This is it!  I've covered audio, nonfiction, and children's and YA.  Now, I'm listing my favorite adult fiction of 2015.  I read 20 titles in this category this year, down from 28 last year.  I got pretty into nonfiction this year, it turns out, which is a surprising development in my reading life.  Never a dull moment!

In any case, here's are the best five works of adult fiction that I read in 2015!

I covered audio books on Sunday and nonfiction on Monday.  Now, I'm on to the best Children's and YA titles I read in 2015!  I read 25 titles in this category, up from 16 last year.

So, here we go!  They're in alphabetical order by author.


The Crossover by Kwame Alexander.  This is an electrifying, heart-wrenching novel in verse about twin basketball players and their dad, a former NBA pro.  It screams to be read in one sitting, it's uber-accessible, and it compels the reader to evaluate the universal themes of family, consequences, identity, and forgiveness. Five stars, for sure - maybe my favorite read of the whole year, and it could probably be devoured by readers 4th grade and up.  It is pretty sad in parts, though.

Taking a break from book reviews to recap my favorite #TwinTuesday shots from this year.  #TwinTuesday is a little-understood, highly quirky creative collaboration.  Each week, Lee and I choose some random objects to photograph together.  The two objects are supposed to engender a feeling of the unexpected.  Like, wow, I never expected to see a photo of a wrench and an avocado together!  Or, Hmm! A flip flop AND a matchbox car?!

It was fun to scroll through the year on the blog and revisit the #TTs.  On the way, I realized I've really had a heck of a year.  I started writing and sharing fiction. We had several blog challenges that each produced interesting work. I continued to teach with two of the most talented, creative professionals I've ever met. I connected with siblings I've never known before. We road-tripped to Michigan. I took my blog down for several weeks, and then I brought it back. We procured the best dog I've ever known. I parented two delightful and interesting children.  I partnered in all things with a calm, whip-smart, and hilarious husband.

It's not been a bad year.  And #TwinTuesday has been a constant - a reliable mainstay - throughout. My faves are pictured above. They are, in order by date:
Lemon and Plastic Bug, 3/17
Flip Flop and Matchbox, 6/30
Baking Dish and Map, 7/21
Wrench and Avocado, 11/17
Smoothie Greens and Magnet, 12/15

Here are my next faves, just in case you wanted to know:
Bubbles and Avocado, 9/1
Poem and Charm, 9/22
Garlic and Dragon, 10/6
Framed Art and Energy Bar, 11/3
Salamander and Dryer Sheet, 11/24 (Included above for purposes of aesthetics)

Today I'm naming my favorite five nonfiction books I read this year.  I read 23 books of nonfiction, up from 15 last year.  Here are the best five in alphabetical order by author:

In the last few days of 2015, I'm going to re-cap my year in reading.  This was the second year I resolved to read 52 books.  I love this resolution, and I plan to continue it indefinitely.  It's a major life-brightener.

Okay, we've made it!  One of my highlights this Christmas was a nice chat I had with Brother-in-law-John and his lovely spouse, Galen.  These two are highly creative and smart - just the kind of people you'd love to talk with about ideas for living a cool and meaningful life.

Recently, these high fliers wrote and produced a show called The King of That Also, a mix of new baroque music, singing, poetry, and projected art works. I had to miss it because of my trip to Arizona, but you might not have to if you're in New York City on 12/27 or Chicago on 2/5.  I did get the accompanying book, which pleases me.

During the same conversation in which we supported and celebrated each other's creative endeavors, I also learned that Galen has a podcast review blog called Hear That Noise. It seems like something we need to read.  I'm going to read it and then listen to her recommended podcasts.  This will be a good thing to do.  Maybe we can share this experience together.

I have some unfortunate news.

In addition to my winter psoriasis outbreak, I now have a full-body dotty-type rash.  Red dots and bumps.  It itches, and it's ugly.  And it kind of hurts, now that I'm thinking about it.

I'm using some self-help type thinking to get through this difficult time.  "This is tough," I remind myself, "but I'll get through it."  I rationally think through my options and decide on a course of action.  I'm pleasant to the on-call nurse in the dermatology clinic who helpfully assigns me to a recent cancellation time slot.  "Thank you SO much," I say.  "Of course I can be there at 3:30."

Only one time did I photograph the rash and send the picture to a friend.  I limited my Google images rash photo examination time to one-and-a-half or two hours.  I only check to see if the rash has spread every fifteen minutes.

Things are obviously totally under control.

#NovelSnip is a tiny portion of my fiction writing project.  Here's another #snip of the new project, which I'm calling School Story. Isobel has survived her asinine department meeting, praise The Lord.

