525,600 minutes.

Did you know that’s how many minutes are in a year? Yes, of course you did. Thanks, “Rent.”

I must say, keeping a blog (even one that no one but my parents reads!) is quite useful at the end of the year for looking back upon all the has come to pass. And despite my miserable, lonely and bitter December, 2010 overall seems in retrospect to have been quite successful for me (even though I did fall short of all my 2010 new year’s goals) and I’ve got a lot to be thankful for.

NEW THINGS/BLESSINGS

Over the past twelve months, I’ve been introduced lots of new things: hot pot, the legends of Chinese New Year, Catholic mass, Beijing dust storms, hair extensions, what to do when your passport is lost or stolen in China, and professional rugby. In July, I lost my dearest pal and companion, Schultz. In August, I moved to Hong Kong and started my new job at WSJ.com — and I absolutely adore my new winter-less island home, and my job is incredibly close to the dream job I envisioned for myself as a starry-eyed J-school grad in 2007.

I am also thankful on behalf of my family & friends: My dad’s new business of performing independent contract work seems to be going well, the other members of my immediate family are still employed (not exactly a given in America these days!), and despite a late-year scare, my grandmother on my mother’s side seems to be doing well and will hopefully be fully recovered soon. My boyfriend successfully completed college and an extra few months of language study, and was recently offered a full-time reporting job (certainly a blessing based on the state of the industry). My cousin Casey also successfully completed college and will soon be a certified veterinary technician (take your pets to her!). Luckily I only had to miss one wedding this year due to my extreme distance (sorry, Haley!), and several of my friends have given birth to beautiful, healthy babies. My parents even got a new dog! Yes, I’d say overall we’ve had more blessings than curses this year.

TRAVEL: 14 CITIES, 7 COUNTRIES/TERRITORIES

I’ve been quite the little adventurer as well. Over the 52 weeks of 2010, I traveled to 14 different and previously unvisited (by me) cities/villages in five countries and two territories on two continents: Haikou and Sanya on Hainan island, Dalian in Liaoning, Kunming in Yunnan, the Jianshiling section of the Great Wall in Hebei, Mount Taishan in Tai’an in Shandong, Beidaihe in Hebei, Cuandixia village in Beijing municipality, Abu Dhabi in UAE, Muscat in Oman, Dubai in UAE, Macau and Phuket and Bangkok in Thailand, as well as traveling back to the good ol’ US of A to visit family. This one will be tough to top since I’m no longer in China, with its generous three-day weekends and 3.7 million square miles of territory, most of which is easily and cheaply visitable by train or plane (now, I must have a new $130 visa every time I want to go to the Mainland.)

RUNNING: ~400 MILES

Though I fell quite short of my goal to run 500 miles in 2010, I did run the Dalian Half in under 2 hours, shaving twelve whole minutes off my first half-marathon time, the North Face 10K at the Ming Reservoir, the Gold Coast 15K and the X-Trail 5K — that turned into a 22K, the first 15K of the Adidas Reservoir Series, both at Tai Tam Country Park.

As you can see from my yearly tracking (done via nikeplus.com plus iPhone or Nike timing chip), I started off the year pretty strong and then sort of fell. The June/July dip actually look so terrible because they represent the time where I lost my bracelet tracker to go with my sensor (I ran an estimated 50 miles untracked.). In August, they released a Nike app and I was able to start tracking again. I’ve struggled to keep up my running routine since moving to Hong Kong (late August) because my new job keeps me much busier than my last and doesn’t afford me a part-time working-at-home schedule, but I’m signed up to run the Hong Kong Half Marathon at the end of February, so hopefully I can get back into it now and best my 2010 running miles in 2011.

READING: 47 BOOKS

I actually thought I would reach my reading goal of 50 books in a year, but alas, I’ve fallen just short, having read just 47 books. I was really hit on this one by my move to Hong Kong. In Beijing, I had an hour commute each way from work, giving me ample time to read . But after I came to Hong Kong, my commute got cut from an hour of walk-subway-bus to an eight-minute walk, leaving little time for reading. And I actually spent far too much time on a single book—probably four or five weeks—when I should have just abandoned it and moved on to something better (it was a book of short stories by Russians.). In November, my tally actually stood at 40, so I’m actually happy with my results. (I read seven books in December, including four in one week!)

I actually also have started reading books via Kindle on “my” Apple iPad (it’s one of our company iPads). I was initially incredibly skeptical about eBooks, but I’ve changed my mind completely. (I plan to write an entire post about this very topic later.)

 

A selection of the books I've read this year (via Shelfari)

So what were the highlights and books I’d recommend?

