In honor of my friends who are going to Australia on their honeymoon today

Came across this piece of news yesterday:

100,000 dead bats fall from the sky in Australia

A heat wave in the state of Queensland that has temperatures rising above 109 degrees Fahrenheit caused nearly 100,000 bats to just fall from the sky and forced some unfortunate reporter to write the following sentence:

"About 100,000 bats have fallen from the sky and died during a heatwave in Australia that has left the trees and earth littered with dead creatures."

Oh, and also this one:

"The stench from the rotting carcasses has begun to disturb residents of Brisbane and large towns. Authorities have dispatched rubbish collectors to pick up thousands of carcasses from populated areas."

Watch your head out there! Also: Do not eat.

Welcome to spinsterhood

You know what I learned yesterday? That I have an old lady name. Look at this graph of the number of babies named "Jessica" over the years:

This means that when I'm old, all the Jessicas in the country are also going to be old. Jessica is the new Gertrude! Egad!

I'd better start working on my "kids these days..." complaints.

This is going to give me nightmares

According to some website I've never heard of, this is the world's most dangerous trail. It's in China. It takes you up the tippy top of a mountain...to a teahouse. Tea sure seems worth risking death to me!

Even if it's not the most dangerous trail in the world, it certainly seems like a good contender:

La la la, no safety railing, no big deal.

Just hang on to the chain and hope your backpack doesn't bang into the side of the mountain, sending you off balance...you'll be fine.

Sandals are perfect footwear for this excursion.

Oh, and then there's the part where you climb straight up the side of the mountain.

I wonder how many people plunge to their deaths on this trail every year. When I visited the Grand Canyon as a teenager, and refused to hike down the trail from the rim, even for an hour, and consequently spent a few hours waiting in the gift shop for my group to finish their hike, I learned that 3-4 people fall of the Grand Canyon every year. And the path there is SO much wider.

From Wikipedia:

Huashan has historically been a place of retreat for hardy hermits, whether Daoist, Buddhist or other; access to the mountain was only deliberately available to the strong-willed, or those who had found "the way". With greater mobility and prosperity, Chinese, particularly students, began to test their mettle and visit in the 1980s. The inherent danger of many of the exposed, narrow pathways with precipitous drops gave the mountain a deserved reputation for danger. As tourism has boomed and the mountain's accessibility vastly improved with the installation of the cable car in the 1990s, visitor numbers surged. Despite the safety measures introduced by cutting deeper pathways and building up stone steps and wider paths, as well as adding railings, fatalities continued to occur. The local government has proceeded to open new tracks and created one-way routes on some more hair-raising parts, such that the mountain can be scaled without significant danger now, barring crowds and icy conditions. Some of the most precipitous tracks have actually been closed off. The former trail that led to the South Peak from the North Peak is on a cliff face, and it was known as being extremely dangerous; there is now a new and safer stone-built path to reach the South Peak temple, and on to the Peak itself.

Many Chinese still climb at nighttime, in order to reach the East Peak by dawn —though the mountain now has many hotels. This practice is a holdover from when it was considered safer to simply be unable to see the extreme danger of the tracks during the ascent, as well as to avoid meeting descending visitors at points where pathways have scarcely enough room for one visitor to pass through safely.

The year in books: 2013 edition

I'm going to just go ahead and ignore the fact that I haven't posted anything on this blog in 3 months (as well as the fact that I only have one reader left (Hi, Anon!)), and I'll launch right into my annual recap of the books I read over the past year. 2013 was a record year in book consumption for me, with 54 books read or listened to. Yes, you read that right: 54! (And I was all psyched when I reported reading 51 books in 2012. Pssh.) It seems that as I age I only get better, like a fine wine...except I don't really mellow out with age, I just read more and more and more, so maybe not like a fine wine at all. In any case, check this out--talk about (self-)improvement!*:

Sadly, aside from the raw numbers, 2013 wasn't a terrific year for me in terms of book selection. Would you believe I rated zero books 5 stars in 2013 (on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is best)? Usually I have at least one 5-star book, if not more, but nope, not in 2013, when the top rating I gave any book was 4.5 (though there were two of those). Another six books got 4 stars from me in 2013. Contrast that with 2012, when I gave one book 5 stars, three books 4.5 stars, and twelve books 4 stars. I'm gonna have to make some better choices in 2014!

Key: Books I loved = 4.5; Books I liked a lot = 4; Books I liked OK = 3;
Books I didn't like very much = 2.5 or lower

Over half of the books I consumed last year were Kindle books (59%). Just seven (10%) were real, honest-to-goodness, paper books. That's kind of sad, because I really, really love physical books. But damn if it isn't way more convenient to read books on my Kindle--or to read Kindle books on my iPad or my phone. No need to plan ahead or to lug big heavy blocks of paper around in my already-too-heavy bag. With the magic of Kindle, I'm never without my current reading material! If someone is late or if I have to wait in line, out pops the phone, and bam, I'm edjumucating (or edifying) myself! (Note to self: you sound like a Kindle infomercial. Note to Kindle: I am available to host an infomercial.)

