The tyranny of the year-end list

Seasonal pressures, dad books, Julia Cameron's reading cleanse

Hello!

I don’t know about you, but I have always considered January 1 as the lesser new year’s holiday. For me, rebirth happens in the fall. Consider all the things that begin anew in the fall: the school year, the September issue of Vogue, every season of Gilmore Girls. We celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, in the fall. (My preference for autumnal rituals of renewal is one reason it was easy for me to convert to Judaism.) In Texas, fall is also when it’s finally safe to walk outside in the afternoon without your face melting off.

Fall brings new shoes, apple cake, and not having to walk the dog before dawn. In contrast, New Year’s in January marks the peak of a hectic season: for my kids, final grades and the push to cram every extracurricular celebration into the school calendar before the end of the semester; for my husband, demanding holiday dinners and special events at his restaurant; for me, the annual ritual of figuring out how I’m going to write while my kids are out of school.

For readers, the build-up to the end of a calendar year also brings the tyranny of the year-end lists.

Two years ago, on December 31, my father sent a list of all the books he’d read in the preceding year to my brother, mother, husband, aunt, sister-and-law, and me. It was a numbered list of 23 books, and at the bottom he had written three categories:

• Most informative: The Body by Bill Bryson

• Best nonfiction: JFK by Frederik Logevall

• Best fiction: Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

I hesitated somewhat to reveal my father’s actual choices, but ended up deciding to include them in order to demonstrate that my dad is one of the daddiest American dads out there. When I worked in a used bookstore in the 1990s, we relied on Father’s Day to clear our shelves of bulky presidential biographies. I’m pretty sure you could randomly select my dad’s reading list from any given year and find both JFK and Lincoln somewhere. (And yes, I know Lincoln Highway is not actually about Abraham Lincoln, but the fact that his name is in the title of a novel by a writer enjoyed by a lot of dads just proves my point.)

After my dad threw down the gauntlet, my brother and sister-in-law responded with their own lists, in idiosyncratic order, each with a short list of favorites at the end. My brother listed his favorite fiction (Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads), favorite nonfiction (God, Human, Animal, Machine by Meghan O’Gieblen) and favorite “other” (Leopoldstadt, a play by Sir Tom Stoppard). My sister-in-law made a list of the best authors she’d discovered that year: Joy Williams, Maggie O’Farrell, Lauren Groff, and Ross Gay.

In my memory, I waited several days before responding. I weighed whether to jump in to this fray, knowing that if I started making a year-end list of books, I might not be able to stop. In fact, I responded after only a few hours, with a unnumbered, unranked, unchronological list of all the books I’d read in 2021. At the end, I added a smaller list of books that were exceptional for one reason or another:

• Most flawless: Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

• Most revelatory: Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro

• Most delightful: Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller (because I had no idea what it would be about) and Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane (because it was great and we used to work together at Sterling Lord)

• Most disappointing: Wayward by Dana Spiotta (for lots of reasons, but mainly because it wasn't the novel I wanted it to be)

An annual tradition was born.

I have now created and posted on Medium lists of all the books I’ve read in 2021 and 2022, with commentary. As I feared, the lists have become a time-consuming habit. Writing the commentary takes a full day. The list is ongoing—I keep a spreadsheet and add to it every time I finish a book. (Here is a template if you would like to do the same.)

In year 3 of this project, I can attest to a side effect of keeping a list: you will begin to compete with yourself. In 2021, I read or listened to 45 books. In 2022, the number increased to 47. In 2023, I have finished 60 books so far—and I anticipate reaching the last page of at least two more before New Year’s Eve.

If your goal is to read more books, maybe this is a good plan for you! Keep a list, and make a plan to share it at the end of the year. I am, as in all things, ambivalent about how the year-end reading lists have impacted me.

Lately I’ve been thinking about Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a popular guide to creativity, modeled on 12-step programs. I have completed TAW twice, and both times I faltered on Week Four, in which Cameron asks the artist not to read.

