I know some of you don't like lists, or are tired of year-end summaries, but I love both of those things and thought I'd make a list of my own.

Here are some of my favorite blogs of the year, in alphabetical order, since there's not really a unifying theme.  I'm an omnivorous liberal artist type, so my favorites range from science and technology to knitting, with some lit-crit writing in between.

The sites, with a brief description from each site:  

• 3 Quarks Daily:  On this website, my fellow editors and guest authors and I hope to present interesting items from around the web on a daily basis, in the areas of science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else we deem inherently fascinating.

• Barking up the Wrong Tree is proud to be listed on blogrolls at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.  My Wired Magazine columns are here.
  

• Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK andThe Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She gets occasional help from a handful of guest contributors.  Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.

• The Everywhereist:  (My friend, Geraldine.  One of the top 3 funniest people I know.)  The story behind the blog.  My husband’s job requires him to travel. A lot. For years, I sat behind a desk while he wandered around the world without me. It sucked for both of us, but probably more for me.  Then, one day, I was laid off.  It might have been one of the best things that ever happened to me.  Since then, I’ve been following him around the world.  This blog is mostly for him. So he can remember the places we’ve visited, the things we saw. So he can know a little bit about what I see when he’s off giving presentations and having meetings.  Yes, it’s a travel blog. But at its core, it’s a love letter to my husband.  A big, long, cuss-filled love letter. The kind he’d appreciate. The only kind I’m able to write.

• Feld Thoughts:  (My husband.) Brad is one of the managing directors at Foundry Group, a venture capital firm that invests in early stage software / Internet companies throughout the United States. He is also the co-founder of TechStars, a mentor-driven accelerator, author of several books and blogs, and a marathon runner.
  

• The Happiness Project:  Gretchen Rubin is one of the most thought-provoking and influential writers on happiness. Her books Happier at Home and The Happiness Project were both instant New York Times bestsellers, and The Happiness Project has spent more than a year on the bestseller list. Here, she writes about her adventures as she test-drives the studies and theories about how to be happier.  

• It's Okay to Be Smart:  This is a blog about science. But it’s probably not about science the way you’re used to it.  I’m a biology Ph.D. student by day, and I curate and publish everything you see here. We live in the future, and that future is one in which science impacts every part of our lives. But too many people aren’t taking part in that future. Too many aren’t taking part in science. We must teach science as more than facts. It’s a creative process, it’s an instant injection of wonderment, it’s the excitement we feel at the edge of knowledge. It’s for everyone.

• The Paris Review.  Founded in Paris by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton in 1953, The Paris Review began with a simple editorial mission: “Dear reader,” William Styron wrote in a letter in the inaugural issue, “The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines and putting it pretty much where it belongs, i.e., somewhere near the back of the book. I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they're good.”  Decade after decade, the Review has introduced the important writers of the day. 

• Singularity Hub:  Science, Technology, The Future of Mankind.  Singularity Hub is a blog and news network covering the latest in robots, genetics, longevity, artificial intelligence, aging, stem cells, and more.  The singularity is the point in mankind’s future when we will transcend current intellectual and biological limitations and initiate an intelligence and information explosion beyond imagining.

• Slow Love Life:  I want to write about moving at a gentler, more loving pace in everything I do, learning to appreciate the beauty of everyday moments, the wisdom of thinking things over. I was forced to slow down when I lost my job–and the journey of grieving and recovery is what my book is about. Slow living led me to falling in love with the world, experiencing what I think of as slow love.

• Yarn Harlot:  Stephanie Pearl-McPhee goes on (and on) about knitting 

• Zen Habits is about finding simplicity in the daily chaos of our lives. It’s about clearing the clutter so we can focus on what’s important, create something amazing, find happiness.

It’s hard for me to believe how long it has been since I’ve posted — the entire second quarter of 2006 just zoomed by, and I completely fell out of the blogging habit.  In the middle of March I started a six week period of working intensively on my novel, and any other kind of writing felt like a distraction.  And then we went to Paris for the month of May, and Brad did a great job of tracking our time there.  June was a manic month, with literally just three nights at home alone with Brad (June 4th and 5th following our return from Paris and June 27th (the night before heading out for 6 weeks)).  And here we are, in July.  Wheeee.

