New Year.

Wow, it's been a while. I've been busy and stressed. I managed to read 318 books in 2013, which could either mean I'm a really fast, amazing reader, or I have no life. You choose. Winter break was good, I got to spend time in North Carolina and Chapel Hill, and as usual, I'm missing it like crazy.

There's less than two months until my thesis is due, and I've been busy doing some freelance editing, tutoring, book reviewing, and applying for jobs. Oh yeah, and reading, of course. :)  Something tells me that with all the work I have to do, and all the anxiety I have, that I won't be getting much sleep in the next two months. Or really, until I get a job. But, in the wise words of Scarlett O'Hara, "I won't think of it now. I'll think of it when I can stand it."

I read The Goldfinch at the end of last year, and loved it - I don't think there's any way the story could have been shorter, and still be that amazing. I'm reading Lee Smith's "Guests on Earth" right now, and though she can basically do no wrong, this book is especially wonderful. Set at Highland Hospital in Asheville, NC in the 1930s and 40s, it is a historical fiction hybrid, telling the story of a girl named Evaline who befriends Zelda Fitzgerald, who later died in the fire at the hospital. She also examines how, even back then, women who didn't conform - who were just too MUCH of anything - were seen as ill and needing to be reformed. I'm really loving it. I've also been reading a lot of the classics I missed out on - Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, etc. And I'm pretty much loving everything on Hawthorne Books' website.

So yeah. I'm still alive, sluggin' it out in NYC.