(Here, just a little bit later than I’d like, is the second edition of the atypically-structured and extra-extra-maximalist annual Ear Mountain year in review! Thank you again to Mackenzie, friend and wonderful coach, for originally suggesting that I do this. And, also an annual tradition: this is “too long for email.” So you may have to click over to Substack to view it all, if you care to.)
2024: we intended to jump in the lake on January 1st, but didn’t; three weeks in a beautiful shed in the woods, taking the ferry to teach; an attack of intense acid reflux after gorging on residency food; I revised my Rooney project, sent it off; rode my bike in tapered intervals to recover from a knee issue; Mackenzie found morels growing by our front steps; Taylor Swift put out TTPD and I gasped in the bathroom when the second half dropped; Miss Macintosh, My Darling arrived after many fakeouts; the press that was going to publish my Rooney project folded; a visiting assistant professor job opened up at Cornish and I got it; a trip to the Methow, too late for the wildflowers; we saw the aurora borealis from Bei Hua and Emelio’s backyard; went to Santa Fe and stayed in the same motel that my grandparents loved in the 80s; endless agent and small press queries; endless inconclusive medical tests re: lingering stomach woes; dayhike tours of lakes with Hans and Andrew; swimming at Seward Park, we saw a crow caught in fishing line dangling upside down from a tall tree, and Emelio and a stranger climbed up and cut it free; bike-in camping with Mackenzie near Mount Rainier; on my birthday Ramona said my name for the first time and we hiked the Chain Lakes Loop; an “apple wig” in honor of Charli XCX at our ice cream party; I took the train to Mount Vernon with my bike and went to Lopez Island for the weekend; the election loomed; I saw the larches solo; I flew to Arizona and discovered I loved doorknocking; Trump won; I left my phone on the lightrail platform and lived without one for three weeks; I saw Julio Torres at the Crocodile with Molly and others and laughed and laughed; Hans got a tail injury, wore a cone for most of December; the Eras Tour!; more residency rejections; we had our fifth cookie swap, saw the lights with Ramona again; A and I got back-to-back weeklong colds; I discovered that the early Dostoevsky novella I was obsessed with as a teenager has gone viral on TikTok; we ended 2024 debating Airbnbs versus hotels for a trip to LA, missed the turn of the clock and the year.
Before my book lists, a preface/confession re: my reading year:
Sitting down to work on this “year in review,” it became clear to me that that my 2024 book world had a very different feel than that of 2023! I read a lot more nonfiction, and I think part of why is that, from April to September, I was immersed in the first 550 pages of Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling. My bookclub had, as I wrote about last year, been waiting for this novel forever, and we started it with great excitement and fanfare (aka lots of texts and emails). The writing is amazing—some of the most weird, wild, beautiful prose I have ever seen. But: it is also dense, circular, and mostly plotless, and the bookclub, myself included, did not get into it as much as we had hoped. I cringe to say it, but we quit! I hope to go back to it sometime soon, maybe in summer when I will have longer stretches of reading time more frequently, but it was not to be in 2024, just one example of many of how sometimes things don’t turn out how you imagine they will. I don’t regret the time I spent with it, but it did take up a lottttt of my reading time, especially my time spent reading fiction.
How did this influence my year’s “reading vibe”? I felt like I liked way more things I read this year than last year, but had fewer extremely transcendent book experiences than in 2023 (The Transit of Venus and The Long Form, both in my top five from last year, were some of my favorites ever of my Seattle-era/possibly even adult reading era). I think I’m most likely to have those reading fiction with a pen in hand (versus as a before-bed book, my more casual form of reading), and I read fewer novels that way in 2024, though I did read some good ones. But as you will see, most of my very favorites this year were nonfiction!
My five (but actually six, because I am cheating a bit) favorite books I read this year, in order of when in the year I read them:
Feeding Ghosts, Tessa Hulls. This is the book I’ve thought the most about and most admired over the past year, and I read it right at the start of 2024. In January I got off the waitlist very last minute at Rockland Woods, a residency in Bremerton, WA, across the Sound from Seattle. I went, and at the orientation one of the owners/founders held up an advance copy of Feeding Ghosts and said, our friend wrote this and it’s amazing, anyone can borrow it! I had seen Hulls speak on the prominent role of women in the history of cycling, and am a fan of her artwork and ideas—so I snagged the galley and read it while tucked into my half of what Rockland calls “the Sheds,” a plywood cabin with high ceilings and huge windows cantilevered off a steep hill. The intricacy of Hulls’s book is astonishing, both in terms of how she weaves together historical information about communist-era China, her family history, and her own metanarrative as an artist and storyteller, and in the way each page combines great writing and gorgeous hand-drawn and hand-inked visual elements. It’s smart and vulnerable and rigorous and absorbing. I can’t stop thinking about the page in which narrator-Tessa is surrounded by her childhood book and comic heroes, each drawn (along with child-her!) in their original style… there is so much complicated tenderness, boldness, and awareness of the power of art in that image, and in Feeding Ghosts in general. Everyone should read it!