But there was more to my hiatus than just being busy — after all, I’m always busy.  The commitment to six weeks of concentrated work on The North Side of Trees required a more focused approach than my usual wide range of daily activities.  I worked hard, and I was tired at the end of the days, and definitely didn’t feel like writing any more — and I didn’t have much to say about daily life.  "Went to writing office, wrote, came home," summed things up for just about the entire six weeks.  I’m definitely not alone in this experience of finding that working on a novel is an entirely different thing than blogging.  Blogging had been a great way of keeping the writing juices flowing during times when I wasn’t working much on the novel.  Write, post.  Write, post — without anxiety or worrying about what people might think.  A kind of writing meditation for me.  And it has been an efficient / lazy way of putting energy into a lot of relationships all at one time, which was great for an introvert like me.  I could let my friends and family know what I’ve been doing / thinking without having to spend time on the telephone, which worked well for me.

And so working on other writing was a positive reason for not blogging.

And the clearly negative reason was nasty, personal attack comments both to me, and to Brad, especially around his Boston marathon in April.  Real attacks, not just comment spam, which is annoying, but comments where an actual human (or a marginal facsimile of one) took the time/energy to write really ugly things on my blog.  I’m not a celebrity (nor do I play one on t.v.), but sometimes find myself unsympathetic to their complaints about paparazzi and lack of privacy because of the public nature of the celebrity life.  And so I, in my tiny analogous way, decided that I’m open to the slings and arrows of public opinion if I do public writing, which is what a blog is.  I took a break to see what mattered more to me — avoiding the crap that comes from putting an opinion out into the world, or accepting that there is plenty of Crazy and Angry out there and writing anyway.  I had an email exchange with Fred Wilson about this over a year ago and he encouraged me to ignore the angry crazies and move on — thanks, Fred.

I’m turning off Comments for now — I don’t get a lot of comments anyway, and if you’re my friend or family, you can send me email, which I’ll answer in my usual haphazard way.

And the issue in the middle ground of blogging that I’m still thinking about is that while the unexamined life may not be worth living, a life lived with a constant eye to writing about it isn’t much of a life either.  Seeing one’s life as a means to an end as an observer meant only for writing fodder is one of the admittedly mild "dangers" of writing, and of blogging in particular.  It’s like people who travel with a video camera attached to their faces instead of actually experiencing a place.  It’s some kind of magical "Let’s save this moment for the future" thinking — I just don’t think the writing life works like that.  "Dream dreams, and write them; aye, but live them first."

And maybe that’s why I still haven’t finished The North Side of Trees.  I’m living a great life.. and I’m going back to blogging about it now.

Today is my 39 1/2 birthday.  I’m celebrating by spending the day in my Spruce Street writing office, working on The North Side of Trees.  That’s the short version of a funny tale that involves Carribbean islands and apple orchards and boundaries.  In a long, far flung conversation over afternoon tea in Boston last October with Pamela Daniels, (who I am still stunned to have been fortunate enough to have as my college dean lo these many years ago), she asked me what I needed to be able to finish writing my book and I answered that I thought I needed to go away from my daily life for 6 weeks and leave obligation behind. 

I considered 3 different geographies:  a farm in north Texas belonging to my in-laws, a bed and breakfast in an apple orchard in western Colorado belonging to an extra-extended family member, and an oceanside house in the Bahamas belonging to a longtime Boulder friend, and eventually made all the arrangements to go stay in the Carribbean for 6 weeks, starting last Sunday, March 12th.  Toward the end of the week, Brad developed a bad cold (thought he might have strep throat, but didn’t) and didn’t want to fly all day on Sunday for fear his head might explode, so we delayed our departure date until today — and I noticed myself feeling relieved about being home the extra couple of days and thinking that I didn’t really want to go — so we didn’t.  Many big thanks to my friend Lindsey for offering her home as my writing place, and then for being her usual Buddhist calm and flexible self about me changing my mind!

I looked at all the great things about living here in Boulder, including my incredible husband, house, dogs, friends, family, landscape, town, bookstore, and my very own writing sanctuary full of books and music and calm and thought that I really need to figure out a way to do my work here, where my life is — so I’m going to do that for the next 6 weeks instead of taking a geographical cure.  I’m going to hibernate and let my obligations fend for themselves and just focus on doing my writing work.  My desk at home is already mostly buried in the daily papers of life, and I’m just going to let things keep piling up around me as I plow ahead toward finishing the first draft of this book.  I’m going away from my daily life, but I’m staying here in Boulder..