Much has been said, written, blogged, posted, tweeted, bitched, and heralded about Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg, and it’s all happened in about a week. If you’re interested in exploring every inch of the positive and negative debate, turn to your old friend Google: it will not disappoint.

Because the issue of women in executive and leadership roles in still an incredibly incendiary topic, many decades after women started speaking up about being treated equally in the work place. That Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, not only brings this issue to light but calls us out as a country for even still having this issue – “The blunt truth is that men still run the world” – is only reason number one why this was a truly important read.

This is one instance where I’m going to very plain about my opinion: I loved this book. It spoke to me as both a woman and a professional. It addressed topics that have bothered me deeply in recent years, some of them more quietly than others, but all of which have had real and lasting impact on my daily life, my livelihood, my self-confidence, my ability to do my work, and my capacity for leading others.

Not everyone will love this book, I know that absolutely, but maybe it’s not about loving it, but hearing – really hearing – the message it contains. As Sandberg writes, “We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.”

FTC Disclosure: This review was based on my own copy of this book.

There’s no other way to say it: I geeked out hard on Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson. (Like many other periods in my life, an inadvertent theme emerges in my reading: this one seems to be centered on all things technology, and I am enjoying it to the nth degree.)

The perfect mixture of adventure, politics, magical realism, and fantasy, to call this novel a thriller isn’t quite right – but only because the word seems too small to convey the myriad threads of its plot and the equally complex tapestry of its themes. Our hero is the title character, Alif, a hacker for hire whose great talent is the moral flexibility to help anyone online who seeks to protect their anonymity under the tremendously forceful cyber-surveillance of an oppressive (and unnamed) Middle Eastern regime.

Add in a rare ancient text, a parallel world of magical beings, a love story, some torture, a time-sensitive race to see who can create the world’s first quantum computer, and more escape scenes than you can count, and you have yourself a fabulously entertaining action movie folded between the covers of this book.

And yet, this is also a novel that tackles the ever-complex ideas of religion, freedom, technology, information, belief, art – everything that makes us civilized and everything that threatens the very meaning of civilization at the same time. Wilson’s gift is her ability to make us care deeply about these things, and treating us to one hell of an adventure along the way.

FTC Disclosure: This review was based on a copy of the book that I borrowed from the public library.

“Yes, we’re sinking. But can you hear that wondrous sound?”

Like its predecessor, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Volume 2 by hitRECord, Joseph Gordon Levitt and wirrow is a strange little creation: part found journal, part children’s book, part poetry. But unlike Volume 1, this edition’s editors  – or more accurately, its creators, since a surprising number of the Lilliputian stories here were written or co-written by wirrow, and yes this person’s name is spelled with a lowercase “w” – seemed to have developed better taste.

Or maybe the submissions were better this time around. Maybe word got out about this unique collaborative art project and more people wanted to participate. I’ll probably never know, but I can live with that, because these stories are at once beautiful and strange, with less sadness and more joy, complemented by charming illustrations.

“There are some things you should know. I don’t know what they are, but they’re out there.”

Isn’t that lovely? These tiny stories asked me to suspend my disbelief for the brief time it took to read, but I was a willing traveler on the road to these little fictions, these little truths and dreams.

FTC Disclosure: This review was based on a copy of the book that I received from the publisher.

A billion years ago (five) I had a real blog. It was not a place where I talked about my hobbies (books) or my business. It was a place I told the truth. For five years, it was a place where I set down all my unvarnished thoughts, looked them over, and built a nifty bookcase using Gorilla Glue and thumbtacks and a blueprint that shifted with Impressionistic light. It was raw, and it was constant, and it was the most real thing I’ve ever written — maybe will ever write — and then I shut it down.

I used to miss it terribly. The first year without it, I was filled with a grief that surprised and shamed me: it was a blog, for god’s sake, not my Pulitzer-winning manuscript, but I missed it like it was the one that got away. If I hadn’t quit because maintaining it had become something too close to walking around without skin, I would have gone back for good. I did go back, for a minute — starting up a different, secret blog that excluded names, identifying characteristics, and pretty much all the heart of my previous one, like you do when you “take a break” from your relationship and pretend that it isn’t the death knell, that you’re not just executing the pre-step to breaking up for good.

