It's the end of the year and I'm back in Seattle for another week and a half. These six-hour flights feel like they're getting longer, but maybe I'm just out of practice from traveling coast-to-coast. Being back where I started this year sharpened the contrast between me at the start of this year and me now.
I was originally planning to make this another year-end book roundup, but in the spirit of creating better best-of lists, I've decided to reflect on some other highlights of 2022 too.
BESTS
Best walk I went on: New York in August, from Midtown to Tribeca
I love visiting New York, but I can't see myself happily living in New York. Visiting New York once every few months preserves the magic of the city for me without letting the small things wear me down: the smell of the subway stations, having to find time to do laundry, the lack of big, open spaces that feel like they belong to you. August was the first time I spent more than a full week in the city, and that day that I'm thinking of made me feel like maybe this was the kind of day I could have countless iterations of if I just moved there properly. But maybe then it would be the kind of day I wouldn't remember on its own, just another night in a blur of street lamps beneath skyscrapers.
We started the night at my friend's apartment in Midtown heading out for a late dinner. The sun had set about half an hour before we hit the pavement, which meant that the heat was finally dissipating into a bearable kind of balmy night, a welcome reprieve from the heat wave earlier that week. Sean made a good point about how summer nights on the East Coast feel better because you don't have to worry about a precipitous temperature drop after sunset. It wasn't any of our first summers on the East Coast by that point, but we still felt like we couldn't comfortably call this home yet.
The thing that made this walk stand out to me isn't so much the walk on its own but everything it reminded me of after the fact: how much less lonely this city walk felt compared to my last walk across London last summer (from Soho to Bermondsey, walking mostly along the Southbank side of the Thames after crossing the Golden Jubilee Bridge); how many more friends I now have on this side of the country compared to three or four years ago; how so much can change in five years, six years—but here I was, on a long walk with my friend I used to go on long walks with at the Berkeley marina and my boyfriend I was (re)introduced to last summer by Sean, taking in the city lights.
Best new habit: Working out regularly
George taught me how to lift this year and I'm the strongest I've ever been. Thanks for bringing me with you to your gym and using all your free guest passes on me. The biggest shift has been mental: these workouts feel good in a way that I couldn't figure out how to achieve when I used to push myself through weekday 6am spin classes (the cheapest ones on ClassPass outside of my regular work hours).
Best art experience: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Nicholas Party L'heure mauve
Nicholas Party's "mauve twilight" collection brought together dozens of different pieces by Party and works by other artists in the MMFA's collection, arranged by color across various rooms tied together by palette and thematic resonance with nature. This exhibit had a good balance of texturally soft pieces with occasionally unsettling sculptures or portraits interspersed. It was deeply satisfying to walk through the color coordinated rooms.
Best thing I cooked this year: Three ingredient tomato sauce
This pasta sauce is very tasty and so incredibly easy to make to the point where I don't think I can ever use store-bought jars again. I came across this recipe years ago and made it once, but it wasn't until this year that I started making it on a regular basis. I love how simple but balanced this recipe is: the sunny brightness of the tomatoes with the smooth fat of the butter and the aroma and flavor of the onion all pair beautifully together.
I always halve this recipe (enough for two people with big appetites, possibly up to four if you're having this as a side dish), using one 14.5 oz can of tomatoes, half an onion, and about a quarter of a stick of butter. My favorite pasta shape for this sauce is bucatini. Cook the pasta to almost al dente and then finish simmering it in the sauce with a bit of pasta water. Serve and garnish with parmesan.
Best rediscovery: That I can still ski
I went skiing last week for the first time in thirteen years. It was gratifying to feel the muscle memory kick in; forgetting how to ride a bike last year really made me doubt if I had muscle memory for anything I haven't done in more than a decade. I'm lucky that I learned to ski before I came to terms with how scared I am of falling. I think what really scares me is the thought of losing control. Skiing feels like a balancing act of being in control and then losing it just enough: you trust that your body will move the way it's supposed to while you chase the rush of gliding down the mountain.
This recent trip gave me the confidence to step out of my comfort zone and left me with a better understanding of my relationship with fear. I also discovered the joys of après-ski and watching eight inches of snow fall in a day. Even though I don't live close enough to the mountains to go regularly anymore, I'll travel seven hours to do this again someday. Here's to hoping that my next ski trip won't happen during another arctic overflow.
BOOKS
I read and I forget. There are simply too many books in the world I want to read and not enough time to read them all. I've recently come to realize that I have a below-average retention of most of the media I consume unless if I write my thoughts down somewhere where I can come back to reference later. So since the start of this year, I've made an effort to record my quick thoughts on books I read as I finish them so that I have some notes to look back on. Here are some of my book highlights of the year:
Couldn't put it down: the Cormoran Strike series, but especially Troubled Blood, by Robert Galbraith
The Cormoran Strike series got me out of a reading dry spell this summer after I came across the TV adaptation (Strike) on HBO. I read the first three in rapid succession one winter in Beijing years ago and the latest two this year, and every book in this mystery/true crime series has been a page turner for me. The main characters, Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, are likable and developed slowly across volumes in a believable way, and most of the self-contained mysteries themselves are complex enough to build momentum without abrupt shock-factor twists. The revelations are well-paced and feel earned. While I admittedly haven't read many mysteries, these books have consistently been ones I've had the most fun reading, even for the ones where I wasn't that into the premise.
