#21 - My 2022 in books and musings
Hey everyone!
Inspired by absent rituals and reflections from a full year, this post explores how I’m thinking about purpose and what comes next.
I’ve also chronicled my 2022 reading list. You can check out my Goodreads reviews here, and please add your fave reads from 2022 in the comments below! 📚
Blessings e beijos do Rio! And a very Happy New Year!! 🙏🎉🥂
Jodi
Despite pounding rain smacking the interlocking brick laneway and pelting the roof like a vitally urgent rap at the door, my mom is passed out in an outdoor reading nook. I’m beside her with my Kindle, but I don’t feel like reading. Really don’t feel like writing either, but somehow my pen glides across the page: December 23, 2022. The end of the year is around the corner. It’d be nice to have something to say about it.
A whirlwind of happy memories froth in my mind’s eye like a cozy cappuccino. I’ve travelled to new cities and countries. Cried laughing with family and friends, watched basically all of the World Cup, and decorated our first Christmas tree together with my husband.
Mostly though, I think of all the time I spent alone. On the couch with a glass of Malbec and some jazz playlist on, while our anxious rescue pup chases invisible insects around the perimeter of the apartment. Eventually she tires, jumps up beside me, and places her heavy head on my calf which she has come to trust as a reliable pillow. In between deep breaths and sudden jolts to steal shoes, she sneezes. It lifts the corner of my mouth every single time.
Despite Oliver Burkeman’s appealing argument in Four Thousand Weeks: Time management for mortals that “Time can be too much your own”, alone time is a construct I place a premium on. Indeed, I’ve made rather significant choices to secure as much of it as I can. I work from home. I moved to a new continent which means socializing happens almost exclusively in my very, very, very second language. This brings out a rather shallow (if not straight-up stunted) extrovert in me. And even this is only on occasion.
I think of the push-and-pull for sheer autonomy and reliable community. I think about how much effort I’ve put into what Oliver Burkeman describes as “desynchronizing” myself from the “same temporal grooves” as others. Like anything in life, I reap the good and the bad.
The unfortunate part, I feel especially this time of year, is that all this mostly alone time comes without time-impressed rituals and traditions with loved ones. My third holiday season here feels neither new nor old. It feels almost nonchalant, but it’s not that. It’s something more reassuring and comforting. It’s a budding sense of knowability and stability.
Young roots and refreshing firsts, like our first Brasilian Christmas with Marcos’s extended family (think Funk music to 2AM and absolutely no carols lol). It is my mom’s second holiday season here, too. We had a wonderful albeit mostly rainy trip to tropical paradise Ilha Grande and charming, historical Paraty.
“We live by the paradigms we know,” writes Michelle Obama in her revealing and casually wonderful memoir Becoming. I highlight the passage and consider what paradigms have been destabilized, reinforced, and introduced this year. Because I grew up with a single mom and experienced a lot of instability and downright traumatic experiences not of my choosing, I spent my twenties yearning for my independence. I was focused on designing a life of my own, deadset on a series of goals that would get me there. Now, and especially this past year, things have changed.
At 33-turning-34, with an exciting career I love, a beach-oriented routine I dreamed of, means to travel, and time for creative pursuits, I no longer feel a fundamental momentum to achieve something else. Still, life is relentless in its allocation of new problems and new blessings.
Now, I wonder what I want to strive for when I’m not driven by a need to escape or conquer? I think of how fragile life is, how much can change so fast. I think: just savour it. Focus on acceptance, not accomplishment right now.
Going into 2023, I have no resolutions. But I have learnings from this past year in the broader landscape of my life. As the new year approaches, I simply ask for more of what I had this year.
More life.
My 2022 in books
Top picks
Finding Me by Viola Davis
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Still buffering on these ones…
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen
My kinda classics
Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
Becoming by Michelle Obama
Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces by Elamin Abdelmahmoud
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama
The opinion is no strong opinion
Travels with Charlie in Search of America by John Steinbeck
Enjoyed
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals, 1962 - 1966 by Thich Nhat Hanh
House of Sticks by Ly Tran
Not for me
All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire by Rebecca Woolf
I love you caralh0