Resolutions
"Ins" and "outs", thoughts on the timing of New Year's and resolutions, things I plan to read and watch
This January I have read many (and scrolled past countless) lists of “ins” and “outs”, best books of 2024, movies to watch in 2025, resolutions, optings-out of resolutions, etc. I scribbled my own versions of these lists with no time to write them out properly as I pushed through the month, weighed down by sickness, by final papers, by work deadlines, by a new semester...
My friends and I agree that January has been a false start. Indeed, starting anew in the middle of a natural period of quietude and hibernation, when the sun and temperatures are low, seems a misguided inclination of Julius Caesar in his calendar reforms. Have people been griping about this since 46 BCE, when Caesar shifted the date from March 1 to January 1? Then in the Middle Ages, many Europeans marked the New Year on March 25, Annunciation Day—until Pope Gregory XIII returned the New Year to January 1, in 1582. The Julian and Gregorian calendars do seem to be the result of two deeply misguided men. (What’s new?)
To mark the New Year at the start of spring, in step with the slow waking of the natural world, would be more fitting—why not make resolutions then? No one is stopping us but the zeitgest...
IN: Writing at “inappropriate” times. (We do what we must!)
OUT: Not finishing a piece because it “isn’t timely (anymore)”!
As this first month of 2025 ends—in my mind, the thirteenth month of 2024—I finally have time to articulate my own New Year’s lists. You could say I’m late to a saturated market, and you’d be right! But this is also my way of marking what feels like the true start to my new year—just in time for the Lunar New Year on January 29.
I handed in my third and final paper on a Friday, and finished the week elated, with the kind of lightness I always hope for on New Year’s Day, which I rarely feel in the end. That Saturday, I went to a hammam with friends, where we sweated out and scrubbed off the ills of the past weeks (or years)! As we sat drinking mint tea under the white January sky, I finally felt that giddy excitement for a new chapter about to start.
IN: Buying the damn book! (Even if I know I won’t read it right this second…)
OUT: Guilt about “not reading the right thing”
Often, the things I am proudest of from past years where unplanned, or unanticipated by my resolutions. At the beginning of 2024, I did not know that I would apply for a master’s degree, let alone that I would return to studying literature. I became re-acquainted with my bone-deep, childhood passion for fairy tales, this time with adult confidence and academic depth.
I have also been trying to create a consistent writing practice for years, and tried many things, including: calendar blocking; creating a writing group; working for an author; attending writing workshops; scheduling holidays alone with no wifi and no one to speak to. I thought that the best conditions in which for me to write would be a total absence of responsibilities or distractions. Last fall, while I was busier than I have ever been with work and school, I wrote more than I ever have. I learned that it is abundance of thoughts and things to do—structure and stimulus—that makes me want to write. Turns out, it is not peace and quiet, though little pockets of those certainly help.
IN: Sending check-in texts, voicenotes, emails, scribbles, etc. to my friends and family
OUT: Relying on social media posts to speak for me
My friends were huge inspirations for me as I started writing more. In fact, scribbles—as a WhatsApp group, before it also became a Substack—probably would never have existed if I hadn’t met AC. She writes a beautiful and intuitive newsletter of vignettes from her month. As soon as I read it last summer, I knew something similar could work for me, too. (I have told her this before and this will probably not be the last time I repeat it!) Then, this fall, Elsa and Lila founded Les Cassettes, which spurred me to write and share short fiction. Their brilliant, bilingual themes and deadlines are doubly inspiring, and I can’t wait to continue participating this year, and to see how the group continues to evolve. (Watch that space!)
IN: Self-expression
OUT: Trying to speak and write perfectly in French
As I look forward, I can’t help but look back at past Januaries, punctuated with resolutions. Many I have carried over into each new year; others have been set aside, unaccomplished because my priorities changed. Sometimes resolutions came to fruition, like when I started making monthly video scrapbooks in 2019. I see that so many boil down to “figuring things out.” I’m sure I didn’t quite see them that way at the time. But I was really sifting sand to find a clearer sense of identity.
Editorialized Resolutions of Years Past
2024
Stop “managing” myself
Be purposefully curious about the world and the people in my life
Ask more “inappropriate” questions
2023
In order to write: I need to go out but stay in
Be rigorous but accept imperfection
Connect with others while being present with myself
My 2020-2022 resolutions, though I’m sure I made them, are lost to time!
2019
No more junior year gloom
Keep taking videos—now, edit them!