Thirty minutes later, Isobel hunched over the steering wheel of her Sienna, headed home, where Mark would have blessedly prepared dinner, and Callie and Riley were likely ensconced on the couch, engrossed in an infernal Disney Channel offering.

“I know, Mom,” Callie would look over her shoulder lazily when a ridiculous caricature appeared on screen.  “It’s culturally insensitive.”

The drive was thirty minutes, far enough from the high school to avoid too many awkward grocery-store run-ins with the parents, whom she would recognize as familiar, but with no idea to which student they belonged.  Inevitably when these encounters occurred, the well-dressed mother would launch into a thinly-veiled critique of Isobel’s methods or grading, while Isobel, make-up free and sweatpants sagging from her hips, furtively stuffed a box of Lucky Charms into her cart that was otherwise filled with leafy greens and coconut water.

That's it!  I woke up early and wrote some more, and now there are six single-spaced pages.  Turns out, I have a lot of fodder when it comes to ridiculous school-based scenarios.  None from my current post, mind you.  But my previous job was just screaming to be fictionalized.

Yesterday morning, I met my fiction writing buddy in a Google hangout at 5:30 am.  We exchanged pleasantries, and then we did a fifteen-minute "sprint" of writing.

"Can I call it a 'jog'?" I typed to Susan.

"Yes!" she said. "But keep the 'j' silent like Ron Burgundy would."

After fifteen minutes we reported back our word counts and congratulated each other on our excellent focus and production.  #amazeballs, I said.  #butterchurn, she said.

Dan, of course, laughed at us.  "It's a weekday, which makes this extra nerdy," he said.  Who even cares, Dan, because I wrote 632 words!

Later I employed the same strategy with my sixth graders who really, really need to finish their informational writing books on e-waste, water scarcity, and global food systems.  "We're going to crank it out," I told them, and set my timer for fifteen minutes.

At the end of fifteen minutes, I made them brag to their writing partners about their massive accomplishments and went around high-fiving everyone.  When my friend Lynne walked in at the end of one class period, I told them to brag to her, as well.  She was promptly mobbed by  twelve year-olds shouting their word counts at her.  "637!" "451!" "730!" "397, but I was already almost done!"

So yeah, super nerdy, but also awesome.  #literacyforlyfe

10ish years ago, I started working with my pal Tim, who was obsessed with his first child, a fluffy mid-sized pooch named Gunnar.

I made a lot of fun of Tim for talking about Gunnar like he was a real person. I especially made fun of him for dropping Gunnar off at a daycare facility.  I mean, Tim paid cash money to watch his dog play with other dogs on a webcam. Ha ha HA!

Well, fast forward to the recent arrival of my 3rd child, a Goldendoodle named Teddy Bridgewater.  As you may have heard, he needs an amount of exercise that even I find prohibitive.  Come to find out there's a daycare facility on my way to work, and if I drop him there and pay cash money, I can watch him play with other dogs on a webcam.  And BONUS: he's so tired in the evenings that he sleeps docilely at my feet instead of finding and chewing everything in the house he's not allowed to find and chew.

File this turn-about in the "Never Say Never" category.  I'm upping daycare attendance to twice per week.

#NovelSnip is a tiny portion of my fiction writing project.  I haven't been posting it for awhile because of some factors.  These factors stalled my writing and filled me with self-doubt.  But then, a few circumstances arose that put me back in business.  One of these was that I heard an interview with Lauren Groff, acclaimed author of Arcadia and Fates and Furies.  She shared in the interview that she always works on more than one project at once.  If one project's not going well, she picks up the other.  That seemed smart to me. So, one time during Creative Writing Club at the urging of the sixth graders, I started a new project.  Here's a little bit of it.  Maybe you'll like it, maybe you won't. But here it is:

Isobel’s eyelids drooped ominously in the after-school faculty meeting.  A heavy fatigue had dogged her for most of her teaching day, sucking her prep period down a dark hole of scouring the Spanx website for an external solution to the five pounds she'd gained since school started again.

Now, several hours later, her department chair expounded on the importance of using language to foster a democratic learning community. “For example,” Mary continued, a full twenty minutes into her monologue, “an effective teaching strategy is to begin with an open question.”  Isobel pinched her left thigh in an attempt to perk up.  Next to her, Jamie, a twenty-five-year old in the midst of her first year of teaching, drew a sixth row of hearts in her college-ruled spiral notebook. Isobel gave her a sidelong smile, and Jamie rolled her eyes.

I'm so happy because I already have a plot idea for this gal.  Unlike in my Alice project, I know what the inciting incident and major conflict are.  That's gotta make things easier, right? We'll see.