Letters to Gwen John, Celia Paul. Andrew requested this book as a holiday gift from my parents, started it in late winter/early spring, and loved it; I bought my own copy and followed him in hot pursuit. As the title indicates, the book is structured as a series of letters to the painter Gwen John, who died in 1939, but with whom Paul (also a painter) feels both an aesthetic and biographical affinity. As this newsletter’s usual form suggests, I love an epistolary project, and I especially loved this one because the letter structure means the book is a work of art criticism, a biography of Gwen John, and a memoir of Paul’s own life all at once, all told in Paul’s pellucid, vulnerable style. There were things about this that reminded me of Rachel Cusk (with whom Paul is friends), but it’s warmer and less prickly, while also still being both joyous and sad. Bonus points for all the beautiful reproductions of pieces of art by both John and Paul. And an excerpt from Gwen John’s notebook for you all, by way of Paul:
Turn gently towards your work.
Instead of this sudden discouragement and sadness take up in your mind a leaf, a flower, a simple little form and find its form, take it into your possession as it were…
Fan Fiction, Tavi Gevinson AND The Slicks, Maggie Nelson. I am cheating on my top five concept by folding these into one recommendation in the category of Taylor Swift literature! Fan Fiction came out in the spring, The Slicks was one of my last reads of the year, and both of them are supersmart and were major sources of delight for me.
Gevinson’s project, which she put out independently (there’s a whole separate paragraph to be written about why I found that so great, but for now I’ll just say—so cool, and you can read it/print it here), is a piece of hybrid essay/autofiction/epistolary fiction with a triptych structure. Up first is a critical examination of how Swift’s music is a kind of memory-hoarding that, by way of those memories’ transformation into art, also separates the speaker-self from the experiencing self. (“Meaning outlives experience” is how Gevinson succinctly frames this.) The middle section plays with a Pale Fire or I Love Dick-style of written-by-the-fictional-narrator retrospective on the friendship between the speaker and Swift. (Gevinson did hang out with Taylor for a while, so this is the part where the text kicks us all into a kind of extremely fun and interesting autofiction-detective mode.) And then the last section is all (again fictional) emails, mostly between the Taylor character and the Tavi character, though Taylor’s publicist Tree Paine—yes, that is her name in real life, if you didn’t know—gets a cameo that I have laughed thinking about many times since I first read it. It’s a very fun read that also gets at a lot of what’s fascinating to me about Taylor: the strong throughlines that stitch together her also wide-ranging catalog, the super-weirdness of fame, the way she is always confessing inner truths and also always speaking from behind a façade.
The Slicks is pure essay, but with Maggie Nelson’s signature roving way of approaching things, and with lots of good first-person thinking, too. Its stated project is to put Taylor Swift’s work in dialogue with Sylvia Plath’s, and it for sure does that in interesting and exciting ways—but it also explores how maximalism, lyric/confessional work, and earnest ambition are received by audiences, how gendered that reception continues to be, and some of what Gevinson explores about fame, too. My favorite part of this is a deep dive into the song “Clara Bow” that Nelson then links, by way of a lovely passage about how “[a]rtists have to open themselves—often radically—to something in order to create” to a Pema Chödrön quote about learning how to be “big and small at the same time.” Nothing better than a piece like this that makes a compelling constellation out of disparate ideas, and, for me in 2024, nothing more fun than if those ideas orbit a consideration of Taylor, who, as Nelson writes of “Clara Bow,” “gives us all that while also giving us something fun to mouth.”
Intermezzo, Sally Rooney. I wrote a lot about this one in my last newsletter, so I will be brief-for-me here and just say that, while there were other novels on my shortlist that in certain ways I wanted to switch out for this spot on my top five (Emily Hall’s The Longcut and Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over are both in some ways more interesting books, I think!), I have to give in and say that Intermezzo was a favorite reading experience for me. Part of that is for all the reasons I wrote about at more length in November—it’s moving, it’s complex!—but it’s also just the case that it is so, so fun to read a book that lots of other people are reading, and to chat about it a lot.
Books Promiscuously Read, Heather Cass White. This was a happenstantial find via the staff picks section at Elliott Bay, and also got a brief shoutout in my last newsletter. The book’s subtitle—Reading as a Way of Life—made me think it would be a “life in reading”-type memoir, a microgenre I am pretty interested in even as I find a lot of books in it annoying! But Heather Cass White, who is a Marianne Moore scholar, is up to something different. Books Promiscuously Read is more of an investigation into what is great about reading by way of many close examinations of texts: Moore’s poetry, Don Quixote, Marilynne Robinson, D.W. Winnicott, a zillion more. I guess it’s sort of a “philosophy of reading” book, but I worry describing it as such makes it sound more dense and daunting than it is. It reminded me of my mentor Geoff Sanborn’s book The Value of Herman Melville, which I am forever recommending to people—it’s so great to think alongside someone who is trying to articulate what is so seductive and joyous about spending a lot of time in communion with books. There’s an amazing part at the end (I don’t think this is a spoiler, but if you don’t want a discursive, roving book of literary criticism’s ending spoiled, skip the rest of this!) where, after a meander into the “astonishing joy” of reading (“If only everything were a book! It feels as though everything might be, if we could just read a little better”), White posits that, “if we need an avatar of that joy, we might bear in mind the twelve-year old girl”:
Her reading habits reward study and emulation. How does she read? She reads a lot, for one thing, often when other people would prefer she didn’t. At the dinner table is a good time, or at lunchtime at school, surrounded by friends. Bedtime is a given, but the beach works fine too, as do family gatherings of all kinds. Reading is an invaluable resource for the dead time classrooms are likely to provide. Rereading is so instinctively pleasurable that she is several years away from noticing that adults rarely seem to do it. She is in fact years away from understanding that not everyone hoards books or feels relieved to be left alone with them. She is a literary omnivore, reading, since reading is a matter of life and death, self or no self, the way wild animals eat.
