Ed. note: Now, even more than last year, it’s easy to believe that literally every single thing on this earth is broken, awful, and/or doomed. But it’s not true. Some things (not all, but some!) are good. Here are a few of the things that gave us hope, lifted our spirits, and gave us a more realistic—that is, marginally less doomy—perspective.
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And the People of LWON, on this day, are taking a break. They will be back, they promise, rarin’ to go, on Friday. Please come back.
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Photo: By Markus Koljonen (Dilaudid) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4270871
Jenny: It’s the first full year without my dad, which makes my heart hurt. And then one of my dogs, Geddy, goes and dies. Well, he got hurt first, and there was a lot of pain, and he was kind of old and not a great candidate for surgery, and we tried to manage his pain but it didn’t work, and we had to make one of those horrible decisions. So my heart hurts even more than it did. My dad always used to ask about my dogs. That was really the only line between them. But he knew how much I loved them, and I know he’d be sad that we lost one. My other dog has let me bury my face in his sweet-smelling fur when I’m hurting inside over my dad and about Geddy. Dogs are so sweet that way. Mourning my dad and my dog are different but the same. They hit the same place in my heart, even if one was a monumental person in my life and one was a furry couch potato who made me laugh and was a daily friend. I miss them both in visceral ways and in subtle ones. The holidays don’t really change anything in this for me. Sad is sad, with or without Xmas cookies. Cold, gray weather, though, that can exacerbate the sadness for sure. I’ll be better when the sun is on my face again.
Cameron: This is a memory from years ago, but the year after my dad died the rest of us went to Kauai for Christmas, thinking it would be fun to start a new tradition, or at least be less reminded of his absence. I think I am the only person in the world who does not have happy, golden memories of Kauai. It was horrible. (The trip, that is. I know Kauai is a lovely place. I just shouldn’t have been there stumbling around with my family, all of us wearing grief goggles.)
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Something funny happened during the time that I spent writing my book: I stopped reading for pleasure. Not because I wanted to, but because I was reading so much for research that reading began to feel like work. But then my book came out, and I traveled around the country giving book talks at lovely bookstores and the whole experience made me fall back in love with reading.
Since then, I’ve been keeping track of the books I read (as well as a list of the books I want to read next), and the fun part about it is that I can look back on the year and remember what I read.
Here are my highlights from 2024. As of December 19, I’ve read 40 books, and I’m partway through several others that I’ll probably finish before the new year. These books weren’t necessarily published in 2024, that’s just when I happened to read them. They are listed in the order that I read them. I loved them all, and don’t have a clear favorite among them.
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Book #2 of 2024. I picked this one for my book club before I’d read it (based on how much I’d liked Nguyen’s memoir, “A Man of Two Faces”) and there was a lot to talk about. It’s a thought-provoking story about the Vietnam War told through the lens of a communist double agent. There are so many layers here. There’s the stories of refugees, which Nguyen has persuasively argued must be understood as war stories; as well as explorations of identity, love, Hollywood’s propaganda machine, friendship and betrayal. Nguyen is a tremendous writer and I will read anything he writes. Highly, highly recommended. The book was also made into an HBO mini series, which is also quite good, though can be hard to watch. If you’re going to watch, read the book first.
Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones
Book #17. I loved this memoir so much. The writing is revelatory and honest. Cooper Jones was born without a sacrum, a condition that caused her to be extremely short, walk with a wobble and have chronic pain. The book recounts what it’s like to move through the world in a body that our society wasn’t built for and her internal struggle dealing with the injustices she’s encountered. This is a beautiful narrative of revelation. Yes, things happen in the book — she has a son and travels around the world. But the real movement in this story happens internally, as we witness a transformation within Cooper Jones as she reshapes her view of herself and her interactions with others. This publicity synopsis puts it well: “Her memoir begins at the point when, challenged on the ethics of giving birth to disabled children—and on the value of her own life—Cooper Jones realizes she has allowed the discomfort of others to limit her choices.” I listened to the audio version, read by the author, who makes it feel really intimate. Also, be forewarned: this book will make you want to see Beyonce in concert. I highly recommend this book to anyone writing a memoir, because it’s a master class.
My Ántonia by Willa Cather
Book #23 WOW! This beautiful novel really earns its status a classic. The writing is absolutely gorgeous. The story takes place mostly in Nebraska and follows Jim Burden, a young orphan boy from Virginia who is sent to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. On the train ride there, Jim meets Antonia and her family, who are immigrating from Bohemia. He and Antonia form a lifelong friendship even as their lives take different paths. The book is rich with sense of place, friendship, and the hardships of immigrant life on the prairie. The ending is a perfect — the final paragraph a masterpiece.
Absolution by Alice McDermott
Book#29 When I posted that I’d hated The Women by Kristin Hannah (such horrible writing, and a ridiculous plot) but wanted to love it so much because the topic —American nurses who served in the Vietnam War — was so interesting, several people told me that this was a much better take on a similar subject. The novel follows two women who are in Saigon in the early 1960s with their husbands working in country to for oil companies and other American interests. It’s a layered exploration of white savior complex that asks what it means to do good and who really benefits. The narrative is so well constructed and rich, and it gets deeper and deeper as it goes. Highly recommend.
