Creatures, merry Christmas! Below please find: my year’s-best list. As always, it counts down to the best in each category, and your insouciant dancing Dragon shall trip freely between “best” like this has Greatness and if you don’t see it that’s a skill issue, and “favorite” like this is janky but I love this janky raccoon novel/film/fanfiction. Most of these categories have ten, not five, due to Bidenomics.
Books (nonfiction)
The two links with asterisks by them are also in my top five essays I wrote.
LA Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City
Meet Me By the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall
February 1933: The Winter of Literature
Metamaus (the making of Maus--a lot of insights both aesthetic and historical. The bit about the nihilist therapist is perfectly balanced between irony and transcendence.)
Max Jacob: A Life in Arts and Letters
The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision
On Friendship: One Hundred Maxims for a Chinese Prince
A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade
* Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures
* They Flew: A History of the Impossible
Books (real books)
When We Cease to Understand the World
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints
Tell Me I’m Worthless. Caveat lector, this book has some real rough gallows humor about subjects ranging from rape to bigotry, and my review indulges to a lesser extent. Read at own risk, no lifeguard on duty, etc.
Piranesi. I didn’t even really have to tilt this list with my hip to make sure that the first book I read in 2023 stayed in the #1 spot.
Your breasts are like towers
The Song of Songs: A New Translation
Also notable
A Fine Balance, Sister, Still Time to Care: What We Can Learn from the Church’s Failed Attempt to Cure Homosexuality, The Cry of the Heart: The Mystery of Suffering, Gentleman Jack: Regency Landowner, Seducer, and Secret Diarist, The Family Chao, Helena, Perpetua’s Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman, Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966 – 1996, A Prodigal Saint: Fr. John of Kronstadt and the Russian People, d, Medea, Fifth Business, The Animals in That Country, Notes of a Crocodile, Not so long ago…, American Caliph: The True Story of a Muslim Mystic, a Hollywood Epic, and the 1977 Siege of Washington, DC, St Fidgeta and Other Parodies (feuilleton forthcoming!), Greener Pastures
Movies (seen for the first time)
“Walker” (same link as above)
“Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse” (same link as immediately above)
“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”
“Bottoms.” Okay… this one I had to yank to the top of the list by main force. BUT I DID IT. God bless this dumb delight.
Also notable
“The Wolf of Snow Hollow,” “Black Widow” (the sapphic serial killer one, not the Marvel comics one), “Shock Corridor,” “Cropsey,” “Strange World” (amazing gap in quality between the visuals and the script here lol), “The 25th Hour,” “Assault on Precinct 13,” “They Cloned Tyrone,” “Cast Away,” “A Dark Song,” “Threads,” “A Simple Plan.”
Things I revisited (excluding Whit Stillman, see below)
This order is governed by a mix of how good I think the thing is, and how delighted I was to rediscover it.
“Candyman” (’92)
“Zodiac”
Beloved
Worlds to Explore: Handbook for Brownie and Junior Girl Scouts. Yes, the 1977 one. No, I was never a Girl Scout. (Try to conceal your shock.) Anyway I enjoyed the emphasis on Girl Scouts as democracy playsets, the lovely hopeful 1970s artwork, and the chance to pretend I care about knotcraft.
The Clouds, The Birds, The Frogs
“The Bride of Frankenstein.” Pretty much lives or dies on the like five minutes of the Bride’s awakening. But what a five minutes!
“The Cabinet of Dr Caligari”
Essays etc by other people
Look, I used to read this kind of thing and now I don’t. I want to praise BD McClay’s essay on being a “bad patient,” and once more laud the creepy pleasures of this “Barton Fink” fanfiction. And I want you to read this very, very long post about why a bridge is where it’s at. Includes a Catholic angle that I found immensely touching, a women-in-politics angle, and some excellent advice about journalism, by which I mean, civic life. (If all you care about is the solution to the bridge mystery, search for “Janel Forde” and you’ll get the advice even though you haven’t earned it!) Cf. St Cadoc’s bridge.
Essays by me
This is mostly just a review of They Flew, but at the end I think I get into my personal damage around miracles and visions in a way others might enjoy.
Spy Wednesday and my childhood obsession with treason (free to read if you register your email)
“The Dancing Bourgeois”: My Whit Stillman opinions… let me show you them
Reviewing Entangled Life, or, Am I a lichen?
“Three Films About Max Jacob.” A fever dream, a hallucination; a vision.
I also contributed a short reflection on St John the Beloved to this book of saint portraits.
Snout in trough
Sure, ok: This is my Amazon wish list. It’s 100% books. No guarantees, but if you do want to know what I think of a book, why not chuck that pastry in the Dragon’s mouth?
Out of the Closets and Into the Pews
I read less than usual this year, in part because I co-founded a nonprofit. We’ve got a few slogans or summaries of our mission: “We’re bringing non-straight Catholics from the margins to the front lines of evangelization and keeping the next generation from facing despair and loss of faith”; or, less specific but punchier, “Gay flourishing within Catholic obedience.” I’ll post more about this once we have a website, but if you’re intrigued, why not email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com to find out more?
Inspirational
Dylan Meconis: “Good work by everybody who made it through today without misplacing a small leopard. To those who DID misplace a small leopard, good work not misplacing a larger leopard”
New Year’s aftermath photo by Anthony Quintano and used under a Creative Commons license.
Nice long list with new categories. Always look forward to it...