A rebuilding year

Every year, I do a little rundown of the books I loved reading most over the course of the prior twelve months. I'll do that here—quickly, in fact, because I don't know that you need me to spend a lot of words to explain why any of these books were great; they just are, and you should read them. How's that?

The full list is here (a decent year, just under 90 reads), but here are the standouts—most of them new to me, as well as one re-read (Americanah), some classics I'd somehow never gotten around to (The Price of Salt, East of Eden), a recommendation from Squish (Piranesi), a relevant-to-my-own-writing read which turned out to be magnificent (Possession), a relevant-to-my-own-journey read which helped me re-map some internal landscapes, or attempt to (The Middle Passage)—that I am still thinking about:

• Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
• Possession, A.S. Byatt
• Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
• The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith
• The Middle Passage, James Hollis
• Heart the Lover, Lily King
• Whereabouts, Jhumpa Lahiri
• East of Eden, John Steinbeck
• Deliver Me From Nowhere, Warren Zanes

I'm too close to 2025 to write about it effectively—but I am thinking a lot about this year, and I think I'll be thinking about this year for the next several years. This year brought one version of a story to a close, but is in the process of transforming that story into something different and equally rewarding and meaningful—just different. This year was one of internal struggle and growth; each bit of growth helping to underscore just how much more growth is needed, how much more is ahead of me if I can meet it willingly. A year of recognition that friendships matter, and that if you hope they will be there for you when you need them, you have to attend to them; I have been moved this year by the generosity of people around me, who care about me and who have been there for me. A year of career success, and of creative rebuilding; of trying new things—hard and pleasant things like learning the dobro, or hard and necessary things like learning to listen to my heart; of redefining things, breaking down things, building up things. A year of vague allusions to personal trials.

I've never loved the word synchronicity—I think it got beaten to death during a thousand creative work sessions or brand pitches during my agency days—but in the latter part of the year, at least, I felt that word all around me. Each morning, I'd sit down with a pile of books—books I hoped might help me begin to make sense of some complicated emotions and experiences, books like The Middle Passage by James Hollis, or Are You Mad at Me? by Meg Josephson, or Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'Engle, or Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, etc.—and I'd read a bit of each, and annotate and underline and pull relevant bits into my journal—and while doing this, all sorts of connections between the disparate texts began to emerge. In small ways—James Hollis would write about the middle passage (his more meaningful term for what we tend to call a midlife crisis), and he'd say something like It's tempting to run away from all of our responsibilities while dealing with all this stuff, but we can't just dash off to a tropical island like Paul Gauguin did, and then shortly after, I'd be reading Madeleine L'Engle and she'd write We had a house full of kids, which we loved, but every now and then I just wanted space to write—I wanted to run away to Tahiti like Gauguin. That started happening a lot, and each time it did, it felt like a small miracle. But sometimes these little threads felt like too much.

Here's an example: Earlier this year, while struggling with a challenging personal situation, I re-encountered something I'd bumped into during the pandemic. Then, I read a post by Austin Kleon, who quoted Oliver Burkeman, who himself quoted James Hollis. I won't quote all of these here, because I don't think this blogging platform is capable of nesting quotes within quotes. But essentially Kleon and Burkeman are both referencing James Hollis's recommended framework for decision-making, which says you shouldn't make big decisions by asking which choice will make you happy—you should instead ask yourself Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?

At the time, I journaled a bit about this, and I found that the framework wasn't quite workable for my own decision. Maybe it was, but I didn't really know how to apply it. But what matters is that I found the new perspective interesting, so I decided to try one of James Hollis's books, The Middle Passage, and found it enormously—enormously!—meaningful. Just line after line after line of patient but direct guidance. It set me on this reading habit that I'm still carrying on today, with those aforementioned stacks of books. I spend anywhere from an hour to three hours each morning, before my workday begins, reading and journaling and reflecting. And all of those little threads of synchronicity began emerging.

Then, just a week or so ago, while reading one of Madeleine L'Engle's memoirs—the one I mentioned above—she wrote about her childhood, living near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, taking a shortcut through the museum, soaking herself in beautiful paintings and sculptures, and recalling how deeply this fed her creative self. She wrote this:

A great painting, or symphony, or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of creation behind the universe.

I think it was one cosmic string-pluck too many. It might have broken my brain just a bit, seeing the—almost certainly coincidental!—way that all of these books were conversing with one another all around me. I had the thought, briefly, that this is what a religious experience could have felt like—like some big curtain had fluttered open, just for a moment, to reveal all the mechanisms behind things. It closed again quickly, and by the following day the feeling had worn off—but I listened to Madeleine, and that day, I didn't take my customary walk in the park but instead went to the Portland Art Museum and submerged myself in other people's art.

During a therapy session recently, while rambling about some of this, I had the distinct thought that this is the second occasion—that I'm conscious of—in which books have changed my life. The first was more than twenty years ago, when reading books by Carl Sagan and Christopher Hitchens and others gave me the tools I was missing to re-evaluate my flagging faith in god; and now, when I think they're helping me to draw a new map for navigating my inner landscape.

I fully expect the coming year will be drastically different from the one that's very nearly over, but I equally expect that those drastic differences will be the right differences. That it will be a year of discovery for myself and for my family, a year of learning new ways to support one another, to each of us not simply get by but to thrive. A rebuilding year—but rebuilding can be so emotionally and creatively fulfilling when it's done by choice, with a sense that all the right pieces are finally on the table, that you can make something wonderful out of all that's laid before you.

Happy new year!