“For most artists,” Cameron writes, “words are like tiny tranquilizers. We have a daily quota of media chat that we swallow up. Like greasy food, it clogs our system. Too much of it and we feel, yes, fried.

Cameron knows that her readers are likely to shy away from a forced week of reading abstinence. Her introduction to Week Four begins with a warning: “Do not skip the tool of reading deprivation!” (Notably, in a traditional AA program, the fourth week is devoted to making a “searching and fearless moral inventory” of oneself. I suspect this step is similarly subject to evasion.)

Now, you may argue not every book is the equivalent of a bag of potato chips. This was certainly my position the first two times I failed to go a week without reading. But after further reflection, I think Cameron is onto something when she compares reading another person’s words, no matter how eloquent, to snacking on processed food.

For most blocked creatives, reading is an addiction. We gobble the words of others rather than digest our own thoughts and feelings, rather than cook up something of our own.

A week of not reading, Cameron promises, will function as something like a colonic:

Reading deprivation casts us into our inner silence . . . If we monitor the inflow and keep it to a minimum, we will be rewarded for our reading deprivation with embarrassing speed. Our reward will be a new outflow. Our own art, our own thoughts and feelings, will begin to nudge aside the sludge of blockage, to loosen it and move it upward and outward until once again our well is running freely.

As an audiobook addict, I am particularly aware of how listening to books can supplant my own creativity. I tend to listen to books while I am doing repetitive manual tasks—the same hours when, as everyone knows, we are susceptible to surprising moments of creative insight (there is a reason we get such great ideas while taking showers).

This year, I listened to nine Mick Herron audiobooks while walking my dog, folding laundry, and washing dishes. I’m afraid to calculate the exact number of hours that I spent listening to the misadventures of Herron’s beleaguered crew of MI5 rejects, but it’s somewhere in the ballpark of 75-80. Could that time have been better spent? I want to argue in the contrary. Je ne regrette rien, says Gerard Doyle as Herron’s antihero, Jackson Lamb, doing an impressive Edith Piaf impression in my head. I don’t regret a moment spent with Herron’s bumbling Slow Horses, but I am curious about what I wasn’t hearing while I was listening to Herron’s words.

Mary Ruefle writes in Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures:

I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, “I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say”; but I know now that I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.”

As we stumble to the end of another holiday season, I’m thinking about how I can tap into my inner silence. How to spend more time listening for the words that I will write. I might do a week of reading deprivation. I might resolve to read less in the new year, or to only read one thing at a time instead of my usual literary juggling act. Whatever happens, I will report back in this compendium of reading and writing that we are creating together.

Other interesting things

• Jeanine Ouellette wrote about that beautiful line from Mary Ruefle’s lectures in her Writing in the Dark Substack this week. I subscribe to WIID for weekly doses of this kind of inspiration.

• Is your inbox overflowing with 2023 best-of lists? Mine is! If you are lacking in this department, or simply looking for books to give as gifts this season, may I suggest John Warner’s Biblioracle Book Recommendation Extravaganza? You might also enjoy The Paris Review’s Favorite Books of 2023, this list of 25 must-read books published in 2023 by independent presses, and The Rumpus’s most beautiful books of 2023.

• Shout out to Charley Reysek, CEO of Austin’s Book People and all-around awesome person, one of two booksellers named 2023 People of the Year by Publishers Weekly for her courageous leadership against HB 900, Texas’s book banning bill.

• Speaking of book banning, here is an Open Letter to the 11 Adults Responsible for the Majority of Book Bans in Schools. “What an unexpected pleasure it was to feel an actual jolt of joy when I read that the entire movement to ban books in US public schools is coming from fewer people than I fed this Thanksgiving. Thank god (do you have an issue with me saying “god”? Or “God”? I’m guessing no) it’s just eleven of you.”

• And now for five words I did not expect to type together: Good news out of Florida!

Bye for now.

S.