If you're only going to read one, The Cuckoo's Calling (book one) is the most approachable but my personal favorite is Troubled Blood (book five). Troubled Blood had the most gratifying slow-build character development for Cormoran and Robin running in parallel to the unraveling of a decades-old cold case that takes the two detectives across Cornwall and London. The sheer size of this book was intimidating but I finished this one in under a week, faster than some of the "normal" 250-page novels more frequently found on my reading list.
Comfort read: Either/Or by Elif Batuman
I read this book in September around the peak of back-to-school nostalgia season, and this book is refreshing and funny about all the anxieties a precocious 19 year old entering her sophomore year of undergrad feels about the confines of the world around her. The protagonist, Selin, is immensely relatable as an awkward immigrant kid at an elite university falling in love with college for being what it is:
How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other’s rooms, and our most important job was to solve mysteries. The temporariness made it all the more important to do the right thing—to follow the right leads.
The title of the book comes from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, in which "either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically." Selin frames the philosophical lesson from her literature classes to reexamine her life as a student at Harvard in the 1990s, finding "the idea of an aesthetic life to be tremendously compelling. It was the first time I heard of an organizing principle or goal you could have for your life, other than making money or having kids." Selin has the kind of thoughts on life you can only have when you're still coming into your own in young adulthood, pondering questions about life and all the awkward growing pains that come with independence, while you still have the luxury of spending your days listening to brilliant professors teach new ideas that change the way you look at everything, from how you email your crush to deciding to go abroad for the summer. The writing was thoughtful, funny, and the right amount of pretentious, just enough to pique your curiosity to peek at the Works Cited list at the end of the book for a syllabus of recommended reading.
While technically this book is a sequel to Elif Batuman's The Idiot, I felt like I came at it as a standalone novel because I read The Idiot two years ago, and as I said, I read and subsequently forget. Read one, read both, read them next September.
A book I'll remember for a long time: The Lonely City by Olivia Laing
The Lonely City is part biography, part cultural criticism, and part memoir on loneliness in art. Laing’s memoir parts were the parts that hit home the hardest. There were times, especially in cities I didn't have anyone in, when I felt like my loneliness would swallow me whole. Even though it never stayed that way for long—the way it must have consumed the artists she writes about—the experience of new city loneliness preoccupied my thoughts when I was by myself in those places.
I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn’t anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal and I was embarrassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarrassed about wearing a stained or threadbare piece of clothing. I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished. if I could have put what I was feeling into words, the words would have been an infant’s wail: I don’t want to be alone. I want someone to want me. I’m lonely. I’m scared. I need to be loved, to be touched, to be held. It was the sensation of need that frightened me the most, as if I’d lifted the lid on an unappeasable abyss.
The first time I moved to DC I spent my first week delirious from actual jet lag and metaphorical motion sickness, trying very hard not to think at all. I just needed to get through each day with a sense of routine. The people I told about what I did said I was brave for everything I mustered up the courage for that month, and the people I didn’t wouldn’t have guessed. I wrote somewhere two months in that I was getting good at pretending like there wasn’t this gaping hole in my chest. I’ll fake it every single day until I don’t need fantasy / until I feel you leave. But in those moments when I caught my eye in my own reflection I couldn’t help but wonder why I wasn’t enough, and when I would ever get to a point in my life in this new city where I finally felt close enough to someone to spill my secrets to, someone I didn’t have to hop on a four hour bus or five hour plane ride for just for a hug.
The second time I lived in London was good until midsummer when the few friends I made during the height of the pandemic moved away one after the other. I had those lines from Lorde’s "Ribs" this dream isn’t feeling sweet / we’re reeling through the midnight streets / and I’ve never felt more alone / it feels so scary, getting old stuck on repeat in my head in those moments of alone-ness in London last summer: this dream isn’t feeling sweet / this dream isn’t feeling sweet / this dream isn’t feeling sweet—
because in the end, London without the people I loved was just another concrete jungle when you strip it of sentiment. It was just a city, and going home back to my second flat every night made me want to go home properly after all, for the first time in my life, until that became the only thing I could think to do to reset my life again, even if it meant giving up on a dream I had for the better part of the past decade.
Those periods of loneliness never lasted as long as I thought they would when I was right in the middle of it all. But reading this book captured what it was like, and for a moment there my breath catches, remembering.
While the memoir transitions were my favorite part of this book, most of The Lonely City is about artists and art, and how art is inseparable from history and politics. Works about art are really a question about why art, and Laing answers: "the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive."
We create for ourselves and for other people, so that maybe someday, someone, somewhere, might possibly connect with what we have to offer up. "What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last."
Honorable mentions:
- Writers & Lovers by Lily King
- Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
- Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer
- Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich
- The Raven Cycle series by Maggie Stiefvater
- Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
- Babel by R.F. Kuang
What were some of your bests and books of this year? Let me know; I'm collecting recommendations for 2023. In the meantime, happy new year!
xoxo, vivian
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