What I'm bringing from 2024 to 2025

My top books, articles, foods, and pictures

Over the holidays, I wrote a few thousand words on social media and consumption, but it’s taken me longer to perfect than I’d hoped. Hopefully it will be in your inbox soon. In the meantime, here are the fixtures of my 2024 that I hope to carry into 2025.

3 top reads

• Reading Sebald is like learning how prose works from the ground up. Like constantly pushing the fabric of my brain to imagine new ways of seeing something I thought I’d known before.

• Kairos tracks the fall of East Germany through the rich colors of East Berlin culture, featuring a thoughtful exploration of the lives of artists who rejected the capitalism of nearby West Berlin. Also, its musing on the potential for love amid political upheaval challenged my expectations of its Lolita-adjacent themes.

• Biography of X accomplished more in a single book than several others I read this year combined. It somehow managed both a reimagining of post-Civil War political history and a retelling of the 1970s New York art world. Its tapestry of downtown scene-y references may give it the vibe of an artsy coffee table book, but really it was the book’s imperfect characters and long considerations on imperfect memoir that lingered in my mind after I finished.

I read mostly contemporary lit this year, but next year I’m aiming to read more works written more than 200 years ago — starting with finally, really, finally finishing Tristram Shandy. Book club anyone?

Other things I read

hit parade of tears - izumi suzuki

to the lighthouse - virginia woolf

no judgment - lauren oyler

intermezzo - sally rooney

bitter water opera - nicolette polek

crooked plow - itamar vieira junior

rejection - tony tulathimutte

the end of the world is a cul de sac - louise kennedy

american bulk - emily mester

second place - rachel cusk

the happy couple - naoise dolan

health and safety - emily witt

herscht 0779 - krasznahorkai (did not finish)

swann’s way - proust (did not finish)

the great believers - rebecca makkai (did not finish)

3 foods I make again and again

• Homemade sprouts. I loved vegetable gardening back when I lived in Chicago. Every winter I pored through seed catalogs for weird heritage varieties, but now in my shoebox-shaped, backyard-less apartment, this mason jar and seeds from the hippie co-op will have to do.

• Homemade bone broth. Instant pot, rotisserie chicken, vegetable scraps from the freezer, three hours of cooking in the background. The result is something so delicious that the health benefits barely register. There’s no store-bought version that remotely compares.

• Homemade pickled onions. I’ve found it hard to achieve the perfect crunch with pickles, but onions are easy (bay leaf, garlic, vinegar). They’re on tacos, they’re in every bowl cuisine, they’re eaten directly out of the jar in between zoom meetings.

3 favorite things I wrote

• How low economic sentiment is a product of structural affordability issues and why it matters. (Published a month before Trump won the election.)

• Measuring the impact of post-pandemic inflation on the ultimate treat-consuming yuppie: myself.

• How tech and hiring trends are destroying the job market from the inside out. (The fellas at Hacker News had a lot to say about this one.)

10 memories on film I won’t forget

It’s always refreshing to close the X app after reading about San Francisco’s trashed, hideous, crime-filled streets to take a walk around it myself. (Kodak Ektar)

In one weekend of camping in the redwoods and taking turns reading in the hammock, the six of us finished six bottles of wine and two bottles of whiskey. (Fujifilm Superia)

My friend Alexandra and I talked a lot about modernism in a weird book club. (Shot on Ferrania Solaris, a film that expired in 1991)

I grew up near this beach, went almost every weekend, and every time I visit as an adult it’s feels as though I’m realizing how nice it is for the first time. (Ilford HP5)

On a camping trip with friends to the Sonoma coast, the boys braved the ocean water for a few frigid moments. (Fujifilm Superia 400)

Taken on my way to camp in Big Sur, where I might have been bitten by a colony of spiders. We raced down PCH in order to put up our tent in sunlight — but my boyfriend insisted that we pull off the road so I could take this picture. (Kodak Ektar)

While hut hiking through the Swiss Alps, I found vistas existed in every direction nestled within an infinity of other vistas. (Kodak Colorplus)

A manual double-exposure of my friend Alice set against the alpine hut where we spent the night. We shared a large dormitory room with an eight-month old baby who was not even the loudest sleeper of the bunch (Kodak Colorplus)

Laying hiking clothes out after a long day’s hike, overhearing Swiss couples fight about who had to take the baby. (Kodak Colorplus)

Concluding our trek, covered in dirt and sweat and having no more topics to discuss except for our need for Swiss cheese, we took “Trotti” scooters down this trail, stopping at a roadside hut to buy said cheese. On that long trip, I learned a lot about the importance of slowing down. (Kodak Colorplus)

Looking back on my 2024 through film, books, and critical rituals like sprouting French microgreens, I'm reminded that my most memorable experiences stemmed from improvised moments of slowing down. Whether I was taking a detour off PCH for the perfect shot or spending a quiet Friday night with a bowl of buttery popcorn and W.G. Sebald, I’ve learned unplanned pauses have a surprising capacity for enduring impact.

As we find ourselves navigating an online landscape increasingly saturated with the most vile of alt-right engagement bait, what grounds me (and what I hope grounds you) are the simple, nourishing things that filled this year’s memories: making bone broth from scratch, ambitiously attempting manual double exposures, and sharing a bottle of pinot noir and a copy of Intermezzo with friends beneath the redwoods.

Cheers to the moments that truly sustain us. And may we make our 2025 worth remembering.