Ok, let's just blog every day for the rest of 2015.  It seems like the only thing to do.

Along with my new creative writing life, I'm a little behind this year on the gift buying.  Will I catch up?  It's likely.  I'm pretty sure the holiday will roll around, and I'll have something for everyone.

It might not be the perfect thing.  But there is no real perfect thing.  The perfect thing is a fallacy.

Will I catch up on creative living?  Catching up on creative living is a fallacy.  You just start right where you are.  Whenever you start is the right time.  Whatever you produce is the right thing.

Well, it might not be the right thing, but that's a fallacy.  It's better than no thing.

• While I woke up with a very sore throat, it subsided as the day continued.
• There was thin-crust veggie pizza for lunch.
• My newest nephew was born in the evening.  His name is Ellis.  I think he's tops.

We're coming up on the annual holiday violin concert, an event in which I play in a section with middle school girls.  This year, I'm contributing to three pieces, including "Fiddle Like the Dickens," "Wassail Song," and Gigue from Veracini's Sonata in D Minor.  I'm excited, and my goal is to limit air-bowing to 14 measures of the the gigue.

I realized the other day that I've been studying violin with my teacher, Jennifer, for four years now. I find violin to be meditative, satisfying, and generally life-enriching.

Mac has also been studying with Jennifer for four years.  He finds violin to be torturous, excruciating, and generally soul-sucking.

Although it's made us both miserable on many occasions, I have diligently persevered in forcing that child to produce music.  "He's the type of kid that needs to be made to do something," I'd explain to skeptical friends.  "And he's really good at it," I rationalized.  And sometimes, on a rare occasion, he actually did seem happy playing his little instrument.  But most of the time, in the vast majority of cases, he wailed and stomped and barred himself in his room to delay putting the bow to the strings.

So, finally this fall, I conceded the battle over violin.  Today's recital is his last.

I talked at length with Jennifer about my decision to throw in the towel as a Suzuki parent.  Am I a failure? I asked.  Am I doing the right thing?

"Look," she said, "Mac is probably the strongest-willed student I've ever had in my studio."

I was relieved to hear this.  The problem is not that I'm faint-hearted; it's that he's a total, unrelenting pain in the butt.

It's December and it's eggcellent.  Let me count the ways:

• I'm done bragging.  Bragging is harder than it seems.
• It's tights weather, and I love tights.  I especially love Spanx tights with a heavy duty control top.  
• Mac and I are playing our holiday concert on Sunday.  It's been a rough go, in terms of stamina, for violin this fall, but it looks like we've both weathered the storm.
• Lee and I have this amazing #TwinTuesday: Brené Brown book + egg.
• I'm working on living a more creative life this month.  I'm engaging in some self-help.  I'm also reaching out, growing creative community.  What could be wrong with that?  It's all so good.

Good news: I've recently experienced two non-fiction stories in different media.  One was a movie and one was a book.  Here are my blurbs:

Last night my mom and I saw Spotlight, the film about the group of investigative reporters that uncovered the massive sex abuse cover-up in the Boston Archdiocese.  It was riveting and inspiring.  It also highlighted the importance of teamwork.  As David Sims writes in his Atlantic review, the film resists glorifying any one player, but rather heralds the "combined efforts of a well-run, well-staffed journalistic organ not beholden to moneyed interests, and with enough will to push past any political or social pressures."  I'm going to go ahead and heartily recommend this film.

I'm going to do the same - heartily recommend - the investigated memoir by Suki Kim entitled Without You, There Is No Us that I finished yesterday. The book is about the author's stint as a visiting English professor at a North Korean university for the sons of the ruling class.  Kim's style is spare and factual, except when she discusses the love she feels for her students.  Her descriptions of the strict and baffling rules set forth for her and the other professors by "the counterparts," their North Korean censors, highlight the role of fear in absolute control.  I'm going to call the book chilling, and maybe a little hopeful.  As Euny Hong writes in her New York Times review, "Kim's narrative suggests that the regime's stranglehold on information is starting to crack."  Gosh, I hope so.

Yes, it's been too many days since I last published a blog entry.  But, as this is already my most prolific year of the last ten as a blog writer, I'm not feeling too terrible about that.

Let's see here:

Entertaining: Dan and I hosted a dinner for sixteen people.  All the food was amazing, even the food we didn't make.  The company was phenomenal.  The fact that three of my five siblings were there was unprecedented and sublime. Let's not talk about how I'm the shortest of all the siblings. It's not fair, but it's reality.

"Do you have a salamander?" asked Lee.