To devour and be devoured by books—I want to cultivate and celebrate that kind of reading! Books Promiscuously Read helped me to articulate that desire, and I felt it fulfilled in reading White’s book itself.
A bunch of other things I read this year and thought were great (also in chronological reading order, and with the added note that a good number of these were on my “shortlist” for top five!):
I’m a Fan, Sheena Patel
Thin Skin, Jenn Shapland (I also read this at Rockland, in my wood-scented shed, and the last two essays in particular were very meaningful to me!)
Phoebe’s Diary, Phoebe Wahl
Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed
The Longcut, Emily Hall (this book is so funny and good—like Beckett mixed with Claire-Louise Bennett, and also totally its own thing)
The Other Significant Others, Rhaina Cohen (good podcast interview with the author here)
The Resurrection Appearances, Jay Aquinas Thompson (Jay is a Seattle writer and pal, and this book, which I would describe as an essay, a memoir, AND a book-length poem, is moving and lively and gorgeous)
Root Fractures, Diana Khoi Nguyen
My Life, Lyn Hejinian (Molly and I read this aloud in honor of Hejinian, who died in February; possibly my favorite book of poetry ever, if I had to choose, which I do not)
Emergent Strategy, adrienne marie brown
Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti
Contradiction Days, JoAnna Novak (JoAnna is also a friend—this is a supersmart, harrowingly honest work of first-person nonfiction, and a deep consideration of Agnes Martin and her work, too!)
Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe (I listened to this on audiobook and it was so compelling that Andrew happily let me play some random sections from the middle of it during a Methow Valley trip with lots of driving)
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, Anne de Marcken (read mostly on a biking/hiking trip and finished on the lightrail, where it made me tear up; an amazing novel)
Thunder Song, Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe
The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard (like if Rachel Cusk wrote a nonfiction book of hybrid memoir/ecocriticism in the style of Outline!)
Is There God After Prince?, Peter Coviello
Minor Detail, Adania Shibli
Six More Months of June, Daisy Garrison (a YA debut that had some of the most engaging characters and compelling relationships of anything I read all year)
The Bostonians, Henry James (sort of horrifying but I also couldn’t stop reading it)
Children of Rivers and Trees, Elissa Favero (another superb book by a Seattle friend—I interviewed Elissa about it here)
Sex With a Brain Injury, Annie Liontas
The Pairing, Casey McQuiston (a romance novel with excellent characterization AND one protagonist is a sommelier/mixologist and the other is a baker AND it’s set on a European food tour?!? You had me at hello…)
Any Person is the Only Self, Elisa Gabbert
The Sentence, Louise Erdrich
When the World Tips Over, Jandy Nelson (mentioned in my last Ear Mountain; Jandy Nelson is, I say, the best writer of YA around right now)
Finding a Likeness, Nicholson Baker
Big Fan, Zan Romanoff (a romance novel in which a big part of the plot revolves around a campaign for UBI, AND the pop-star love interest reads Having and Being Had on the plane?!? You ALSO had me at hello!)
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
The New Naturals, Gabriel Bump (one more friend recommendation—I loved Gabe’s first book, and loved this one just as much/maybe even more!)
The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, Jane Wong
Once More From the Top, Emily Layden (a truly perfect book for me while sick at the end of the year—more Taylor Lit! This is a novel about a pop star nearly identical to Taylor who has some ~mysterious~ things in her past re: her high school best friend. Sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually well-written, fun, and, dare I say, swift)
Some thrilling food-adjacent experiences:
The food at Rockland, the residency I went to. As mentioned above, I had a very unexpected chance to go to a residency in January, and hopped on it—and, among the other lovely parts, lunch and dinner were prepared daily for us. I hadn’t experienced this perk/gift/feature of a residency before, and the artists there talked a lot about how astonishing it was for all of us to have someone cook for us. It’s a way of opening space for other kinds of thinking, and I felt super grateful for it every day of the three weeks I was there. This was especially true because Gabby, the chef for our session (who is also an amazing artist and whom I loved getting to know!), knocked it out of the park every single time. Some highlights remembered a year later: amazing roasted carrots with pickled onions and feta, brothy beans and cornbread, lahmajoun made in the residency’s pizza oven (I had a vegetarian version), a chocolate mousse with candied fennel seeds atop the whipped cream. Each meal was incredible, but this was also a highlight because of the care and generosity Gabby showed us via these amazing spreads.
Red Tail Grains. Sometime early in the year, Mackenzie went to visit her friend Danny in North Carolina and returned with a bag of polenta and a bag of cornbread mix from his grain farm as a gift for us. Andrew and I tried them both and were SHOCKED by how much more flavorful and delicious they were than the stuff we were getting at the store… and thus began my romance with freshly-milled grains. We tried a lot of stuff from Red Tail—I baked with some flour from them, ate their delicious three-grain breakfast cereal with our summer fruit CSA bounty, and Danny very thoughtfully gave us a bag of pasta flour with one order, which we loved! The cornbread mix is my “must buy” item (I am a cornbread obsessive), but maybe the pinnacle of my experience with Red Tail this year was taking their buttermilk pancake mix on our birthday camping trip and chowing down on the sublime results with fruit, peanut butter, and maple syrup along with many pals.