Be the best skier on the mountain
2018
Give myself more breaks
Ski a lot
Film everything
Rereading my past resolutions (the unabridged versions) I see clearly that my hoping and wondering has become more refined over time. There were so many unknowns when I first moved to Paris in September 2021, from the career I would pursue to whether I would stay in this city to who I would meet and befriend. Not very many years later, so much of that has been clarified. I feel generally less confused, I am more focused, left to stretch out into the sky and burrow into the ground at once. Thank god for that!
Editorialized Resolutions for 2025
No more endless yearning and scrolling
Be confident in my passions
No more biking road-rage!
Throughout my childhood I felt acutely confused most of the time. The process of growing up has mostly been coming into a world that feels relatively understandable—which stemmed from understanding myself.
I think from here, my yearly resolutions might become repetitive: not many things to change or reorient, but rather to deepen or continue. Each January, I hope I will have advanced on these winding paths that don’t change much in bullet-point form, but with every passing year, make up a life.
IN: Routine and curiosity
OUT: Redundancy and resting on my laurels
Books I read last year
My most-read authors of 2024 were Deborah Levy and Annie Ernaux, with three books apiece. From Levy I read Real Estate (2021) and Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013), parts one and three of her Living Autobiography series. I also listened to Hot Milk (2016) during one long drive across the south of France in August. From Ernaux, I read La place (1983), Les Années (2008), and Le jeune homme (2022). These two women are well-known for their auto-fiction and confessional styles, and I’m certain these readings influenced me as I started scribbles, as I never wrote many personal essays before last year!
I was lucky to read on many beaches last year, including Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (translated by William Weaver), Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić (translated by Celia Hawkesworth, Mark Thompson, and Ellen Elias-Bursać), Du givre sur les épaules by Lorenzo Mediano (translated by Hélène Michoux), Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, and Orlando by Virginia Woolf. None of these might be immediately identified as “beach reads,” but I’m happy to confirm that it was very nice to read them on a beach anyway. I went on to write a paper about the use of photographs in Orlando—something I found perplexing during my first read—which will appear in a future scribble!
In the spring of 2024, I finally finished Mary Ann Evans/George Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch. It took me several years to complete because I read it in short bursts, though always with great enthusiasm. I originally chose the book purely for its length, as a way to cope with heartbreak. My sad and confused thoughts felt so overwhelming that I decided to read (or listen to) Middlemarch every time I thought about my ex—reasoning that, by the time I finished such a long book, I would be over her. As it turns out, the book was so long that I moved on from the breakup well before I reached the end! From the very first chapter, though, I was captivated by the humor of the narrative voice and the tender, humane way Eliot describes her odd (and not always likable) characters. It’s such a profoundly compassionate book and I can’t wait to read it again.
In addition to reading more in French than ever before, I’ve also made a point to read more books in translation over the past few years—of late, translated from Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Croatian. In 2024, the standout translation for me was Verdigris by Michele Mari, translated by Brian Robert Moore. The blurb:
“At the tail end of the 1960s, the thirteen-year-old Michelino spends his summers at his grandparents’ modest estate in Nasca, near Lake Maggiore, losing himself in the tales of horror, adventure, and mystery shelved in his grandfather’s library. The greatest mystery he’s ever encountered, however, doesn’t come from a book – it’s the groundskeeper, Felice, a sometimes frightening, sometimes gentle, always colourful man of uncertain age who speaks an enchanting dialect and whose memory gets worse with each passing day.”
The “enchanting dialect” referenced is an imaginative amalgamation of regional Italian dialects—a “willful pastiche,” as Moore describes it, drawing on Milanese, Varesotto, and other Lombard and Northern Italian dialects—rather than an accurate reconstruction of a specific Gallo-Italian dialect. Moore translates Felice’s speech as colloquial—often coarse—and heavily elided: "and" becomes “an’,” and “-ing” becomes “-in’.” As Felice’s mental state deteriorates throughout the story, his speech becomes even more fragmented and unintelligible, effectively replicating the disorienting impact it has on Michelino, who speaks in a polished, urbane Italian (rendered in clear English). In the translator’s note, Moore explains:
“Having found the novel so enjoyable and gripping, I wanted to recreate that experience and that world as fully as possible for anglophone readers. What I mean, essentially, is that I wanted this translation to live as a book in English, and remain, like Mari’s original […] a unique celebration of language and an utterly absorbing mystery.”
