Motivational Puffin

Perhaps goals lead to improvement. This year’s goals, in no particular order:

  1. Go camping with Ben Here be proof.
  2. Visit Seattle, WA and Portland, OR
  3. Travel abroad (this is an especial must)
  4. Run a half marathon in under 1:45
  5. Read at least 50 books (including War and Peace and re-reading the Lord of the Rings) — running list below
  6. Master the handstand without kicking up against a wall
  7. Practice my Russian regularly, as in, remember it
  8. Learn a new photography-related skill
  9. Chop off my hair Here be proof.
  10. Visit at least one of my favorite homes — Gambier, Finland, or both

I also take recommendations! And I’m curious: what are your goals?

Books of 2014

Pablo Neruda – Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada
Ian Frazier – Travels in Siberia
Warsan Shire – Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth
Scott Stossel – My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind
Nicole Krauss – Great House
Adam Johnson – The Orphan Master’s Son
Isabel Allende – Ripper
Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet
Ransom Riggs – Hollow City
Philip Pullman – The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
Paul Murray – Skippy Dies
Markus Zusak – The Book Thief
Bill Bryson – A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
Indra Sinha – Animal’s People
Kazuo Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day
Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg – Journey into the Whirlwind
Peter Matthiessen – The Snow Leopard
Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg – Within the Whirlwind
Bhante Gunaratana – Mindfulness in Plain English
Charles Eisenstein – Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Americanah
Kurt Vonnegut – Mother Night
Sara Wheeler – The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle
Marina Tsvetaeva – Selected Poems
Peter Matthiessen – Baikal: Sacred Sea of Siberia
Colin Thubron – In Siberia
Robert Galbraith – The Silkworm
John Ajvide Lindqvist – Let the Right One In
Elizabeth Kolbert – Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change
John McPhee – Encounters with the Archdruid
Ava Dellaira – Love Letters to the Dead
Catherynne M. Valente – Deathless (re-read)
Deborah Copaken Kogan – Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War
Donna Tartt – The Goldfinch
Hillary Rodham Clinton – Hard Choices
Emmi Itäranta – Memory of Water
Rory Stewart – The Places In Between
Chris Guillebeau – The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest That Will Bring Purpose to Your Life
Haruki Murakami – Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
John Green – Paper Towns
Barbara Demick – Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
Kazuo Ishiguro – Never Let Me Go
Masha Gessen – The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
Andrey Platonov – The Foundation Pit
Susanna Kaysen – Girl, Interrupted
Erlend Loe – Naïve. Super
Maira Kalman – The Principles of Uncertainty
Margaret Atwood – Oryx and Crake
Masha Gessen – Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot
Margaret Atwood – The Year of the Flood
Rohini Mohan – The Seasons of Trouble: Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War
Margaret Atwood – MaddAddam