"I think so," I said. "And how about something with laundry?"

And so salamander and dryer sheet was born.  Little did we know we have EXACTLY the same red plastic salamander.  We actually had not an inkling until we posted our photos (mine on the left, hers on the right) this morning on Instagram.

There's never been a #TwinTuesday as #TwinTuesday as this. I know.  It's flipping out of control.

My friend Melanie is a food and nutrition blogger.  She's got this thing going on right now, which is a GREEN SMOOTHIE CHALLENGE.  You try to drink a green smoothie every day between now and January 1.  Because why wait to make positive health changes?  She says you don't even have to stop eating the other holiday stuff.  Just ADD the green smoothie.  Finally, she doesn't even get mad at me for not doing it.  She just says, Good Try!  Thanks for thinking about it!

So, it took me ten days and some whining and asking for special favors to start the challenge.

But I did, and I'm on Day 2.  My GREEN SMOOTHIES have had a blend of dark greens, including baby kale, chard and spinach, coconut milk, frozen mango, and a little banana.  Also I sprinkled in a little of Dan's protein powder.  Don't tell him, or he'll probably have me arrested for stealing, right after he makes me read his blog.

If you're not an English teacher, you probably didn't even know that you should come to the National Council of Teachers of English convention today in Minneapolis.  You wouldn't even have realized that it would be your chance to hear acclaimed and ground-breaking cartoonist Alison Bechdel discuss her path as a writer and artist.

This week, I was smart enough to sign up to go to the NCTE conference, taking place this year in MINNEAPOLIS, tomorrow.  That means this is my last teaching day of the week.  Also because I team teach, I no longer have to write lesson plans when I'm going to be gone.

Can you even imagine that benefit?  My team just covers for me, and kids have the same educational experience they would have had if I had been there.  Later, I cover for my teammates when they have alternative obligations.

It's smooth, it's smart, and it's good for kids.

Last Friday, I had some surprise visitors from another school.  They were interested in our curriculum and our system of assessments.  So, naturally, my boss had them come and see my class on Friday during the last instructional period of the day.  She gave me almost no notice of their planned observation.  Just a little, Hey!  I'm sending you some visitors!  Be sure to be impressive!  Hope that's okay!

Reading: Turns out, I finished my New Year's Resolution to read 52 books early.  I'm now finished with 54.  This total includes 17 young adult/children's books, seven books of adult non-fiction, 21 books of adult fiction, three books of poetry, and six teacher professional development texts.  I'm just saying.

Writing: Another New Year's Resolution was to work on my fiction writing.  I have 52 pages of original fiction now.  I printed it out, and I'm figuring out where Alice's story is going.  I need an arc at this point, so I'm developing one.

Teaching: We're doing something new with Writer's Workshop and using Units of Study from Teachers College at Columbia University.  My sixers are cranking out some really interesting information writing.  We're writing non-fiction books next, which excites us.  I'm a writing coach.

Parenting: I become only mildly to moderately exasperated most mornings when trying to get to work with the slowest child on the planet.  I mostly feel only mildly to moderately jealous of other working parents who commute unencumbered.

I had to get to a meeting by 7:45 today, so the efficiency of the morning get-ready took on critical importance.  I woke at 4:55 to spearhead the entire effort, at which point I fed and walked the dog, prepared the coffee, ingested some breakfast, dressed myself in a fashionable and professional outfit, and then, at 6:30, empathetically woke the children.  I deposited Mac on the couch with his remote and the  poured him some cereal.  I gently shook Shef an additional time.  I applied natural-looking make-up to my face and curled my hair.  I supplied Mac with weather appropriate clothing and made sure he brushed his teeth.

Even with a last-minute shirt change by (who else?) Mac, we were in the car right on time at 7:16.

I'm sorry, but that's pretty damn good.  I even supported Shef when he explained on the way to school that his choir teacher instructed him to mouth, rather than sing, the high parts of songs.  "That happened to your grandfather, too," I told him.  He comes by his low, stubborn voice naturally.

Because we have completely refined palates, my sister Rachel and I have decided to sample and review area cheese plates.  The one pictured above is from Barbette.  We forgot to pay close enough attention to the descriptions of the cheese to actually tell you what they are.  The one on the left is a cow's milk, the one in the center is a sheep's milk, the one on the right is a blue.  That's all we know. Also, I forgot to take a photo of the plate before we started eating it, but you'll probably still appreciate the artfully drizzled balsamic glaze and thinly sliced apple.