Wellness by Nathan Hill
Book #30 I was thrilled to discover that my book club’s pick in September was a novel exploring some of my favorite topics — placebos, uncertainty and the power of belief. It’s also about marriage, the stories we tell, and the absurdity of the wellness industry. I loved Hill’s writing too, enough so that I went on to read his first novel Nix, which I didn’t like as much.
James by Percival Everett
Book #39 There’s a reason this novel is on so many best of the year lists. It’s a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, a runaway slave who becomes Huck’s friend. The character development is superb as is the novel’s exploration of racism, slavery and code switching. It also delves into the power of reading and books. I will be picking this for my book club this year, unless someone else in our club beats me to it.
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Image: Dall-e’s ridiculous, incompetent attempt to create an image of me reading in my office chair.
Here’s some moss I saw on a recent walk along the Thames River, west of London. The Thames itself was too high to walk where my traveling companion and I had planned – the trail was underwater, and so were lots of fields and the meadow in the background of this photo, where a woman we encountered had hoped to walk her dog. Everyone in the area was walking their dogs on the streets that week.
I love to see moss. That’s why I took the picture. Also, I can never remember what moss is.
Is moss a plant or…some other thing? Classifying things is hard. What about fungus? Animal, vegetable, or mineral? The answer is often “it depends”–and people have answered these questions in different ways at different times. Is zucchini a fruit or a vegetable? Well, are you interested in its botanical or culinary function? Is whale a fish or mammal? The answer was a different a few centuries ago than it is now. And a lot has changed about the classification of life since I learned it in school.
But on moss, the internet tells me, we are clear. A moss is a plant. A funny little plant with spores and no roots. A beautiful plant that looks soft like a carpet. A plant that can survive dry spells by drying itself out. A plant that grew happily on the bridge over this stream–this stream that is currently just another part of a meadow, or is it a lake, or is it a river. Ask at different times and you’ll get a different answer.
Photo: Helen Fields, obviously
As I was researching and writing DOG SMART, trying to understand what it means to think like a dog and experience the world as a dog, I had an epiphany of sorts: Dogs around the world wandering the streets—the “village” dogs you are bound to see roaming here and there, often with a few pals, if you travel outside of the Western world—are living a legitimate life for dogs. In fact, I imagine they are very much like the proto-dog who, thousands of years ago, learned to tolerate our human ancestors just enough to take advantage of them and get what they needed (nibbles at the trash heap, maybe a handout or two, even shelter in an unseen corner of a dwelling) while staying at the periphery of the peopled spaces. Those becoming the most tolerant of their two-legged co-residents, of course, would have had the chance to be healthier and longer lived, with more successful reproduction, thus moving the needle on domestication and the pathway to our beloved pets.
So even if that pet life is luxurious by comparison, a dog’s life doesn’t have to be the one we provide. Why do we see those “unhomed” dogs’ experience as illegitimate, unacceptable, or just plain wrong? It looks hard, I’ll give us that, and it doesn’t match what we want for the animals, what we think they need. And street dogs can be problematic when they carry/spread disease or bite kids or displace wild animals. But those skinny, itchy, wary pups are, as I like to say, dogs uninterrupted, dogs doing all the things dogs want to do naturally with no one pulling them back. These are animals thinking for themselves and making choices, doing what they must to survive, rolling and humping and barking when the need arises or the mood strikes.
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This post ran back in 2018 and digging it up was another act unearthing oneself, something I end up doing when rummaging in my car, when I clean my desk. Our own lives are archaeology. Put a trowel in your hand and go through your past. Bounce ground penetrating radar through your heart. See what you find.
We were walking through meadows of dry grass on our way to a friend’s house when I stopped with my gal in a lone ponderosa grove where I once lived. I showed her what had been my porch and the place where I had a wood stove, all of it gone now. My front door had been a flap of canvas that on summer nights I’d leave open to let in the stars and the evening perfumes.
It was a tipi, about 20 feet across, and I had been the sole resident of these pastureland meadows just off the dirt track of County Road 1, Ouray County, Colorado. The road is now paved, a few houses gone up, golf course across the way. My tenure, almost 30 years ago, was turning into archaeology.
Do you ever go back to where you grew up and see how time has treated you? Decades later, you look up at the second story bedroom window you used to climb through when everyone else was asleep. Or the place you had a baby in your arms, rocking it gently night after night. This is a form of archaeology, unearthing physical recollections, reassembling your history. Your memories are the artifacts. The place brings them back together.
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I’ve suffered from migraines my whole adult life—two day-long affairs that I would slog through with an unwise amount of cumulative Advil. Until, that is, a neurologist offered me a calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP)-inhibitor, the first new pain treatment in decades. It’s solved the problem with a decisiveness I would never have thought possible.
For chronic pain sufferers, there has yet to be an equivalent. Addressing Ottawa’s premier parliamentarians’ science lecture, Bacon & Eggheads, McGill University’s Dr. Jeff Mogil explained that everyone with chronic pain has nerve damage or inflammation somewhere, but the pain itself seems activated by psychological factors—catastrophizing, perseverating, depression and anxiety.
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