End of year, end of decade

My decades do run from 0 to 9 currently.

2010-2019? A decade of unrelenting losses.

The first and worst was Brent's beloved sister Wendy. It put us into a downward spiral of Ottawa eldercare worries, adding a third country and a huge amount of added stress to our already somewhat strenuous two-country life.

Brent's dad Chuck died in 2014. My mother's dear husband Jim was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma at the end of 2014 and died a few months later after some brutal weeks in the ICU (here was my eulogy for him). Implausibly, my father died suddenly about two weeks later, and it was a "dog ate my homework situation" when for the second time that month I told my powerlifting coach that I had to go to Philadelphia in the aftermath of the death of someone very close to me. I wrote too many eulogies that year.

Time with our beloved step-grandfather Gene was always a gift, but it was tough watching him go, slowly, over the final six months of congestive heart failure. I wrote his obituary too: it's a little more than two years ago now and we are only just starting to regroup in the wake of his loss. Gene also left money that has put me in a position of financial security that I did not think I would ever achieve: I retain humility in the face of it and am very happy to be in a position now to fulfill the dream of my twenties, which was to pick up the restaurant tab for a table of friends or students without worrying about how much it costs!

Brent's mother had a series of strokes that took away first independence then movement and speech; she died in June of this year. Brent is still handling various estate business, but as a consequence of her death, he was able to spend his first Christmas at home in Cayman since he moved here in 2005.

At the same time - 2010-2019? A decade of rich simulating writing and fitness and friendship and family - a decade of enormous pleasures and privileges.

I wrote and published three books - a novel (I need to write another one of those soon or I will lose the thread!), a literary-critical memoir of my life as a reader, a short book about Jane Austen. I drafted another book that's close to done now and I had a surprise bonus book project fall into my lap as well: after Gene died, I got his and his wife's literary manuscripts, Margaret's novel The Duchess of Angus turned out to be an unsung masterpiece and will be published in a few months by Trinity University Press. See you at the San Antonio book festival in April!

I was still in the grip of triathlon at the start of the decade, had to back off training for my first Ironman the summer Wendy died, tried for it again the next summer but got horrible bronchitis after my peak training weekend and took a DNS, had a year off to regroup and then finally did really pull it off: completing IMWI in 2013 remains my proudest and most unlikely achievement!

Back problems started in a big way in 2011 and have plagued me on and off ever since; I am currently on a mix of running, yoga and swimming and am bent on continuing to regain mobility and running with less discomfort in 2020. My run coach is a voice for sanity and joy in my life, and I am extremely grateful for him and the community he has created.

I had amazing stints at the American Academy in Rome, at Balliol College, Oxford and at Reid Hall in Paris. I made friends in all three places and continue to pick up funny nice friends everywhere I go. Specially precious friends are Darren and Jane, who cared for Gene and Christine respectively in their final months. We could not have done all this without them.

Teaching continued to be one of the greatest pleasures of my life, and it was in this decade that it belatedly sunk in that the work I do as an educator is pretty certainly more important than the work I do as a writer. I was a reluctant leader in various institutional capacities, and there is a good chance I will be elected to chair the committee in 2020 that has most been driving me crazy and wiping me out over the last four months! (If I am chair I have more control over how it goes....)

I started teaching at Columbia in 2000 which means that I'm coming up on year twenty; from a professional point of view, I saw more change in the conditions of my work life from 2000 to 2009 than I did from 2010 to 2019, but really I've just been doing the same thing pretty happily since I started grad school in the mid-90s. The thought of two more decades in the same job is a little daunting, but the job changes as you age and grow, so I trust it will remain stimulating and sufficiently challenging!

I am at an interesting juncture in my professional life: there is a constant tug towards administration, but I believe that my temperament truly better fits me for quiet time alone, reading and writing and exercising and cuddling with cats. WHICH WAY WILL IT GO? Even I don't really know, though I am pretty sure that if I get the chance to back off significantly, I will take it. (But if someone asked me to be the dean of the graduate school, I would also find it hard to say no....)