Lopez Island food tourism. In September, Andrew and I had a backpacking trip planned (to replace another backpacking trip cancelled because of unseasonably rainy weather in August), and he had work stuff come up last-minute that meant he couldn’t go. After some mild moping about how I didn’t want to backpack alone, I realized that, though that was the case, I did still really want to get out of town. So I took my bike on the train to Mount Vernon, biked to the Anacortes ferry, and had a solo camping weekend on Lopez Island, which I had never visited. It’s so great there! I loved my campsite at Odlin State Park and biking around the island, but obviously I also scoped the food, and two things stood out during my days of eating there: first, cookies and bread from Barn Owl Bakery, which I obtained from their barn farm stand (the rosemary sea salt shortbread was unreal!), and second, ramen from Setsunai… I waited a long time for it, kind of freezing at a picnic table in my puffer, but when the mushroom/chrysanthemum greens-topped bowl arrived, I was in heaven.
The 11-course tasting menu at the Acorn in Vancouver. Because of stomach problems, this was a year in which I went to way, way fewer restaurants than usual, and especially did not do my favorite kind of dining out, which often involves a bunch of shared things. But at the recommendation of Molly’s friend Charlie, who went to school in Vancouver, Andrew and I booked a reservation at the Acorn, a vegetarian restaurant there, as a special treat for the first night of our trip to see Taylor Swift. A series of unfortunate events related to a small wound on Hans’s tail meant that Andrew stayed behind for much of that trip and only came up for the concert—but I decided to keep the restaurant reservation and, in looking at the menu, realized that because it is a small-sharing-plates-style place, the tasting menu would be just a tiny bit more expensive than dining alone and getting a couple things for myself. So I went for it! The Acorn is a beautiful small space, and I loved everything I got during the truly wild ride of myriad courses. I took detailed notes for Andrew, so I can report with certainty that my favorite things were a dish of salsify spears and parsley root roasted in smoked butter served atop parsley-root puree, with toasted salsify peel shavings and frozen local grapes (!!) as a garnish; “cauliflower three ways” with “tree spices”; and the palate cleanser of melon rind granita and butternut squash seed butter, followed by an incredible ginger squash cake with blue Hubbard squash ice cream and squash-gut caramel (?!?). Hopefully this gives you a sense of the level of detail of each dish. The experience was amazing and overwhelming in a great way… and also the tasting menu was, before tax, $62 USD. True deal and steal! I WILL be going back, and this was definitely the best meal I ate all year.
Coffee with amaro and stollen fried in butter on Christmas again, plus more. I wrote about this last year, but will just say that we continued our new tradition, this time swapping in local nocino for the amaro and adding a Columbia City Bakery fruitcake to the mix (excellent, but my heart belongs to the stollen), as well as the best pie I have maybe ever had (more about that in the recipe section). We enjoyed these treats with Bei Hua and Emelio and Indigo, and it was the Christmas morning vibe I want.
Other food items deserving of accolades:
The “Something to Believe In” cocktail at Tivoli (the pizza place in Seattle, not to be confused with my beloved Tivoli, NY; the pizza etc. there is also amazing!)
Any jam from Ayako and Family (thank you Elissa and Colin for introducing me to this local treasure!)
The honey butter toast at Temple Pastries
The cardamom bun at Cowdog Coffee in Vancouver, accompanied by pourover
Tivoli Bread & Baking’s cookie box (especially the spritzes, which Mikee sent us another box of!)
A few most-beloved recipes of the year (with links when available):
Last year we had a favorite radicchio salad and dressing, and this year we had a new favorite in that microgenre, specially tailored for my narrowed eating needs! I made a modified green goddess dressing from Hetty Liu McKinnon’s Tenderheart with coconut yogurt, and put it on radicchio paired with fennel, pistachios, and croutons. We brought it to a lot of summer parties on butter lettuce with similar toppings, too, and it was a smashing success. (The whole original recipe, which pairs the dressing with roasted carrots and black-eyed peas, is also great! It’s not available anywhere online, but email me if you want and I will send it to you. Hetty Liu McKinnon is my newest “I always trust you” cookbook author.)
Inspired in part by my love affair with Red Tail Grains, I tried out a recipe for corn ice cream from Roxana Jullapat’s Mother Grains that involves steeping polenta in the cream base before it’s churned. I made it for a party in June, and then again for our now-annual ice cream party. A huge, huge hit both times. I was especially honored that our neighborhood toddler BFFs both tried and loved this one. (Again, you can email me for the recipe!)
For our birthday camping party, Andrew made this olive oil cake (with fancy olive oil from our local amazing amaro bar/Italian food market) as a shelf-stable, easy-on-my-stomach celebratory dessert—and it was extremely sublime! Also the decorations were pretty awesome…
We had a quiet Thanksgiving at home, and made this ricotta leek galette (the recipe here is slightly modified from the original, which is in Joshua McFadden’s Six Seasons, a perennial fave) as our main dish. We loved it, and loved the nut-enriched crust in particular. For Christmas, Andrew decided to make another recipe that involves a cousin of that crust: a sweet carrot pie, similar to a pumpkin pie in texture, that involves pureeing carrots with a homemade caramel and crème fraiche. We cut into it on Christmas morning with Bei Hua and Emelio and were all in awe. Indigo said “More please!” and so did we.