I haven’t missed it for a long time, but tonight I do. I’m reading a book on research (How to Find Anything: From Extreme Google Searches to Scouring Government Documents, a Guide to Uncovering Anything About Everyone and Everything by Don MacLeod — do you see me relating this post to books? Do you?) and I started looking for evidence of my old blog. Cached pages, maybe, though those are either long gone or buried so deeply under a billion references to Pippa Middleton (she’s an “almost royal”), I’d smother before uncovering any pieces of myself.

Except: I have uncovered the times when other bloggers mentioned me, my maiden name slamming into me like a front kick to the chest, in body copy or comments. The occasions I’ve long forgotten about, when people I’d admired actually asked me to come back after I’d quit, shut down, and gone silent on the web. Am I dreaming this? How did I say no to these kind people? Was my reason for quitting so legitimate — had it gotten that bad?

I don’t remember clearly. I could ask Maggie — whose blog went fallow for awhile before going six feet under, still existing in my mind as irrepressibly beautiful, so much like its author — and she would tell me, I believe, yes, it had gotten that bad.

That whole walking-around-without-skin thing will do that.

I don’t live a public life anymore. People probably think I do, because I maintain active social media accounts, but I doubt more than a handful of people understand I do so for professional reasons rather than personal ones — and just how much of myself I hold separate — and that speaks for itself.

So now my life is small and valuable and private and mine. I lost my blog, sure, but it was my choice — a necessary amputation, the cutting out of infected tissue to save the muscle, maybe even the bone beneath. I had the text printed out and bound. No Pulitzer, no awards, just five years of my life that came to 500 pages in my hands. I set it on a shelf, mixed in randomly with the rest of my books, not even on the same side of the room where I keep my favorites, and I have never read it all the way through.

If I have rare moments when I’m missing it — now, like a telescope misses a meteor or a foot a sock — well, so what? I’m not dreaming the kindness and the thrill I found when I was blogging. But I remember now that I said no for the most legitimate reason I can think of: to live more honestly. To exist on my own terms inside a deeper truth that has nothing at all to do with an audience or my own ego. To have experiences and adventures and still make face-planting mistakes without anyone to entertain.

If there are ghosts in the web, images somewhere of that messy, unplanned, crooked bookcase I built from my thoughts and words and heartstrings: I’m glad. It shouldn’t be like it never existed. But it also shouldn’t be like it had.

So far. Seriously, the year isn’t over yet – these details matter when you’re a person who keeps track of how many books you read in a calendar year – but on the off-chance you’re looking for gift ideas (or presents to yourself; no judgment!), I’ve managed to put this list together on time this year.

And what a good year it was. I went from 65 books in 2011 to 91 in 2012. I’m pretty happy with how that turned out, and I’m grateful for the time and (somewhat) good health of my eyes that allow me to pursue this hobby that gives me the deepest pleasure of my life. I read many outstanding books this year, and I hope a few of these bring you as much joy.*

MY BEST BOOK OF 2012:

Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell (read my review)

RUNNER-UP BEST BOOK OF 2012: (Tie!)

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple (read my review)

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

HONORABLE MENTIONS FOR 2012, in no particular order:

Devotion: A Memoir by Dani Shapiro

The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food and Love by Kristin Kimball

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

Gold by Chris Cleave (read my review)

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan (read my review)

FAVORITE CHARACTER OF THE YEAR:

Anne Lamott, from Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers by Anne Lamott (for being a more honest, hilarious nonfiction narrator than any fictional character ever could be)

Happy New Year, readers! Wishing you many wonderful books in 2013.

*Please note that this list indicates books that I read in 2012 but were not necessarily published in 2012.

It’s hard to describe my feelings for Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, but I will tell you that the last five interactions I’ve had about this book  – over email, by text, on Facebook, and face-to-face  – have involved the capricious use of all caps and also shouting with glee.

I loved this book, but that’s easy to say, because I am someone who madly, passionately LOVES BOOKS, and this novel is all about loving books. Marry that with the fact that this is also a novel about Google’s technology, and anyone who knows me understands why I have to revert to all caps.