What I found particularly impressive in Moore’s translation was his handling of Michelino and Felice’s word games. As Felice’s memory declines, Michelino devises mnemonic devices to help him remember basic details: his name, the location of the bathroom, and so on. Felice’s garden shed becomes a chaotic magpie’s nest of mnemonics, as his ability to sort out the growing web of connections deteriorates. Meanwhile, Michelino struggles to invent effective cues, as Felice’s mental and verbal associations are often surprising and shaped by his limited worldly knowledge despite his age.
For the translator, this dynamic posed a unique challenge: finding mnemonic devices that would make sense to an Anglophone reader while maintaining the humor and logic of the original, “without humorless footnotes.” For example, the name of the town, Nasca, is linked in the original Italian to the mnemonic “nascita” (meaning “birth”) and evoked by a nativity scene. In English, Moore reimagines this as “NASCAR,” tied to one of Michelino’s toy cars.
The first book I read in 2024 was The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Michael Glenny. I spoke about it on my friends’ podcast, L’Art de la page, which you can listen to (in French) wherever you get your podcasts! (Here’s the Spotify link.)
Finally, I didn’t read The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter for the first time in 2024, but it was my most-often reread book of the year, as it became the subject of my master’s thesis!
Plans for reading this year
My first read of the year is set to be Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, a sort-of Christmas novella that I am finishing well-after yuletide. Like I said above—January was a false start! Only halfway through, I am gobsmacked by Keegan’s economy of words and the elegance of her characterizations, which I know will become more emotionally poignant by the end. I’m also finally getting around to Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, which no one needs me to comment on at this late hour, except to say that I love Irish authors, and have several Irish films on my watch-list for 2025, so this feels like starting on the right foot! I would also love to read Cré Na Cille (literally "Earth of the Church,” often translated as “Graveyard Clay”) by Máirtín Ó. Cadhain this year, probably the most famous modern Irish-language novel.
I am most excited to get into a trilogy of novellas by Catalan poet and novelist Eva Baltasar (translated by Julia Sanches), starting with Permafrost. The blurb:
“Desperate to get out of Barcelona, she goes to Brussels, ‘because a city whose symbol is a little boy pissing was a city I knew I would like’; as an au pair in Scotland, she develops a hatred of the colour green. And everywhere she goes, she tries to break out of the roles set for her by family and society, chasing escape wherever it can be found: love affairs, travel, thoughts of suicide.”
These stories about the lives of lesbian women (already, I am convinced!) were described to me as being written in beautiful prose, borrowed from Baltasar’s poetry.
Over the past year, I became very interested in the Oulipo collective and constrained writing techniques. After reading Invisible Cities (in English) last year, I started reading Calvino’s Le Château des destins croisés (translated into French by Jean Thibaudeau and the author). This weird little book is not as transportive as the former, but it’s odd and interesting. Like The Canterbury Tales or The Decameron, it is a collection of stories recounted by an eclectic group of travelers night where travelers, except here, they are all made incapable of speech and so must instead use tarot cards to express themselves. It’s interpreted from the perspective of a narrator, who could be getting it all wrong—and that’s the point. I also can’t wait to read Sphinx by Anne Garréta (another member of Oulipo), a novel written in French without gender referring to the main characters!
I also want to continue reading literature in translation—not all of the books above are translated, but many are! I want to read in translation from new languages, and am also excited to re-encounter Italian in The Hunger of Women by Mariosa Castaldi and Japanese in Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. (Castaldi and Baltasar’s books are both published in English by And Other Stories, like Verdigris!)
Finally, over the next few years I will also be finishing every Virginia Woolf book I haven’t yet read—starting with The Waves early this year.
You can find a full (ever-changing) list of books I hope to get to in 2025 below—though I already have a list for 2026, and I know I won’t get to all of these! But if you end up reading one, and want to talk about it, give me a shout!
Plans for watching this year
Along with a list of books I’d like to watch this year, I have an (ever-changing) list of the next movies I’d like to watch on Letterboxd, called “Baking”—movies that are “in the oven,” so to speak. Here it is:
I’ve already watched a few movies in 2025, including:
I mentioned above that I have several Irish movies on my watchlist for this year, so I thought I’d enumerate them:
Kneecap (2024) - Watched, loved!
Small Things Like These (2024)
God’s Creatures (2022)
The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)
War of the Buttons (1994)
A Joyce double-feature: The Dead (1987) and Bloom (2003)
An Irish animation triple-feature extravaganza: Wolfwalkers, Song of the Sea, and The Secret of Kells
Love this!