The dietician with whom I have been discussing my stomach problems this fall encouraged me to try some “novel proteins,” and my favorite has been Pumfu (pumpkin seed tofu) cooked via this relatively simple method… it kind of tastes like a flavorful salty snack food, but it’s a backbone for a substantial meal.
Subjects of deep dives:
Stomach woes. This has already been alluded to in several spots, and was in part the subject of my one and only Ear Mountain letter of 2024, but I spent a lot of this year feeling pretty limited foodwise and sometimes not the best physically! The verdict is still out and might always be on what happened, but it seems like I had a big flare of acid reflux/GERD at the start of the year, which then lingered—and then in the summer it was joined by a flare of the IBS I was diagnosed with in 2013, maybe retriggered in part by the GERD medication I was on. This was not a deep dive I was excited to pursue, but I did learn a lot about the following: all the rule-out medical testing (not my first rodeo with this; cf. my prior IBS diagnosis); SIBO (I don’t have it, but the test was weird and kind of fun!); low-acid cooking (The Acid Watcher Cookbook is actually pretty good?!?); PT for stomach issues (involves self-massage and, for me, dry needling, both of which did help, but going to get regular massages was maybe even more helpful); lots of various supplements (most did not do much, but DGL tablets do help with GERD for me); tapering off of PPIs (again, not my first rodeo); working with a GI-specialist dietician; low-fermentation diets; and more! As has been the case for me before, things have been slowly getting better, so maybe I have also learned patience? Probably I will have to relearn that again and again, and maybe same with some of the other stuff too.
Frederick Wiseman. Early on in the year, Andrew and I watched part of Wiseman’s newest movie, Menu-Plasirs – Les Troisgros, with Bei Hua and Emelio, and watched the rest on our own (it is four hours long!). I already knew I was a fan of Wiseman, who makes documentaries that have no narration (there’s no voiceover or talking-heads interviews, just footage) and that immerse the viewer in a wide range of contexts. We saw Ballet and part of At Berkeley with Bei Hua and Emelio a few years back, but this one—which is all about a multigenerational family of restaurant owners in France and their incredible meticulousness re: the food they serve—spurred an intense desire to watch much more Wiseman! I didn’t do this as much as I would have liked; we only got through City Hall (whose many bureaucratic meetings and shots of Marty Walsh blathering brought Andrew to the brink of madness) and National Gallery. But City Hall is 4.5 hours long, so it’s kind of like watching three normal movies! I’m hoping to continue making my way through his work this coming year; like Nicholson Baker, another major fave of mine, he does something totally new subject-wise in each movie, but each piece—and the body of work as a whole—illuminates how anything can be super interesting if you actually give it your full attention.
Taylor Swift, again. Ah, my greatest connection to a broad swath of humanity! I wrote so much about Taylor in last year’s list that part of me hangs my head in shame to do it again, but it is also true that I simply cannot represent 2024 with any accuracy if I try to obscure how much time I spent thinking about Taylor. The fact that we secured Eras Tour tickets (for December 2024) in November 2023 guaranteed that this would be the case, but Taylor also upped the ante, as she is wont to do, by announcing a new album in February and then, when it came out in April, dropping not one (long) album’s worth of songs but essentially two. Obviously there was a lot of hype for me between her announcement and the day The Tortured Poets Department appeared; when it finally did, Andrew picked me up from my Hugo House class and we spent our drive home listening. It’s great! Some favorites include “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” “Guilty as Sin,” “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” “So High School,” “The Black Dog,” “The Bolter”… but honestly, so many.
In addition to learning all these new songs, I went back into the Every Single Album episodes and paired them with the albums, especially the Taylor’s Versions, which I had not fully absorbed all of in 2023’s deep dive. Part of this need for intense revisiting had to do with the fact that Andrew was prepping for the concert for much of the fall, so I could do it with him, which was very fun, and another part had to do with wanting to be sure that when the surprise song part of the concert rolled around, I was “…ready for it,” as they say. Songs that emerged as new top picks during this include:
“The Way I Loved You”
“Better Man”
“Afterglow” (as the podcast observes, basically another version of “Dress,” which is still even more beloved for me—both of these, Andrew pointed out, are kind of like Taylor doing a Caroline Polachek song)
“Call It What You Want” (I know, I know! All the diehards already knew this one was amazing)
And then, the Eras Tour!! It was an awe-inspiring experience, and kind of felt like being in a visual art installation with a really awesome soundtrack (and so many other people!) for several completely absorbing and joyous hours. Taylor was great in an anodyne way—she is clearly a professional about it, including having some boundaries about how much emotion she invests in her connection with the crowd, and didn’t visibly deviate from her script except when she made a very funny/goofy face while singing the line “Because we’re crazy” in “The Tortured Poets Department,” which was one of our surprise songs (a very good one for me!).