The Kindle has virtually ruined my dream of having a room in my future
house stocked full of books that I have read (pun intended).

Speaking of edjumucating (or not), I didn't do terribly well in 2013 in terms of reading non-fiction. A paltry five of the 51 books I consumed were non-fiction (that's 9%, versus 22% of the books I read in 2012). Interestingly, though, three of the books I liked best during 2013 were non-fiction. This seems to be a trend with me--I mostly read fiction, but my favorite books of the past few years have been non-fiction (cf. here and here). And yet, I don't regret for an instant reading all those made up stories (I only wish I had read more non-made-up stories). Hm. I'll have to think about what that says about me.

Man. And two of the non-fiction books were about food, too,
which I already kinda know about.

I read a lot of medium-length books in 2013 (average page count for Kindle and paper books: 331; median page count: 320).

Chart shows page counts for Kindle and real books only.
Page counts are based on the print copy (paperback if available
at time of calculation, hardcover if not).

Similarly, I listened to a lot of medium-length audiobooks. Average audio length: 14.1 hours; median length: 12.9 hours. My audio books ranged in listening time from 8.1 hours (blessedly short, thank goodness, I didn't like that one**) to 32.5 hours (thankfully, I did (mostly) like that one). Interestingly, in their paper form my audio books tended to be longer than my kindle/real books (average page count for audio books: 416, median: 384).

This data surprises me, because I usually try to pick audiobooks
that are as long as possible. Apparently I couldn't find many long
books I was interested in. Oh god, what if I've listened to them all?

Perhaps because I didn't consume very many super long books, I finished almost all of my books in a month or less--and I finished half of them in less than 10.5 days (average length of time reading or listening: 14.5 days; median: 10.5 days). Surprisingly, my audiobooks tended to be consumed faster than my reading books (average length of time to consume audio books: 13.2, real books: 15.1 days)

If you're wondering how this math works, know that I always have
two to three books going at once.

More fun book trivia...but no graphs. I'm tired of making graphs.

• Average rating for all of my 2013 books: 3.0. Average rating for audio books: 3.2, for non-audio books: 3.0. I apparently do a better job picking my listening books than I do my reading books.
• My favorite books of the year: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves; This Is Not Your City. Though I wouldn't necessarily recommend either of them to other people; they are both best suited for particular tastes--especially the latter, which is depressing as hell.
• My least favorite books of the year: The Angel's Game (I will never read another Zafón); Every Contact Leaves a Trace (that will teach me to accept a suggestion from Audible.com); Promise Not to Tell (not even worth the bargain price I paid for it years ago)
• Books I might recommend to others: Going Clear (holy smokes fascinating); The Curfew (weird and wonderful); Salt Sugar Fat (also fascinating, but more I-kinda-already-knew-that fascinating versus holy smokes fascinating)
• Number of short story collections read: 6 (average rating for short story collections: 3.5, versus 3.0 for everything else--I guess I do okay picking out short story collections as well).
• Months I finished the most books: April and May (6 in each)
• Month I finished the fewest books: August (2)
• Book that took the longest to read: The Idiot (124 days -- started in October 2012, finally finished in January, 2013)
• Book I read fastest: Thousand Cranes (1 cross-country airplane ride)
• Shortest book: The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (134 pages)
• Longest book (in pages and in audio time): The Goldfinch (784 pages; 32.5 hours).
• Number of dystopian*** novels consumed: 11. Number of dystopian-esque novels consumed: 3.
• Favorite dystopian novel: Love Minus Eighty (though it was only slightly above average)
• Favorite dystopian-esque novel: The Curfew (this one I liked a lot).
• Oddest books consumed: The Curfew and The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (tie for oddness, but I liked the former better than the latter)
• Number of books read for a book club: 2. Number of times I actually showed up at the book club: 1.
• Number of  books taking place in Spain that I read while on vacation in Spain: 2. Number of said books that I liked: 0. Chance that I will tailor my vacation book selection to the location of my next vacation: very low.
• Most common book length: 352 pages (n = 9. Nine! Wha???)
• Books I started in 2013 but which I am still reading: 2. 

And that's about it for my summary of the books I read last year. If you want to know more about my reading, you can (as always) visit my Goodreads page, and you can also peruse this Google spreadsheet I made, which includes my reading data from 2012 and 2013. Now: Bring on the books for 2014!

*Confession: if you look at the number of pages read each year, I seem to have peaked in 2011. But we won't talk about that; I'm not even sure how Goodreads calculates page counts.
**Which was really disappointing, because I read it after hearing about it on this awesome Radiolab Short and I had high hopes.
***Why does spell check want to turn "dystopia" into "utopia"? That's not at all what I'm trying to say!