Oh, December. Month of leftover turkey sammies, four-thirty masquerading as seven or eight, and more lists than you can shake a social media button at.

One of the nice things about setting a goal to write all year is that as a side product, kind of like ordering Christmas gifts and getting a free tote bag in the process, I also ended up reading a lot more. It became a nervous twitch, this compulsive clicking-and-reading (I am much more a long-form article person than a book person.) I read a lot about business and a little about politics. I read a ton on Medium. Nytimes.com became what my fingers typed when left to their own devices. The Atlantic started popping up as every third story in my news feed, that’s how much I clicked on it.

Of the millions of words I scanned, only a few made the leap into long-term memory.

In no particular order, they are…