I note they took away the top 10 bloggers list.  Hm….[br][br]I just finished my last book of the year.  See, my English teacher had us to these reading logs when I first moved to London, where you jot down the book title and author, the date you finished it, and comments on what you thought of it, etc.  I loved being able to look back on what I was reading and where my head was at, so I’ve kept it up ever since.  It’s been 9 years now.  I also started keeping track of how many times I’d read each book, and how many books I read each year.  My highest record so far is 46.  The lowest was one freak year where it was only somewhere around 36.  I remember being disappointed, because it was a time when I was just so distracted and lost feeling, i wound up turning away from one thing I’ve always adored – reading.  Generally, though, it’s always in the 40s.  My goal is to break 50 some day.  A book a week would be amazing. [br][br]So the first ever logged book was on 2nd November 1999.  The result is my reading log year end is 1st November.  So that made today the end.  And I thought last week I’d never manage to squeeze one last book in there, but I did.  Tonight, at 11.30pm, I finished book number 42 for the year ending 1st November 2008.  It was an exciting moment – it always is.  It was called ‘The Book Thief’, a long but quick novel narrated by Death, about Nazi Germany.  It stood out as unusual, though, because it didn’t actually talk about concentration camps.  It was just one girl growing up as normally as she can, in what happens to be Nazi Germany, not really understanding what’s going on around her but being caught in it all the same.  A totally different approachh to the subject, as far as my experience is aware.  I cried, of course.  The ending wasn’t exactly ‘happy’…but then, it sort of was.  It had it’s sad parts and it’s lovely parts, and ultimately wasn’t depressing.  Ultimately, it was the kind of thing that makes you grateful to be alive, and appreciative of all the little things you might take for granted otherwise.[br][br]The thing about those kinds of stories is that you read them, they move you (and really I was in the mood for a good cry over something beautiful and beautifully crafted), you carry them with you all week and you feel like your whole world is changed and you’re going to be this amazing person from now on…and then the feeling settles so deeply into you that you forget about it and the next week you’re back to the way you were before.  But that one exquisite week…that’s why I read.  I’m chasing that inner change.  I keep searching for the next thing to cleanse my soul and make me love every atom in the universe.  I hope this one lingers a long time….