Hobby Watch 2010

(Is this thing on? Hello? ... Okay, it's been a while since we posted here. Let's kick off the cobwebs...)

We didn't really have time for hobbies in 2009. It sounds almost sad in saying it, but been adjusting to life in a new city, making new friends, getting used to new jobs, and, of course, wedding planning, there just wasn't room for us to steadily pursue hobbies together. We had some favorite activities (see below for more on one such examples) and favorite places to go, but nothing that fully advances to the scale of hobby.

2010 should, in theory, be different. We've both gotten to know and love this city; we've made some wonderful friends; the wedding planning books are packed away and ready to be given to another bride-to-be. Will is pretty well adjusted to his job, although Diana's on a new project (and that's a good thing). Though this quasi-mythical free time has yet to truly manifest itself through the first two months of 2010 ... well, we can dream can't we?

So, we find ourselves in the somewhat strange but not at all unpleasant position of being able to pick out some new hobbies: things that we can do together in our still somewhat new (okay, we just rolled 500 days last week) hometown whenever we have few free hours strung together. Thus far, we've had two main candidates emerge:

• Guitar. Will gets the credit / blame for this one; for Diana's birthday, he bought her a lovely acoustic/electric guitar. Diana returned the favor two weeks later, getting Will a classical guitar for Valentine's Day. We're looking forward to learning together.
  
  
• Racquetball. The credit for this one goes to Diana. Our local gym (which, somewhat bizarrely, is on Hollywood Blvd about two blocks away from Grauman's Chinese Theatre and the Kodak Theatre) has four courts, and we had a pretty good streak going of getting in ~5 games a week. For those of you keeping track at home, Diana is currently ahead in the standings, with a record of something like 7-4.
  

Depending on one's point of view, we're either dangerously or tantalizingly close to adding a third potential hobby here: salsa dancing. We ended up going on consecutive weekends surrounding Diana's birthday. We'll see how that pans out. To switch from the first person plural to the first person singular now, I (Will, in case you hadn't guessed) [Editor's Note: Hey, I also help ;) I am proof reading for us... ] want to do my geek out thing and examine what I suppose could be considered my leading hobby of 2009 (despite the argument above): reading. I probably read more books for fun in 2009 then I have at any point since high school, thanks largely to three factors: too much time on airplanes, a natural bedtime about one hour later than Diana's, and my Kindle. Yes, I do find that I read both faster and more on the Kindle--I'm not sure entirely why, but my best guess chalks it up to preventing eye fatigue by changing font sizes. Being a geek, I kept a log of everything I read last year. All told, I made it through 32 books cover to cover last year (or 31, if you are inherently biased against book-length graphic novels). Some fun stats on those books:

• 19 were Fiction, 13 were Non-Fiction
  
• 28 were books I was reading for the first time, while only four were re-reads
  
• 26 were eBooks (Kindle), 5 were physical books, and 1 (1776) was an unabridged audio book
  
• The average year of first publication was ~1845 (mean average) or 2005 (median and mode averages)
  
• Authors with multiple appearances: Neil Gaiman, Chuck Klosterman, David Foster Wallace, China Mieville
  

I won't subject you all to reviews of each one of these books, but I will call out my three favorites:

3. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, by Max Brooks (2006). There is no way on Earth I could have expected this book to be so good. It was supposed to be a guilty pleasure of an airplane read. Kudos to you, Mr. Brooks! Not bad from Mel Brooks's son.

2. No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy (2005). This one was a bit more predictable; the Coen Brothers film adaptation blew me away. The book is absolutely worth reading. The character of Ed Tom Bell (played extraordinarily well by Tommy Lee Jones in the film--but the film character is substantially different) rocks my world.

1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer (2005). I liked the film Everything is Illuminated a good deal, but was still caught off guard by this one. Of course, I was reading this in the days leading up to our wedding, so maybe I was just in a sappy, emotional mood. But damn if Mr. Foer didn't get me emotionally engaged.

And lastly, just for good measure, I'll note that although neither of them cracked my top three for the year, my top two non-fiction books of the year were probably Killing Yourself to Live, by Chuck Klosterman (2005) -- probably the World War Z of my non-fiction list -- and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (2006), though something by David Foster Wallace would easily top both of those if I'd read a full book of his non-fiction.