A couple of takeaways/takes from my second full year of Taylor preoccupation:
1) One of the things I’ve appreciated about Taylor and the response people have to her music is the sense of fun friendship/camaraderie (and yes, I am aware that this is only the high side of what can be a darker fandom). So I was psyched about that re: the concert! Andrew and I did make friendship bracelets. But few people traded with us, possibly because a couple in our age range is not the most approachable unit at a Taylor Swift show. I also wondered if it had to do with a pretty sharp difference I felt between myself and a lot of the other folks there, though, especially other cis-het women; in the bathroom before the show began, I looked around, realized I was maybe the only person not wearing makeup, and felt a pang of something I haven’t felt in my Seattle life in a while: the specter of an insufficient performance of femininity. I don’t think much about that as a valence of my style day-to-day, but I did feel it at good old BC Place. But I also kind of didn’t mind, because it led me to think about how part of what’s cool about the Eras Tour, and maybe Taylor more broadly, is that in the context that she creates, the performance of that kind of femininity is (primarily) for other femme-identified people—it kind of détourns the possibility of sequins/makeup/glitter/etc. as a way of catching the attention of men. I like that, even as I didn’t participate in it myself, or really want to! I didn’t feel “in” the community of the Eras Tour, but seeing it at a mass scale was a huge part of the fun. (And outside of the concert space, I feel there are plenty of people in my sub-sub-librarian Swiftie niche—readers of Gevinson and Nelson, for instance!)
2) At risk of saying the most bland thing: Taylor is really, really good! I spent a lot of time this year listening to other female pop artists, and while Taylor is certainly not better than everyone else, she is way better than a lot of other contemporary pop musicians. I think it has to do with her songwriting, which tends towards the specific and slightly idiosyncratic in ways that lots of other pop songs elide, but another part of it is mysterious to me in a way I like. Her music has something about it that appeals to a zillion people, but it does that while maintaining a certain depth and weirdness. I like that art, and even super popular art, can be like that.
(Obligatory pre-show picture, and yes, we did have our shirts custom-made!)
Charli XCX. As this and my above Taylor discourse indicate, I’ve really left my teenage self, who wanted only to listen to music no one else knew about yet, in the dust! Like so many other people, summer was Brat-saturated for me. I’ve been a distant fan of Charli’s music since (I think) 2012, when Molly showed me her song “Need Ur Luv,” but last year Andrew and I got very into Crash, and listened to it a ton. We anticipated Brat with excitement this past spring and put it on while cooking dinner the night it came out, but agreed that it was maybe too electronic/clubby for our tastes. Fortunately, I listened to it again a week or so later while driving to hike Oyster Dome with Hans, and realized that we were fools! What is so, so good about the album is the combination of the music and the lyrics; they’re not at odds with each other, but the combination is strange and catches you off-guard. Charli makes both components smart and swaggery and simultaneously vulnerable, and the range of Brat is shocking—who else puts a song like “I think about it all the time,” with its chill melancholy and deep ambivalence about having a kid, next to “365,” whose frantic chorus includes the couplet, “Should we do a little key?/Should we have a little line?” I love the entirety of this funny, poignant, catchy, weird album, with special accolades for “Sympathy is a knife”—a Charli song about Taylor, making my 2024 deep dive dreams come true!—the Lorde version of “Girl, so confusing,” which is like a showstopper number for a 2024-update and Anglicized musical version of My Brilliant Friend, and “Apple,” obviously. My household’s Charli mania came to a head in early August, when, unbeknownst to either of us, Andrew and I both asked our friends to learn the “Apple” dance as a birthday surprise for the other person (our birthdays are two days apart; our friends complied!), and also both bought each other Brat nalgenes as gifts. Beyond all this album (and remix album—also so good!) enthusiasm, I went into the back catalog and found innumerable amazing other Charli songs. “Take My Hand,” a joyous dancey one from her first album, was my most-listened-to song of the year.
(Above: only one of myriad performances, accompanied by my nonstop laughter; below, Anneka’s contribution to our cookie party.)
Bagels in/around Seattle. Sometime in the spring, beloved pals Ruthie and John told me about John’s quest to find great bagels in Seattle, and about the excellent local Substack that had inspired this quest. I read it over lunch one day (love to read food writing while eating lunch!) and felt similarly inspired. Bagels were a good treat for me during my most restricted days of eating, and my two highlights are Howdy Bagel (not in Seattle, and not a 2024 discovery per se, but amazing—their rosemary salt bagel is A+++) and Hey Bagel, which we got to try via their free test bagels at the very end of the year. (They are astonishing.) Oxbow is another favorite, though their bagels are very different from the other two I just mentioned. I learned a lot about my bagel preferences through this journey… I love a towering big salt bagel with a crisp exterior!