Here's a rough transcript of our expert, sophisticated review:

Me: Which cheese was your favorite?
Rachel: I think the slab in the center.
Me: Didn't you like the thinly sliced apple?
Rachel: Yes!  It was very thinly sliced.
Me: What did you think of the chutney?
Rachel: I liked it, but I noticed you didn't eat all of yours.
Me: I liked the chutney with the cheese, but I didn't like it separately.
Rachel: Oh.
Me: If you were to rate the cheese plate on a scale of 1-10, what would you give it?
Rachel: I mean, it was good.
Me: Yeah, it was good.
Rachel: It would have been better with a glass of prosecco.
Me: Next time, let's get prosecco.
Rachel: Yeah.

And there you have it!  The cheese plate at Barbette is good, but better with a glass of prosecco.  You're welcome.

Not everyone could think of the idea of turning a department meeting into a found poem.  Come to find out, I thought of just that idea.  What I did was this: I wrote down key words that people said in our meeting on Best Practices in Writing Instruction, and then I arranged them into this poem.  I added some other words in between.  In any case, what a good way to make something (a department meeting) into something else (a poem).

Injury takes on perplexing utility.
partnering cosmos with alignment.

I hate to brag, but I'll just mention that my small moment was featured by Mac's second grade teacher as a mentor text.

Mac told me all about it.  "We heard your small moment today!" he said.  "We discussed CRAFT moves."

"Great!" I said.  "What kinds of craft moves did I make?"

"You wrote that you said something THREATENINGLY," he said.

"Yeah," I said.  "Were you proud of me?"

"Uh huh," he nodded.

Then this morning, I saw Mac's teacher, and she too complimented my small moment.  "I had to write to several parents to ask them to, you know, beef up theirs," she said.  But she didn't have to do that to me.  Mine was full of craft moves as it was.

#winning

Would you look at that?  It's framed art and an energy bar.  It's the very energy bar I was eating for breakfast.  I don't want to brag, but that was a healthy breakfast choice, complete with protein and little fat and sweetness for the sake of satiety.

I also don't want to brag about this next thing, but I'll just go ahead and share that I brought my current events magazines to school in order to catch up.  I'm reading bits and pieces here and there.

And, I hate to toot my own horn, but I'll just quickly mention that I made an appointment for next week and promptly recorded it in my planner.

I'm just saying - and I only bring it up because it seems apropos of this #TwinTuesday pairing - that I'm pretty on top of things.

November, here we go!  It's time to get back into the writing swing of things and get some words on the page.  I'm talking about here on the blog and also in #novelsnip.

The truth is that things have been a little irregular and a little intense.  I'm going to just describe it as the Fall Funk of 2015.  But, I'm tired of it, and it's over.

Do you think that'll work?

Let's go for it.

Here's a fun little anecdote to get things rolling.  Teddy the Canine has been in obedience class.  It should surprise absolutely no one that none of my family members agree to attend this class with me.  It's just me and the most attractive pupil.

Sadly, Teddy is not the most academically advanced pupil.  Superior students include Pippa, Cuddles, Dakota, Lu, Basil, and most notably, Maisy.  Maisy is a flipping genius, and boy do her people love to flaunt it, walking all over the room breezily during "stay" practice, giving me little condescending glances as I gradually decrease my proximity from twelve inches to sixteen.  But as a teacher, I know that life-long learning is not about competition.  Life-long learning is about continual progress, and I think Teddy is moving along his own trajectory.  Also, he's cuter than Maisy.  So there.

It's Halloween at school.  Tweens in costume throwing candy at one another in the hallways.  Whoooo!

Yesterday was likely to be the more productive day.  Yesterday, I was super excited to teach my first hour class about the components of sustainable development.  "We're going to do one of my favorite things," I told the class.

"You're going to teach us about grammar again?" asked a smiler in the front row.

"No!" I said.  "But I like grammar almost as much."

Coming to our house tonight: The Evening of Halloween Festiveness.  That's right. We'll be carving pumpkins and putting up decorations.  I'm going to swallow hard, don an orange t-shirt, and totally rock the enthusiasm.

This'll be a bit of a hardship because you know I don't like carving pumpkins, right?

And I don't like Halloween decorations, and I don't like costumes.  I also don't like candy corn because it makes me feel sick.

This is all part of my well-documented aversion to fun.

Sometimes I wish I loved things like Halloween and St. Patrick's Day and fireworks and Easter Egg hunts - in short, things that other people think are fun.

But you know what I think is fun?  Putting on sweat pants, cuddling on the couch, and reading aloud.  Also getting a latte and talking a walk.  I think talking about books is fun.  Seeing new places is fun.  Looking at art is fun.  Even going to movies is fun.  Studying commas with sixth graders is super fun. I'm the funnest person in basically the whole world.