Favorite reads of 2011!

In 2011 I was lucky enough to read a lot of good stuff: I read a total of 54 books, and 43 of them I rated three stars or more. So in celebration, here is a countdown of my top ten favorite reads of 2011:

10. What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn 

I loved the atmosphere of this novel, perhaps because I've worked in a huge British shopping centre in the recent past. The story first follows Kate, a ten-year-old detective keeping tabs on the goings-on at Green Oaks, a mammoth shopping mall near her home in England. The longer second part of the story follows Lisa, a record store employee who works in the same shopping mall twenty years after Kate disappears. O'Flynn captures the bleakness of working in retail perfectly, and adds an element of mystery and a pinch of the supernatural (is the little girl who appears on the security cameras at night Kate's ghost?) to create an original, slightly creepy, poignant look at modern life.

9. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

One of the first books I read this year and I absolutely loved it. A classic tale about four sisters with very different personalities—bashful, musical Beth; worldly artist Amy; literary tomboy Jo (my favorite); and serious, responsible Meg. With the support of their ever-patient mother, their army chaplain father, and their neighbors, Mr Laurence and his grandson Laurie, the girls grow into young women, enduring hardship, love, heartache, and lots of other life lessons along the way. I seriously love this book! I could not put it down. The characters are unique and sympathetic, and their adventures funny, sad, and heartwarming.

8. Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I am in awe of this author's writing. After being traumatized by Half of a Yellow Sun (a tale of the brutal Nigerian civil war), I knew Adichie's powerful way of storytelling wouldn't disappoint when I picked up her second novel, Purple Hibiscus. Again set in the author's native Nigeria, this novel tells the story of Kambili and her brother Jaja, who live under the shadow of their fanatical Christian father, who is both physically and emotionally abusive. Then a visit to liberal Aunty Ifoema's house in Nsukka changes everything. This novel has a wonderful sense of place; I found the settings rich and the characters complex and interesting.

7. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

Sue Trinder is raised in a den of thieves in 19th Century London. She knows all about scams, so when a mysterious man called Gentleman asks her to pose as a lady's maid in order to swindle an innocent girl out of her fortune, she jumps at the chance. Her job is simple—gain Maude Lilly's trust and persuade her to elope with Gentleman, who will then have Maude committed to a mental asylum, keeping the fortune himself and paying Sue a cut of it. But what is really going on at Briar, where Maude lives in seclusion with her austere uncle? And is Maude really as innocent as she seems? I love the clever way this books is written, revealing alternate perspectives that change the way the reader sees key scenes. A fun read.

6. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

It took me a long time to get around to reading this Newbery-award-winning novel, but I was so glad that I finally did. The Graveyard Book tells the story of Bod Owens, a boy who is raised by ghosts in a graveyard after his parents and sister are murdered by an enigmatic figure referred to only as "the man Jack." Modeled after Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, each chapter tells a story about Bod and his adventures with his undead friends. At the end of the book, Bod finally confronts his family's killer, and learns the truth about what happened that night. A funny, imaginative, and surprisingly moving book.

Playing pretend

As I've said before, I think one of the great things about being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to have imaginary friends as a grown up. When I was little, I had a lot of imaginary friends (what you get when you combine having an overactive imagination with being a lonely child). There was Space Man—an obese copper space robot with a penchant for naughtiness. There was Fred, who skateboarded around on the school roof as I sat in my second grade class at Toler Elementary. There was a vampire named Frank, and a little white mouse whose name I can't recall, and a myriad of other magical characters who populated my childhood over the years. The thing is, while most children outgrow these fictitious friends, I didn't. Instead I internalized them. They became characters in stories—not actually real, but emotionally real. Admittedly, Space Man did fade away (after getting me into all sorts of trouble by cutting holes in everyone's underpants, thanks dude), but he was replaced by other characters, stronger voices and stories.

I think that playing pretend is such an important part of childhood. It encourages empathy by putting you in someone else's shoes and head. And of course it promotes creativity, which is important for its own sake as well as being helpful in tasks like problem-solving.

But what about playing pretend as a grown up? As fiction writers, we pretend every day. We pretend into being whole worlds, whole lives.

What I'm really curious to know is, do you pretend in other areas of your life too? Because I'll be honest, I do.

Examples: Sometimes, if there are lots of chores to be done, I pretend I'm Amish (they love chores!). Sometimes I'm not cooking dinner for Big Chimp and me; I'm cooking for the lords and ladies of Downton Abbey (because I'm a scullery maid now, but one day I'll learn to type and go to secretary school. As soon as the war's over). Sometimes I'm not a lone library assistant on the train home from work, I'm a NINJA IN DISGUISE SO DON'T FREAKIN' MESS WITH ME!! Or, you know, sometimes I'm a secret agent or a magician or a faerie or an alien or a killer whale trainer at Sea World.

Pretending: is it a healthy way of releasing creative energy (I think so), or is it (as one of my former psychologists suggested) a worrying avoidance of the real world? Do you other creative people play pretend in your everyday life? If yes, tell me in the comments!

What I learned about writing in November

See how that title works grammatically in two ways? Yup, it's time to sum up the things I learned while participating in my first NaNoWriMo.

1) I can write more than I thought I could. I can wake up early on my day off, just to write! And it doesn't suck! Some days I wrote 1,667 words. Some days I wrote two thousand, three thousand, or four thousand words. Some days my eyes burned from the screen so that I had to lie in a darkened room for a while listening to soothing music on my iPod. I'm what Big Chimp calls a "considerate" writer, so four thousand words a day is big stuff for me.

2) I can do this while still managing to have some semblance of a plot going on. Sometimes, in fact, the need to expand my wordcount left little time for sitting there wondering what happens next, or worrying over something that might or might not work. Sometimes I threw in unexpected twists just to have more to write about, and those twists, in retrospect, really helped make the story.

3) Turning off my Internet connection is very helpful. Especially when used in conjunction with goals: I will keep the Internet connection disabled until I've written two-thousand more words, and then I can turn it on for fifteen minutes and brag on Twitter about what a great writing day I'm having.

4) I may be starting to get the hang of this novel-writing thing. I had so many false starts and scrapped attempts with my first novel that it took me almost two years to finish the first (very rough) draft. With this novel, though it's obviously rough and will need plenty of editing when it's finished, the first draft is so much more confident. It's got some solid characters, it's got good direction, it's got plot...it's miles ahead of where the first novel was after the first month of work. Light-years ahead, in fact.

And on top of all of that, it feels pretty good to have written over half of a novel in 30 days (Laundry Mountain or no Laundry Mountain).