Amazon asked me to participate in their round-up of celebrity picks of the best books of 2016 and I suspect they confused me with Jennifer Lawrence but I still did it, although I picked way more than the 3 books that I was supposed to stick with and also I chose books that helped get me through 2016 even if they came out long ago so I broke all their rules and also I ended up not being Jennifer Lawrence. I am very disappointing. You can click here to read all about why I picked what I did. If you’ve read anything that helped you find comfort in this year, feel free to share in the comments. We could all do with some escape and comfort and magic.
(If you don’t want to go there, here they are: Unmentionable, Discworld, Stolen Things, Let Me Tell You, Akata Witch, Buffering, I’m Judging You, Shades of London, and everything by Jessie Burton and Rainbow Rowell.)
In unrelated news, Victor is in Japan this week and every year he goes there he’ll call on FaceTime and walk around a giant toystore and let Hailey pick out a stuffed animal, which is very surreal because basically I woke her up at midnight in Texas to let her visit a toy store existing in a sunny Japanese afternoon. She picked a cat in a cloak, but I saw this awesome giant squid and I was all. “BUY THAT NOW” and Victor was like, “This is enormous. I can’t fit that in my suitcase” and I was like, “Even better! Because you’ll have to carry it with you on the plane and share a seat with it and you can use it as a pillow. EVERYONE WINS.” And then he disagreed with me on the the meaning of the word “EVERYONE” but Amazon says I’m a “celebrity” so all bets are off on words and eventually he grumpily but with adorable resignation carried the giant squid and caped cat (and also a tiny slow loris) to the cash register.
I told him he should take Nicole Squidman everywhere and get pictures of her all over Japan and he totally balked but he did take one picture of Nicole Squidman climbing into his hotel window, except that most of the body was hanging out of the window and a breeze came and suddenly a giant squid plummeted nine stories down toward the polite screams of several confused pedestrians. He considered just walking away from the whole thing but Victor is my personal hero so he went down to rescue Nicole Squidman and explained to the doorman who was holding her that his wife is insane and that she made this happen even though she’s in Texas right now. I suspect that no matter how great Victor’s Japanese is the doorman suspected that he was using all of the wrong words, but regardless, Nicole Squidman is alive (ish) and well.
Technology is kind of amazing, y’all.