Classics: I read two Hemingways, including Garden of Eden, a lesser-known that nonetheless makes it to my top-five all-time favorites; Jane Austen’s Persuasion (free on several eReader programs!); The Beautiful and the Damned, (what I think is) the only Fitzgerald I hadn’t yet read; The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (I finally get that Gossip Girl episode!); and the 672-page feminist classic, The Golden Notebook (I didn’t understand all the hooplah; I thought it was kind of a drag and far too long). I’m also rather glad that I read the classic tales of the The Arabian Nights: Volume I, as it actually came in handy for my visit to the Middle East and understanding some cultural references.

Contemporary Fiction: My top pick of the year is Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, portraits of the staff of an English-language newspaper run out of Rome (the caricatures of all the newsroom personalities are so dead-on, but non-journalists might not get what’s so great about it). Other highlights:  Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 Freedom;  J. Courtney Sullivan’s Commencement; the old-but-still-great Laughter in the Dark by Nabokov, and, of course, the 2010 sensation, Stieg Larsson Millennium series: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

China Books: The must-read of the year is Peter Hessler’s Country Driving: A Journey through China from Farm to Factory, which was just released in 2010. Others I read include and recommend: Factory Girls (but skip over all the parts about the author’s family), Lisa See’s fictional but highly informative Peony in Love and The Atlantic’s James Fallows’ collection of his writings on China, Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China.

Non-Fiction: Atop this list this year for me is Barbara Demnick’s Nothing to Envy, an intriguing tale  by a LA Times reporter/editor about life and the struggles to escape North Korea based on her countless interviews with several refugees. Coming in at a close second is Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, a true story about a former Olympic runner who joined the military during WWII. The book, which was written by the same author who wrote Seabiscuit and is a shoo-in for being adapted into a Hollywood movie, details the main character’s harrowing tales of survival, including living for 46 days on a raft adrift in the ocean after his plane went down over the Pacific and the horrors he suffered at the hands of the Japanese as a POW.  Others include: Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall, which does for Russia what Peter Hessler does for China; and The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men and the New York Times, a must-read for any journalist, male or female.

I track my readings via Shelfari, a great resource for keeping track of all those books you’ve read and plan to read! (Thanks to Karen for sharing that one, and full list of my books of 2010 after the jump.)

2011: WHAT’S NEXT?

So now what? I’m not quite sure what my plans for 2011 are. I don’t think I’m going to set my 50-book bar again, as I actually have some longer books I’d rather focus on (see: Anna Karenina and the Bible, in their entireties). I think I’ll try to run more than I did in 2010 without setting a particular numeric goal to simply stay in good (better!) shape. I hope to keep traveling: Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, Europe? I’d like to buck down and get at least one (of two) of my credit cards paid off. Maybe I’ll get a dog (it’s currently under serious consideration). I’ll return to the USA at least once to see my family and for a wedding in Philly this summer (plus an anticipated work-from-the-New-York-office week to coincide with that). I’ll turn 27 (OMG!). I hope I’ll get more involved, meet more people and make new friends in Hong Kong. And, hopefully, next year, I won’t have to spend Christmas and New Year’s alone.

Happy New Year’s!

The Books I read in 2010, in reverse chronological order

Laughter in the Dark, Vladimir Nabokov
Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand
The Rogue of the North, Eileen Zhang
The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Once on a Moonless Night, Dai Sijie
Factory Girls, Leslie Chang
Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demnick
The Portable Russian Reader, Various
The Dubliners, James Joyce
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson
Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall, Andrew Meier
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Xiaolu Guo
Hong Kong: A Cultural and Literary History, Michael Ingham
Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution, Agnes Smedley
The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain
Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler
Bush Hat, Black Tie: The Life of a Foreign Service Officer, Howard Simpson
Commencement, J. Courtney Sullivan
A Mosque in Munich, Ian Johnson
Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men and the New York Times, Nan Robertson
Never Surrender: A Novel of Winston Churchill, Michael Dobbs
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
Peony in Love, Lisa See
The Beautiful and the Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald
50 Great Short Stories, Various
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
She-Fan: True Love with the New York Yankees, Jane Heller
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
I Lost My Love in Baghdad, Michael Hastings
The Shack, William Young
The Arabian Nights: Volume I, Anonymous
Country Driving: A Journey through China from Farm to Factory, Peter Hessler
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemmingway
Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China, James Fallows
Garden of Eden, Ernest Hemmingway
This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor, Susan Wicklund
The Man Who Loved China: The Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries, Simon Winchester
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
What Happened to Anna K, Irina Reyn
Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson