These are the books I read this year. Six thousand nine hundred and sixty one pages of bookish goodness, in order of recommendation (within each category)…

Fiction:

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

City of Thieves by David Benioff

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Alphabet Weekends by Elizabeth Noble

Goodnight Nobody by Jennifer Weiner

Until I Find You by John Irving

Non-Fiction:

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

The End of Overeating by David Kessler

Tell Me Where It Hurts by Nick Trout

Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier

Currently reading: SuperFreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Up next: The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

I distinctly remember thinking I was both fat and ugly just before the fifth grade swim social at age eleven. I was probably less than five feet tall and eighty something pounds. How absurd is it that you have to sit down with your eight-nine-ten year old and starting giving her ammunition to last her a lifetime against the beauty industry? Doesn’t even talking about it pose a problem? Parenting a girl seems like a nightmare.

Who knew that the most interesting show I’d see on television this month would be on HBO Family and aimed at infants? Certainly not me. At any rate, browsing channels today I happened upon a hidden gem: Classical Baby.

Mix the essential classical music (Tchaikovsky, Satie, Schumann, Strauss, Puccini and Debussy, among others) with imaginative choreography, famous artwork (Miro, Monet, da Vinci) and enchanting animation and this is what you get.

If you can get past the fact that the show is aimed at the under 3 set, you might really enjoy it. Critics seem to be uniformly caught up on the fact that the producers are encouraging television watching among infants, but frankly I think the show should be marketed at adults. The average American could stand to have an increased appreciation of art and classical music.

Watch it on Tuesday at 4:15 pm on HBO Family.

The O.C. was fantastic this week. A charming concoction of 80s nostalgia, 90s glitz, and 00s cynicism. Unlike three weeks ago’s sickening Spiderman re-creation, the director included just enough of the elements of Risky Business that worked (the music, the catch) without making it seem unoriginal. Kudos.