Coffee, again. The day of my “fun” excursion from my residency to the Silverdale urgent care for chest pain that turned out to be severe acid reflux, I quit drinking coffee cold turkey. That was in January, and for almost all of the year, I lived without it. But at the beginning of November, I went to Phoenix to doorknock with renowned neighborhood coffee expert Hannah E. and others, and while there I could not resist a little coffee tourism at Futuro (thank you for the recommendation, Matt!). The iced café de olla was out of this world, and after a couple of days of enjoying that without feeling physically off, I tentatively began more attempts at special morning coffee. As someone who loves to pay attention to the taste of things, and someone who looked forward every single day to my one cup of pourover prior to my stomach problems, it was extraordinary to return to the world of varied and delicious options. At Hannah’s recommendation, Andrew and I visited Push x Pull, which we’d never been to, but where the barista walked us through a lot of exciting info about their decaf (Andrew’s drink of choice) and a truly, truly wild sangria co-fermented Colombian coffee I tried. After we debriefed this with her, Hannah sent us a presentation she’d made that discussed various processing styles, and I became intrigued; I’d paid less attention to that than to roast and origin in my prior moments of deep-diving. In Vancouver, I also used Hannah’s recommendations to tour around some of the finest coffee available, as well as googling around myself for some gems. I think my very favorite experience was at Cowdog Coffee, a tiny shop where I sat at the thinnest counter I’ve ever seen and drank some anaerobic “innovative washed process” Colombian coffee from Luna Roasters alongside Cowdog’s cardamom bun, which got its own nod above. But Nemesis and Modus both wowed me too! As of this writing, I am back to drinking coffee daily (usually beans from our incredible coffee/record subscription program)… cross your fingers for me that I can keep it up!
Music I listened to a lot and loved (in no order):
Morrissey, “Every Day is Like Sunday” (Molly did this as a karaoke song at Bei Hua and Emelio’s party in February, and afterwards I became obsessed! It was my second-most-listened-to song in 2024, apparently)
Adrianne Lenker’s Bright Future (I named “Sadness as a Gift,” which hadn’t come out yet but which I saw performed live, as one of the songs I loved most in 2023 and it makes it onto the 2024 list too; also especially loved “Fool” and “Ruined”)
One of the most exciting releases for me this year was beloved friend Paul’s beautiful album, put out under the name Shaggy Parasol! (love it all, but you could start with “Split” or “Ugly Parts,” and I also have a real tender spot for “Pray To”)
Wild Pink (Andrew, who it must be said is the real music-discoverer in our house and is responsible for a ton of what I end up getting into, showed me the album “Yolk in the Fur” because he thought I might like it—and I did, in fact I loved it, and then the new album came out! It’s all so good. “Lake Erie,” “Dulling the Horns,” and “St. Catherine St.” are all top songs for me, and Wild Pink might be my favorite new discovery of the year musicwise)
Alvvays (a longtime fave! We saw them play at the zoo this year)
Chappell Roan, “Good Luck, Babe!” (like the rest of the world, and for good reason!)
Rosali (the song “Rewind” was my favorite end-of-the-year discovery and ties with “Sadness as a Gift” for most beautiful song of 2024 in my book)
Mannequin Pussy (another Andrew discovery via the song “I Don’t Know You”—some is too punky for me, but a lot is soooo great)
Ariana Grande, “we can’t be friends” and “imperfect for you” (and her Charli remix feature, duh)
Wednesday, “Quarry” (sounds so much like “Waterloo Sunset” in a good way!)
Billie Eilish, “LUNCH” and “Birds of a Feather” (the former I instantly loved for its sassy playfulness; the latter took me a second, but I am now a superfan—the extra layer of synth that comes in towards the end of the song is candy for me)
MJ Lenderman, “She’s Leaving You” (and other songs too… sigh. I had an initially skeptical response to Lenderman, maybe because the only people I ever hear talking a lot about how much they love him/how awesome he is are men, and I had a contrarian impulse. But what can I say, a lot of his songs are weirdly earworms!)
Destroyer (we saw him play sans band in March, and I did a lot of pre-listening to prep: some discoveries included “Foam Hands,” “City of Daughters,” and “Painter in Your Pocket.” And I have loved “Your Blood” forever!)
Annie, “Heartbeat” and “Chewing Gum” (Andrew put these on our ice cream party playlist and they are heavenly)
A.G. Cook, “Britpop” and “Soulbreaker”
Art Moore, “A Different Life” (discovered via the movie Babes)
Beach House, “Silver Soul” (I listened to this one zillion times while away at the residency in January… good alone-in-small-cabin-in-winter-in-an-ambiguous-mood music)
Hurray for the Riffraff, “Alibi,” “Hawkmoon,” and “Vetiver”
Nilüfer Yanya (another eleventh-hour 2024 discovery for me)
(Inspired by wonderful Jay Aquinas Thompson and their most recent newsletter post, I made a playlist of all the songs mentioned in this Ear Mountain; it is here! Beware, there is a lot of Taylor on it.)
This year I wrote down most of the movies I watched, and here are the ones I really liked:
Babette’s Feast (I watched this at my residency over a dinner of homemade burgers, shakes, and fries—an excellent high/low combo!)
The Taste of Things
Problemista
Menu-Plasirs—Les Trosigros
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
Janet Planet (a favorite—so visually and tonally beautiful)
Babes (I saw this twice, and it was also a favorite in a totally different way! I laughed, I cried. The ending is amazing.)
City Hall
Adaptation (a rewatch, but so good)
The Gleaners & I
Protagonist
Women Talking
Cameraperson (had been meaning to watch forever, and was bowled over)
Eno (Andrew and I saw this at the SIFF documentary festival, and it was a highlight of the year—it’s definitely triggered a bit of a Brian Eno obsession for us both)
The Red Shoes (a great SIFF Egyptian showing we saw with Livia and Calac!)
