Year End Resolution Review

I made 20 resolutions this year, and this is how I did:

Visit one state I’ve never visited. Complete. I visited Charleston, South Carolina in October, which was a great trip for a history geek.

Visit one (additional) state or one Canadian province or one country that I’ve never visited before. Fail.

Write 100 words a day of a non-blog related nature. Complete. Sort of. I must confess I did not write every single day this year, and in fact, there times in July, November, and December that I forgot to write for an entire week at a time (oops), but if we go strictly by word count, I think I’m okay on this one.

Read two history books. Complete. The first book I read was The Americans: The Colonial Experience by Daniel J. Boorstin. I’d read another of Boorstin’s books (the third in The Americans series, I believe) in college and loved it, so I figured I’d like the first in the trilogy. Boorstin had some interesting insights, but reading this decades after original publication, I found it to be a little . . . non-PC might be the most polite way to put it. The second book was Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis. I had a really difficult time getting into this, probably because I was reading too many books at the same time, but once I was reading exclusively this, I began to really enjoy it. See notes at the bottom of this post for full review. (1)

Read two books by authors from non-English speaking countries. Complete. I wanted some cultural variety in my reading material this year, and I ended up reading two books from Central Europe. I read the Czech novel, The Joke, which I reviewed here. Then I also read An Exclusive Love, a memoir set in Hungary and Denmark, which I reviewed here.

Read four classics. Complete. Oh, dear. This was the resolution that started well and ended badly. I loved my first classic of the year, Belinda, and reviewed it here. I liked my second classic of the year, Dracula. My third and fourth classics were kinda awful. Moll Flanders, classic # 3, was quite possibly the worst book I’ve read in my entire life. (2) Then I hated classic # 4, Vanity Fair, almost as much and I ranted about it here.

Read two Pulitzer prize winning books. Complete. This one was pretty easy. I read A Visit From the Goon Squad, which was this year’s fiction winner, and also Gone with the Wind, which doesn’t sound like a book that would win a Pulitzer, but it totally did in 1937. Review for GwtW here.

Read Augustine’s Confessions. Complete. All I have to say on this one is that Augustine was one tedious fellow.

Be more social. Complete. I’m still a hermit by most standards, but I’ve made new friends this year, and I’m ending the year with a pretty incredible boyfriend, so I definitely consider this one to be a success.

Go vegetarian. Complete. Or really, really close. This was going really well. I’ve cooked with new whole grains this year; I’ve dabbled in tofu/tempeh cookery. There were a couple times, I admit, that I failed to ask if a soup was made with veg stock or chicken stock, but nearing the end of the year, I was pretty smug. Then on December 26th, I bit into some bacon. It was an accident, as I hadn’t read a menu carefully and didn’t realize the grilled cheese came with bacon and I only ate one bite before picking the bacon off, but I’m still mad at myself.

Find a soup recipe that I’ll use when I get sick (as chicken noodle is no longer an option). Complete. It’s actually a garlic broth recipe from a Moosewood cookbook, but if you add peas and pasta, it can become a meal.

Bake bread. Complete. I actually think I completed this one on January 1st or 2nd which gave me a serious over-confidence with the rest of my resolutions.

Try 40 different recipes. Complete. This was actually surprisingly easy. I finished this in April.

Finally get a dining room table and chairs. Complete. And you’re totally welcome to drop by for dinner. ;)

Have a dinner party. Fail. I am moving this to my 2012 resolutions.

Take a class in something I’ve never tried before. Complete. I took a martial arts class in November. (It was a free trial type thing.) I plan to take up martial arts for real in January.

Volunteer or do some church ministry. Complete. This was pretty much stuff I did with my church: cooked and served meals at a homeless shelter, passed out groceries in a retirement home, and volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. (I was pretty useless in the last; I just ended up covered in flooring glue.) In 2012, I’ll be a co-chair for one of the ministries at church, so I guess this resolution went well!

Save up for and get a new car. Fail. I did begin to save, but I won’t buy a new car until spring.

Create a bucket list. Complete. You can read it here, but you’ll need to scroll down a bit.

Reorganize my closets, buying storage equipment where needed. Almost? I reorganized the first three closets months ago, and I then today, I worked on the last one. The closet is actually pretty clean, but I have all these documents on the floor of my spare room that I need to go through.

Did you make any resolutions this year? Did you keep them?

Notes: 

1. Elaboration on Founding Brothers: One thing I enjoyed about the book is that Ellis has clearly spent much of his life reading the papers of the founding fathers, so he presents them as if they are people he actually knows. At times, I felt he went a bit too far with his familiarity, presenting his theories about the true intent of Adams, Jefferson, etc. in their letters and public statements as fact rather than theory. But, for the most part, I found his portrayal of the historical figures to be enlightening and very human. I also like how he writes, as he’ll just toss out these perfect phrases in spots. My favorite of his was “enlightened procrastination,” which he was using to describe foreign policy, but I intend to use to describe my own sense of timing. Another one I liked was “improvising on the brink of catastrophe,” which I also find applicable to my own life. He was using this to describe just how fragile the new nation was. We now see it as destiny that the founding fathers declared independence and founded a unified nation, but Ellis focuses on just how dangerous the declaration of independence was, and how the supposedly unified nation was barely holding together in the early decades, and how a silence on slavery was the only thing keeping North and South together. 

2. Elaboration on Moll Flanders: You know how when a book is truly awful, a person will always compare it to either a Harlequin novel or a Twilight novel to illustrate its dreadfulness? That’s because hardly anyone reads Moll Flanders, so Stephenie Meyer and Harlequin authors get unfairly blamed for all the evils of bad literature when Daniel Defoe should take the blame. This is a dreadful 18th century novel about a woman who collects a mind-boggling number of husbands (often she has more than one husband at a time) and abandons even more children. It’s not that I object to reading about skanks precisely. I just expect the fictional skanks in question to possess a personality, which Moll does not. Do not read this book. Ever.