So here it goes. In 2012 I WILL:

• be brave
• be me
• write
• stop worrying
• take much better care of myself than in previous years, physically and mentally.

And in 2012 I WON’T

• let people bring me down
• panic
• be so damn hard on myself

Ugh, now that I’ve read that it seems so self-indulgent. Fuck it, it is blogged therefore it is done. Though I might add ‘get five stars on every song on Dance Central’, just for balance.

Suckling pig from St Katherines in Kew. I was in a food coma for three days after this.

Seriously blog, money might not buy happiness but since I’ve had this job money has bought me a five course banquet at St Katherines (including one tenth of that pig), tickets to Eddie Izzard (greatest night of my year) and a third-share in a XBox Kinect which will go down in history as THE GREATEST THING ANYONE IN THIS HOUSE HAS EVER BOUGHT.

One of my many new years resolutions that I’m working on for next year is to blog more. About what, I have no idea. But I will. Once I think of something.

In the meantime, I’m going to wallow in my own crapulence for a while, because I GOT ALL MY CHRISTMAS SHOPPING DONE IN NOVEMBER. I’ve never been so awesome. Naturally everyone is getting books, so for my own personal exaltation here is what I bought:

My grandpa: Life on Air by David Attenborough
My Pop: The Black Echo by Michael Connelly
Pop’s girlfriend Bern: The Snowman by Jo Nesbo
Dad: Game of Thrones by GRR Martin
Mum: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safan Foer
My brother: Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, She Thinks I’m A Piano Player in a Whorehouse by Paul Carter
My bro’s girlfriend – The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer

In the interests of full disclosure, I have almost no idea what the Paul Carter book is about, and I really don’t care if my brother even reads it. That’s got to be one of the all time greatest book titles EVER.

What books are you buying this Christmas interwebs? What books are you hoping Santa might chuck down the chimney? And are you as excited about the new Sherlock Holmes book as I am?

My Dad had one and lived. He was very, VERY lucky.

Here’s what I’ve discovered after nearly three weeks at the Stroke Foundation:

• Stroke is Australia’s second single greatest killer after coronary heart disease and a leading cause of disability.
• In 2011, Australians will suffer around 60,000 new and recurrent strokes – that’s one stroke every 10 minutes.
• One in five people having a first-ever stroke die within one month and one in three die within a year.  (Did I mention how my Dad was lucky?).
• Stroke kills more women than breast cancer and more men than prostate cancer.
• Close to 20 per cent of all strokes occur to people under 55 years old.

Did you know that??  Although Dad wasn’t old when he had his stroke, I was staggered at the percentage of people under 55% who suffer a stroke. And stroke kills more women than breast cancer! How did I not know that???

Suffice to say, I love my new job. It’s so great to work at a place that has makes such a tangible difference to the community. Yeah, it’s not publishing, but I haven’t ruled out going back to that later on. Who knows, maybe I’ll start writing again. Good luck to anyone doing NaNoWriMo this year – I just didn’t have it in me this time around.

In other news, I finally finished The Selected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen after buying it at the MWF about three years ago. It has taken me a month to read (which is unheard of for me), but it was so worth it. My mind has been wonderfully melted.

Instead, here’s a musical interpretation of the above, as sung by someone with much cooler hair than me.

My name is Briony, and I’m a book-a-holic.

The thing is though, I FREELY ADMIT THAT I HAVE A PROBLEM. I just don’t intend to do anything about it. I have a pile of 32 books on top of my TV, some dating back to two Writers Festivals ago, and possibly even dating back to that time we all got stimulated by Kevin Rudd and I naturally blew a couple of hundred bucks on books.  At the most recent Writers Festival I bought two more (Before I Go To Sleep by SJ Watson, and Black Jesus by Simone Felice*** for those playing at home), despite my solemn oath that I would buy food instead of books. But when faced with a choice between food and books, I choose books. The only thing better than having 32 books on my TV is having 34 books on my TV. And don’t even start me on the pile of library books I’ve got floating in and around my bed. Let’s face it, it’s better than injecting heroin into my eyeballs.

This paints a pretty clear picture, methinks. I’m a bookworm. But here’s the thing I don’t understand – when did reading habits become so judgemental? I get that some people just don’t read. Not everyone grew up in a house like mine, with fortnightly trips to the library in Launceston to pick up armloads of books. I get that. But why does reading make me weird?

I feel like there’s an us vs them reading mentality going on right now, at least in my world. Maybe it’s since I’ve started working in publishing, but the phrase ‘literary snob’ is being thrown around a lot more than it used to. Granted, there is a lot of pretentiousness around reading, which I hate. I always remember an article I had to read for uni back in my first year about children/young adults reading, and they interviewed a girl who said she always felt intimidated by the people around her on the train who had their noses in  books. But you don’t have to read the scary stuff! I only read Moby Dick because I’m an English major, and it’s a classic. But I don’t judge people who don’t want to read those books!

Forget about it I say. If you want to read about sparkly vampires and their feelings, do it! If you want to read about Swedish journalists being saved by street-wise young women, do it! If you want to read the work of some crusty obscure dead white guy, do it!

It doesn’t matter what you read. I’m just happy that you read.

***To be fair, Simone Felice totally Roberta Flack-ed me. He could have sold me a Collingwood membership and I would have been delighted with it (then set it on fire when I woke up and realised what I’d done).

Amen.

So, I play this song to banish the winter ghosts.

Winter doesn’t end for a few days, but it’s been such a lovely weekend in Old Melbourne Town and it has made me appreciate where I live even more. It’s also Melbourne Writers Festival time, aka Christmas in Brionyland, so I’ve spent all weekend reading down by the Yarra and hanging out at Federation Square and delighting in the assortment of people who love the festival as much as I do.

This has been the first MWF I’ve been to as a patron and not a volunteer, and I kind of miss it. It’s been good to go and see the festival from a different angle though, (highlight so far has been Jonathan Franzen living up to my imagination) but the fact remains that I’m halfway through the festival and I HAVEN’T BOUGHT A SINGLE SOLITARY BOOK AND WHAT IS THIS ARRRRRGGGGHHHH. Every time I go into the pop-up Dymocks store I get an itchy wallet finger.

Speaking of books, the September 1 is the starting date for my involvement in A Novel Challenge, also known as the grown-ups version of the MS Readathon where Australians read to raise money for research into a cure for Multiple Sclerosis. I used to do the readathon a a kid, I was awesome at the reading part but useless at getting sponsors. I’m hoping this time, with the useful nagging capacity of the Internet, I will do better. Plus, every person who sponsors me gets a cookie, and by cookie I mean hug. (If you’d like to sponsor me, I’d really appreciate it!)