The 2015 Book Challenge

Happy New Year blogosphere!

Somehow it always comes as a kind of surprise to me, the passing of time. I mean, I'm aware that it is passing, I just never expect it to pass as fast as it does and I feel like I've barely made any New Year's Resolutions before its December 31st all over again.
I am totally the 'oooh doesn't time fly' kind of a cliche. It's a problem that I don't know quite how to solve.

I'm making resolutions this year, as I do every year, but am still mulling them over so if you're looking for a blog post on how I plan to improve my life in 2015, well, this isn't it.

What this is, instead, is a post whereby I declare my pals to be absolute diamonds. Seriously, I must not have hit the snooze button on the day friends were handed out because mine are so excellent I can only have been first in line. (I've hit the snooze button every day since though. Waking up in a morning? Totally not my thing.)

The reason for my praising their collective excellence today, is that I received some excellent Christmas gifts, like for example the bag given to me by my BFF, that is upcycled from an actual copy of Alice in Wonderland (Those who know me like she so obviously does, know is The Book. I own more copies of it than is probably fine, I have no idea how to begin to care about that.)

A bag, made of Alice.

I'm telling you, so much pretty. I made some weird kind of squealing noise when I unwrapped it. So much pretty.

It's not the only truly excellent gift I got though (I told you, front of the line) and this one, from my pal Sarah, is one that you're going to hear a lot about this year.

Sarah got me a ribbon tied pile of sealed envelopes -  one for each month, a handful (7 actually) marked ICE - and a book.

She's set me, as she also seems to know me rather well, a book challenge! How marvellous is that!?
I don't know much about how it's going to work out, other than that each envelope contains a challenge for that month, I'm not allowed to re-read, and the book for January is Bill Bryson's 'One Summer' which I am RIDICULOUSLY excited about because Jazz Age America people: the roaring twenties. Al Capone and prohibition and the Flappers and talking movies and Atlantic flights and all that, well, jazz!
When people ask me, as people do, what decade I'd choose to live in, if it were in fact a choice, then pretty much every time I find myself thinking 'the twenties.'
I mean, there are other periods that interest me, others times I think I'd fit in with quite well, and perhaps I've just over read Fitzgerald (can you over read Fitzgerald?) but there's something about the twenties that just appeals to me. Needless to say, I cannot wait to read this book and I cannot wait to see where the rest of this challenge will take me.

I'll tag all the related posts with 'the 2015 book challenge' if you're interested - which well, it's a book challenge. Why would you not be! For now though I can't stay and chat; I have 600 pages of Bryson to read...