Anora (saw this twice also, the first time on 35 mm in a packed theater at SIFF Uptown; this was my favorite movie of the year, for its willingness to commit to narrative/affective ambiguity, for the great acting, for the cinematography, for the big feelings it elicits)
I Used to Be Funny (harrowing, funny, and so good)
(And I’m bad at watching TV, but did watch and like Couples Therapy and Fantasmas)
Areas of material obsession/preoccupation/longing:
Advent calendars. I’m a little bit ashamed to write about this, because, whether sensibly or not, it feels more frivolous and bougie than even my other bougie interests! But in the hope of inspiring others to enjoy an advent calendar of their choice, I will confess. Last year, I got the totally good/serviceable Tony’s Chocolonely advent calendar, but I’d had my eye on the pop-up one from Neuhaus, which my food expert friends Mikee and Laurie love. This year I decided to go big. After a bunch of reading online, I chose Compartes’s calendar over Neuhaus, and I have to say I am not sure I made the right choice—the Neuhaus one looks really great—but mine was also quite good! The best part was the design, I think—the box was gorgeous, the truffles emblazoned with lovely images. The s’mores one and the crème brûlée were my faves. The advent calendar I really, really want in 2025, though, is Dandelion Chocolate’s; their stuff is amazing, and I love the amount of care invested in the things they make, as well as the incredible maximalist amount of info available about their processes. This year’s advent was constellation-themed!! I do not know if I can afford a 2025 one, or accept my own decadence if I do buy it, but this is the thing I crave most as a treat this coming year! And, beyond the mild horror/guilt/inner turmoil that buying a $100+ advent calendar brings up for me, I would also say that having an advent calendar of any kind is such a joy. The structure of a tiny treat each day makes me so happy! I kind of wish I could have one every month, but I know then it wouldn’t be special anymore.
Bags. My normally-rampant bag obsession has been pretty dormant this past year because, sadly, this was not the year for me to get a new bike moneywise; 2025 likely will not be either! But I will deliver a special longing shoutout to this gorgeous tote bag made by a Portland artist, which is another most-craved item for me.
Ceramics. Andrew and I got some great plates from Wolf Ceramics as birthday gifts from both our parents to round out our dinnerware collection, and I acquired a really beautiful mug from Oxbow (I think it is made by one of the owner’s partners, whose ceramics I have also seen at Sea Wolf… not available online, but worth keeping an eye out for if you live in Seattle!). Andrew and I also got this extremely delightful serving dish (pictured above) from the lovely local shop Storied at Home as part of a gift from Anneka/Molly/Paul. Super fun at a party! I don’t need any more ceramics, really, but I will say that I am keeping my eye on the recently revived online store on Dina No’s website (No’s work is what started my obsession with handmade ceramics, way back in 2012-13 when I lived in Portland), and also on Sandbox Ceramics, which I may never splurge on but which makes such gorgeous and interesting work. (This lamp, which I pine for!! These pie dishes!)
Books I want to read in (early) 2025:
Bibliophobia, Sarah Chihaya (I am a superfan of The Ferrante Letters, the book Chihaya organized and co-wrote about the My Brilliant Friend series; she’s a great writer, and I can’t wait for this)
Theory & Practice, Michelle de Krester (Woolf, complicated romance, and big questions about reading the canon?! This sounds amazing, and I really liked de Krester’s short book about Shirley Hazzard)
Wave of Blood, Ariana Reines
State Champ, Hilary Plum (I love all of Hilary’s work, and am so excited about this one!)
A Field of Telephones, Zach Savich (Zach is Hilary’s partner, and I know them both just a tiny bit through mutual friends; again, he’s someone whose body of work I really admire, and the concept of this book thrills me!)
Recognizing the Stranger, Isabella Hammad
Madeline ffitch’s new novel (I hear through the grapevine that this will come out this year!)
Something, anything, by John Berger
What Art Does, Brian Eno (2025’s year in review will likely include an Eno deep dive; after getting obsessed with the documentary, I’m currently “auditing” a class Andrew is taking with him via School of Song!)
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar Al Akhad
You Didn’t Hear This From Me, Kelsey McKinney (I’m sad that Kelsey is done hosting Normal Gossip, but thrilled to read this!)
Tristram Shandy, Lawrence Sterne (have been meaning to read this for years and I think now is the time)
Something About Living, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
In the Wake, Christina Sharpe
Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici (a holdover from last year; this is the year I do it in the summer!)
Curves from the Apple, Rosemarie Waldrop
My Lesbian Novel, Renee Gladman
God, Human, Animal, Machine, Meghan O’Gieblyn (big fan of her essays and finally bought this book)
Other things I’d like to do in 2025:
Find a volunteer project to get involved with; watch more Frederick Wiseman; watch a bunch of Agnes Varda movies; go backpacking in the Olympics and to Goat Rocks; try the Sea Wolf kouign amann; go to Seabird Bakeshop on Orcas Island; act more on impulses to be generous; go on a multi-day bike trip; take our toddler friends on outings; see shows at Cornish; set up my home office slightly better; get a tasting flight at Letterpress Distillery; make baked Alaska; visit Sound & Fog in summer, maybe on bike; host a clothing swap; brûlée an ice cream sandwich with my new kitchen torch.
And a passage for you all (some of you may know it):
I continue west. I know you will not be there in the dunes. Except that I will be there. I will be there and through me you will be there. I think, if I am in the place where we were together, then we are together again. (Anne de Marcken, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over)
