Eucalyptus and Eucatastrophe
2024 best-of
Creatures, I’m writing this on December 24, the feast of Adam and Eve! Unofficial but traditional, like so many good things. It’s been a wild year for your dizzily dancing Dragon. I’ve spent my first year as a California girl: poppies and bird-of-paradise, fog lights and flood zones, mission churches and high schools where they dock points if you don’t use AI. Welcome to California, America’s Tomorrowland; hope you like driving.
I launched a nonprofit this year, for my sins. I’m preparing for a covenant of kinship next summer. This is my adventure, and like the great journeys of epic fantasy, it’s been in some ways an allegory, exposing everything I need to battle or befriend within my own skull. It’s also been a journey of new love not only with my partner and her family, but with the saints who help us along the way. Get you a saint friend, that’s my advice for 2025.
And I found time to read the occasional book, etc. Here are my year’s-best. As always, “best” sometimes means “favorite,” but often means, “favorite and therefore best, fight me.” Let’s do this thing. Counting down from least-best to best-best in each category. Links go to my reviews unless otherwise noted.
Books (nonfiction)
Hadley Vlahos, The In-Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life’s Final Moments
Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction
St. Oscar Romero, The Violence of Love. Excerpts from homilies. One thing that stood out to me was the depiction of conscience as an inner room: the only place of true privacy in a dictatorship; a place of freedom and moral choice. He often addresses torturers and killers directly, as their brother and friend.
Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess
Rhaina Cohen, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center
Tertullian’s Treatise on the Incarnation. Emphasizes the shock and shame of flesh.
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. Ends midsentence!
William Dalrymple, In Xanadu: A Quest
David Halperin, How to Be Gay
Books (real books)
Christopher Rowe, Telling the Map: Stories. Teach me a hymn to sing the river clean.
Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy
Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz. I note that the author commented on my post about this one! You guys should also absolutely read his polar-explorers book.
Charles Johnson, Dreamer. What’s a year without a Charles Johnson book?
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer. The outlaw of the Oranges reveals his softer side.
Movies
“Bad Influence.” The trite ending mars an otherwise tempting tale of bad pleasures, starring James Spader, I’ll always go back to that well.
“Her Smell.” Not quite a riot grrrl version of the classic rock’n’roll “My Rise and Fall,” but adjacent. That link goes to an episode of This Had Oscar Buzz. THOB is usually too chatty for me, but they liked this film so much that they stayed pretty tight; skip the first 20mins or so and you should be good. There’s a break and then they talk about the challenges the director faced in releasing the film, which I also found interesting.
“Tremors.” The Hollywood formula done to perfection. Giant worms vs. rural Americans. Hits the cultural notes (the gun-bunker couple) with a lightness no contemporary film can manage.
“Swoon.” Maybe… maybe the best Leopold and Loeb film ever made?
Revisiting
“The Last of England.” Apocalyptic 1980s collage. Only one truly great scene imho, but that scene—feat. “The Skye Boat Song”—is one of the purest representations of defeat and despair ever committed to film.
Dorothy Gilman, The Tightrope Walker
“The Blair Witch Project.” Justice for Heather, both the character and the terrific actress. In general rewatching this makes me aware of how skilled it is, how crafted. Totally deserved its viral fame.
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Stephen King, Misery. This post’s subtitle is a personal favorite.
Plautus, a whole bunch of plays, some I’ve read before and some I haven’t. STAGE PLAUTUS IN 2025 YOU COWARDS.
My writing
“Pure Pleasure”: an appreciation of John Bellairs and his fond parody of the 1960s Catholic Church… a parody we, perhaps, now inhabit, with less fondness.
“Boiling Teeth” or, What The Bonfire of the Vanities has in common with Piranesi. Bonfire just barely missed making my best-of fiction list… judge me, I deserve it, etc etc.
“An alternate history of gay liberation”
“Pastoral Practice After Fiducia Supplicans”: What does it mean to seek a blessing? Plus some companion reporting for The Pillar.
“And Pippi Longstocking picks up the two policemen by the scruff of their blue-clad necks…” My personal favorite, of everything I wrote this year, was probably this bizarre rant about household feminism/Christianity vs. the anarchic kind.
Also a Wales and England travelogue. We visited the house where Dunstan Thompson and Philip Trower lived!
By Other People
“Supreme Betrayal”: My father and his best friend started a podcast about constitutional law. I haven’t listed to all of it, but I’ll say that the second episode and the Dobbs episode are both very much worth your time if these subjects interest you at all.
Daniel Mitsui made Valentine’s cards with woodwoses (weird hairy English folk creatures).
2024 is the year Twitter slowly died for me, and I am both relieved and a bit bereft to say that nothing has replaced it. Anyway, I’ll always remember the glory days of things like Koko the Gorilla demanding a Birkin bag.
“His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day It Decided to Kill Him.” The last line of this is particularly good.
Others’ Best-Of
I always enjoy Jesse Walker’s year-end series counting down the best films from 10 years ago, then 20, etc etc. So far he’s up to the best films of 1974.
Put Out into the Deep!
The work I’ve done for Building Catholic Futures, creating workshops and educational resources to help Catholic priests, educators, parents etc etc serve and share the Gospel with lgbt+ people, is some of the most intellectually-challenging and exciting stuff I’ve ever done. I’m so grateful for Keith as a collaborator. We come from very different experiences of what it means to be “gay and Catholic,” and I think that difference helps us speak from something closer to the heart of the Church, rather than solely from our own longings, fears, formation, and confirmation bias.
If this project interests you, why not sign up for our newsletter via the “Keep in Touch” link at the bottom of the page? It’s weekly, with updates on our work and snapshots of the intersections of queer and Catholic life. If you’d like a taste, try this post about the rosary of a queer Catholic poet or this one about Pope Francis’s letter on renewing the study of history. If you’re in education, take a look at our call for beta-testers for one of our classroom resources. And if you’re interested in an introduction to what we do, the diligent Dragon can offer posts on a BCF Mission Week and on the people we serve.
Sooeeeeeeee, pig pig pig pig!
This is my Amazon wish list. As always, it is only books. As always, no promises, but if you do want to read my thoughts about one of these books, try tossing it into my maw!
Maybe 2025 Is the Year I Get Into…
Claude McKay
Warren Zevon
The Gay Christian Reading Challenge
How’d you do? I got eight… not quite enough for “while Wilde is on mine.”
Now Playing
“It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fishmen.” I’m sorry, I get this stuck in my head once a year for obvious reasons and now so will you. They speak in guttural croaks and their presence provokes a profound desire to flee!
“Strange Tree, California, USA” photo by “l0da.ralta,” via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license. (It’s a eucalyptus.)