Jennie talks about the SQUEEE part here, so I don’t feel like I need to cover it that much. What I want to talk about is the part about how weird it was that Lizzie and Darcy totally made out on camera and then posted it to the internet. Like, obviously from a story standpoint, we’re not going to get any satisfaction out of the Lizzie/Darcy hookup if we as the audience don’t witness it, but the weird part comes when you start thinking about the diaries as “real diaries.”
In order for it to be part of the story-world Team LBD has created, Lizzie and Darcy not only have to sort of forget they are being filmed (which is definitely something that could happen), but then later physically edit the footage together and agree to let the entire internet (and in a larger sense, the world) view their first kiss(es). Up until this point I think Team LBD has done a great job in respecting the boundaries of what a real person would believably post on the internet about her personal life. Part of the joy of the series, at least for me, is that you become so absorbed in the story that you forget it’s not real — in that sense, it functions more like a diary than as a serialized web series based on a novel from 200 years ago. Team LBD is attempting to create the illusion that Lizzie and her family and friends are real people and this is a real diary. So as squee-worthy as those kisses (and extremely personal love connection confessions were), they sort of pulled me out of the moment. I kept thinking, Oh my God, if that were me and my Darcy, I would NOT have posted that video.
Maybe it’s just my inner academic, but I find this whole thing fascinating. It’s very possible that in the next episode, as she has done before, Lizzie herself will justify posting such a personal moment. She has talked before in the several of the videos about how she views the diaries as a narrative, and how she feels beholden to her audience. She has also made reference to the fact that we never get to see certain parts of her life because she edits them out, or simply does not talk about them. Thus, we see her life the way she wants us to. She essentially has narrative control over her own life, and because she has made her relationship with Darcy such a huge part of that self-constructed story, it is very possible that leaving this moment in the diaries was a deliberate act meant to provide closure to the story that Lizzie the character is choosing to tell (while simultaneously being a fictional character in a aforementioned web-series). Anyway, I’ll be interested to see how it’s handled in Monday’s episode.
3. There is no three. I just wanted to write about The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. Also, I want a chicken cheesesteak.
I read a lot of good books this year, but I only fell in love with two of them. The first was Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Ready Player One takes place in the year 2045 when the disaster that is humanity has folded in on itself and taken refuge inside the immersive virtual reality environment of the OASIS. The death of OASIS creator, James Halliday, sparks a worldwide virtual treasure hunt inside the OASIS, Halliday having promised to reward his entire fortune and stakes in the company to the person who can unravel his clues first. Enter our hero, Wade Watts, a chubby and poor nobody who has lived his entire life inside the OASIS. Wade is a gunter — or egg hunter — and the quest for Halliday’s easter eggs has become not just a quest for him, but a way of life. Ready Player One is a hero’s quest novel dressed up like a cosplayer at Dragon Con. It’s a videogame disguised as a novel. It’s a celebration of geekdom and technology with a progressive punch to the nuts. It’s a love story and a friendship story and an adventure. I loved it so much I read it twice. It hit a ridiculous number of my buttons. You should read it, too. [
The second book I fell in love with took me completely by surprise. I can guess pretty accurately most of the time when I’m going to really like a book, but occasionally one pops up out of nowhere to punch me in the heart. So it was with Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple. Bernadette is a hard book to explain, which is one of the reasons why I almost didn’t pick it up. There’s no way a blurb could ever do justice to the irreverent but loving (and kind of magical) way that Maria Semple constructs her story. It’s a story about living in Seattle, and people who think the wrong things are important. It’s a story about sanity and creativity, and about mothers and daughters and husbands and wives. It’s funny and it’s sad; it’s happy and it’s got a nasty bite. Like I said, it’s hard to explain, so you’re just going to have to trust me on this one. Also, I don’t want to spoil you. [
Another book I was surprised by this year (though not nearly to the extent I was surprised by Bernadette) was The Rook by Australian author Daniel O’Malley. The Rook is a mystery slash thriller slash urban fantasy slash paranormal slash journey of self-discovery for its heroine, Myfanwy Thomas — it’s a mish-mash of all sorts of cool crap, and if you happen to even like one of those genres I just named, you will like the book. If you like more than one, you’ll probably love it. Plus Myfanwy has one of the coolest character arcs of any book I’ve read this year — where she starts out and where she ends up . . . I’d be spoiling it to tell you any more than that. If you like spooky things and thrilling heroics and people with superpowers, or just a good old fashioned whodunnit, The Rook is worth checking out. [
I actually read a couple of other books this year that are similarly hard to categorize. Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines is technically urban fantasy, but mostly it’s just an imaginative story about the power of stories, practically tailor made for book lovers who just want to have fun for a couple of hours. I finally managed to read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern this year as well, and that was a fun ride — a little plot-lite, but a wonderful feast for the imagination. Probably the craziest book I read this year was Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson, a meditation on spirituality, religion, and the exercising of power disguised as a modern day fairy-tale about a young middle eastern hacker who meets a jinn and goes on secret adventures to protect a mysterious book. It was easy going down, but it stayed with me unraveling new meanings for days afterwards. Plus Wilson’s prose is gorgeous, which is always nice. [
I could probably call 2012 The Year of John Scalzi and get away with it. I read his Old Man’s War trilogy in 2011 (and loved it), but 2012 was the year I read everything else of his: all his published novels, most of his short stories, and 
2012 was also the year that I think I finally OD’d on YA — especially YA of the dystopian or paranormal romance persuasion. I read SO MUCH OF IT, and with the exception of the always excellent Laini Taylor, whose second installment in the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series, Days of Blood & Starlight, was published in September to much well-deserved fanfare, and indie author Susan Ee’s Angelfall, almost all of it was disappointing. But really, the best YA I read this year was not paranormal romance or future dystopia, but belongs to a genre I swore I would never read again in my life: the cancer book. Except it’s not really a cancer book. I discovered John Green through his 
the most anticipated book of the year was J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, her first novel since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was published in t he summer of 2007, and her first published non-Harry Potter book. The public anticipation and publicity surrounding this thing, including a series of mostly negative reviews, almost gave me an anxiety attack. But I lived. And ended up really liking the book, which was a bit surprising to me on one level, as it was mostly a downer, but not surprising on another level, because it’s Jo, and she’s so, so good at words and especially characters. The Casual Vacancy begins with parish councilman Barry Fairbrother’s death, and the consequences of his death spiral outward in the community. Ian Parker of The New Yorker called it ‘
The Year of Scalzi, yes, the year of ODing on YA, yes, but also: the year of the graphic novel memoir. I read so, so many, including Stitches by David Small, which was good but incredibly depressing; Blankets by Craig Thompson, which was an experience, to say the least; Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, a fascinating look at growing up during a revolution; and the classic Maus by Art Spiegelman, which tells the story of Art’s father during World War II using mice and cats. It was pretty genius. My favorite, though, was Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (she of 