The fact that Sloan manages to pull into that already thrilling marriage of books and technology a deliciously mysterious secret society, the complexities of modern relationships, and the big questions we’re probably going to have to face sooner or later about the intersection of the print world with the physical world, and you have one hell of a story.

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore was an unadulterated pleasure  – if you haven’t noticed, it amused me and entertained me and thrilled me in all the best ways  – but it was also thoughtful and moving and dead-on responsive to the changes we’re going through as a society, artistically, philosophically, even morally.

Which, I believe, is pretty much everything a great book should do.

FTC Disclosure: This review was based on a copy of the book that I borrowed from the public library.

If it’s sometimes difficult to describe the novels of Luis Alberto Urrea, it’s because they are always woven so completely with rich writing and absorbing plots that the reader can’t help but feel transported, as if on a magic carpet, or some other ambulatory textile. This was true of  Urrea’s 2005 novel, The Hummingbird’s Daughter (incidentally one of the best books I read in the noughts), and turned out to be equally true, to my great pleasure, of Into the Beautiful North.

Urrea is a master storyteller, and the tale of Nayeli – a whipsmart, fierce young woman who works and dreams in her rural Mexican village, until one day she conceives of a plan to venture north to the United States – does not disappoint. Together with friends she has recruited and others she makes along the way, bolstered by the hilariously militant support of her politician aunt, she embarks on a quest that is at once familiar to anyone who has ever studied literature for even an hour, and also particularly Mexican, unique to our present moment in time.

This is a beautiful story beautifully told, with much humor and maybe more grace. In an era when we talk a lot about immigration policies and wrestle with the changing nature of nationhood, this story of one remarkable woman and the people who follow her vision explores the idea that it’s not so much where you’re from, as who you are.

FTC Disclosure: This review was based on my own copy of this book.

I encouraged my 91-year-old grandmother to purchase Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo last spring, as it seemed right up her alley: nonfiction, takes place in the Eastern Hemisphere, large cast of characters for her to map out in her beautiful Palmer penmenship on a single 3 x 5 index card. She bought it and couldn’t get past the first 50 pages.

Still, it won the dang National Book Award last week, so I decided to read it on Saturday.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned since my grammie became my hero many years ago, it’s that I pretty much agree with her  – or, okay, I agree with her 94% of the time, which is a much higher rate than anyone else in my life. In short, I was underwhelmed by this book, and disappointedly so.

Boo’s book is nonfiction that reads like fiction, but there is a passionless-ness that permeates the telling. It’s not that she’s is a bad writer – on the contrary – it’s that I got the sense she was writing so much with her brain that it squashed the sense of her heart.

I wanted to like this book, I wanted to find something in it that my grammie hadn’t, not least because I’ve felt an unsettling dearth of compelling nonfiction in my life lately, and I was hoping this book would fill that void. It didn’t.

Which is not to say it couldn’t fill yours. Check it out from the library and form your own opinion. That’s something my grammie and I both wholeheartedly support.

There is something beautiful about love that transcends time, tragedy, or the boundaries of the known universe, and Emily Hainsworth knows it. That’s probably why she wrote Through to You (and if it wasn’t the sole reason, than it must have been high up on the list).

When Camden’s girlfriend Viv is killed in a car accident, his entire life spins out of control. He doesn’t want to live without her, of course. And one day, when he visits the exact spot of Viv’s demise and encounters an apparition named Nina who is not an apparition at all but rather a girl from a parallel, almost-identical universe, he discovers that he might not have to.

Filled with all the touching moments of teenage love without being corny or cookie-cutter, this is an oddly suspenseful and little bit mind-bending book. Highly recommended for fans of The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger or the movie Kate and Leopold, this is a tender and curious novel: perfectly creepy in all the right places, and full of the wonder we all have when we fall into, and out of, and back into love.

FTC Disclosure: This review was based on a copy of the book that I received from the publisher. 

I’ve read some good books lately, but I’ve also been short on time and energy, and that’s a deathly combination for a book blog.

Still, I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring your attention to the following, which have in common bright and lovely – if not sometimes melancholy – themes. These are entertaining reads, but they are also full of heart, which trumps entertainment in my book, but which also make them so worth your time:

This One is Mine by Maria Semple (yep, that Maria Semple)

Goodbye for Now by Laurie Frankel

Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer

Happy reading, people.