Good morning, gentle readers, and welcome to 2009!

I don’t know about you, but I think I am pretty much over 2008 at this point, even though I will undoubtedly date my February rent check with “2008,” just out of habit. 2008 was a pretty exciting year, what with the groundbreaking election, economic collapse, and all. Hopefully this year will be equally exciting, perhaps with a little bit less of the “getting collectively screwed” going on.

I suppose I could throw out a few predictions for the coming year, so I that I can go back and laugh at my foolishness in December. I’m definitely betting on a further decline of the real estate market, along with a dramatic Obama backpedal on several issues (odds on for LGBQT and women’s rights), and possibly some juicy food security scandals. I also suspect that the City of Fort Bragg will do at least one thing which is so mindblowingly stupid that I will feel obliged to rant about it.

I’m looking forward to sharing more adventures (and incoherent rants) with y’all in the coming months. I haven’t selected a blog project for 2009, although I did think about writing about all of the visual  media I see, or possibly organizing an epic candy exchange, and I suppose there are a few days yet to choose something, but after the exhaustion of the Book Project, I think I might leave this year up the fates. Unless everyone clamors for a blog project. What’s that, you say? *crickets*

I am glad that more of you seem to be coming out of your shells in the comments. Hopefully this year will be more lively in the comments section. As always, though, people who feel shy but really want to talk to me can email me: meloukhia at gmail dot com.

Best wishes to all of you in the coming year.

I read 38 books in December (1.2/day), and 11,398 pages (roughly 368/day). Reading The Chronicles of Narnia definitely dragged down my page/book ratio, since they are all so short and quick to read, but that’s ok. I actually would have read much more in the last month of the Book Project, except that the library started getting very slow about sending books, so I resorted to re-reading a lot of stuff in my own collection, and I’ve noticed that I tend to re-read more slowly than I do on the first reading, because I like to savor the book, rather than bolting it down.

I really liked A Very Long Engagement, and might even call it the book of the month. I also enjoyed Proust and the Squid, and would really recommend it to anyone who is at all interested in the science of reading. Likewise, Cheer! was generally awesome, if you are into cheerleading. Or the cultural aspects of cheerleading.

Suzy, I’m sorry to inform you that The Glass Castle was the turkey of the month. However, I enjoyed ranting about it, so I have to thank you for recommending it just so that I could shred it. (Was that secretly your intent all along? Hrm, I wonder.)

I was definitely looking forward to the end of the Book Project by the end of the month, and while I have enjoyed sharing all of the books that I read with you, I fully intend to read some embarrassing trash this month, now that I don’t have to tell y’all about it. That was the most interesting thing about the Book Project, for me, was my tendency to set certain books aside because I was kind of embarrassed to be reading them. That said, I think that this year has been a pretty accurate depiction of my reading habits: I haven’t kept a single thing back, even if I haven’t always had a lot to say about it.

Tomorrow, I’m going to post a longer discussion about the project as a whole, along with delicious delicious statistics, for the nerds among us.