The Mumpsimus

  Another year gone. To this one, I am not quite so ready to say, “Good riddance!” as I was some other recent years, but I also have no great reason to want to hold on to 2022. I expect it is a year that will grow less and less defined in memory, its borders bleeding backwards and forwards, until it becomes the early 2020s and then sometime in the 2020s … When writing the recent Archive Dive post about past year-end summaries, I discovered I had not done one for 2021 … and I missed it. I regretted the handful of years I had not done any sort of summary, even just a basic list of favorite books. Not wanting to miss another year, I started taking notes for this one, and kept taking notes whenever anything occurred to me. So even though I'm sure there are plenty of items I've forgotten, it all get pretty long.  But the whole point of having a blog/newsletter/thing is to not be limited by the soundbite culture of social media, so I am going to glory in the opportunity to just go...

2020 has been such a difficult, strange year that I often forget a book I wrote got published at the beginning of it. The publication of that book feels like it was a lifetime ago, something from a different world. And in many ways it was a different world, because the book was released just as we were becoming aware that COVID-19 might be something of a problem for the United States. A month after the book's publication, we knew things were serious. Two months after, the routines of the world had changed. Trying to do a year in review post this year is especially difficult because the year felt so long and life was so upended that memory is both hazy and untrustworthy. This year, I didn't write a lot, but I read far more than I thought I had — once I started making a list in preparation for this post, I was surprised at just how much reading I did. This realization made me somewhat less depressed about how little success I've had this year at writing fiction or essays, ...