My specific goals for the coming year: more consistent PT exercises, yoga and mobility work to improve baseline back functionality; work less, rest more. I really think my most important agenda for the year is to write much, much less - between fall of 2016 and now I have essentially written two books, a host of essays and introductions as well as the normal slew of work-related documents (tenure and promotion letters especially), and my brain needs a recovery period.

Brent and I will continue to live in two different countries - neither of us is movable, and having two separate establishments suits us both in many ways - but I believe we will be able to spend more time together (fostering cats while I'm in Cayman turned out to be the last piece of the puzzle, everything is better about being here now that I have lovely cats!). My own cats continue to delight me - Jose had a health scare this summer and every day I get with him now is precious.

I am certain that the new year will bring me more joy than sadness, and what else could I wish for?

Looking back

Really this is the "books I read that stuck with me this year" post (I make it by quickly skimming back through blog posts, so I'm sure I've missed things), but I do feel the need to note one painful failure for 2011 - I didn't get to the start of my projected Ironman race, due to bronchial illness stemming from ongoing lack of mastery of exercise-induced asthma, training loads and life stress. 

I am on a higher dose of asthma controller medication now, and I think I have a better handle on how to manage that particular aspect of bronchial vulnerability, but I am still overextended in a more general sense and I am not going to attempt an iron-distance triathlon in 2012, as I think I need to do more work on various building-blocks first.  If plans go as I hope, though, I'll volunteer for the inaugural NYC Ironman next August and get some kind of preferential status re: registering for a slot for the 2013 race.

On a brighter note, it is also the case that in 2011 I finished drafting the novel formerly known as The Bacchae on Morningside Heights, revised it and found a publisher; I am just now undertaking an extensive further revision/reimagining (this will make no sense to those who have not read it, but I can see now that a whole game is missing!).  I also revised the style book, and it is as of a month or so ago out with publishers again, but I have no news yet as to its fate and fortunes: books can take a long time from start to finish, a fact that horrified and appalled me when it first dawned on me many years ago but that I've had to reconcile myself to in the meantime.

I feel that I had a very good year of teaching: I was eager to be back in the classroom after an overly quiet sabbatical year in 2010, and the charms of teaching have been particularly alive to me.  The surprise for me this fall was how much I loved teaching the required MA seminar to entering graduate students in our department; I had undertaken it as a 'service' class, but it was truly as much of a pleasure as any class I have ever taught.

I have just finished reading what I think is my favorite novel of the year, Murakami's 1Q84.  Haunting, immersive, lovely! 

My other single favorite novel in the loose category of 'literary fiction,' a term I hate but that does serve to differentiate it from thrillers and young-adult dystopias and so forth, was probably Teju Cole's amazing Open City.  Others I particularly enjoyed in this sort of broad category (all newish though not all from 2011): Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child; Lydia Millet's How the Dead Dream; Vanessa Veselka's Zazen; Cody James's The Dead Beat; Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding; Emma Donogue's Room; Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad; Tayari Jones's The Silver Sparrow; Barbara Trapido's Sex and Stravinsky.  Neal Stephenson's Anathem was as immersive as 1Q84 and probably belongs in this group rather than with science fiction and fantasy below (Reamde, on the other hand, was enjoyable but forgettable).

Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods deserves a category all its own!  Another uncategorizable but excellent book: Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti's collaboration The Chairs Are Where the People Go.

Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is definitely in my top ten favorites for the year.  I also loved Lauren Beukes's Zoo City, that's another strong recommendation.

Megan Abbott's novels Bury Me Deep and The End of Everything were among the most interesting crime fiction I read all year, but there was a lot of other exceptional stuff too.  Tom Franklin's Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter; Taylor Stevens's The Informationist; Deon Meyer's Thirteen Hours and Trackers; Lawrence Block's A Drop of the Hard Stuff (which also prompted a reread of the amazing When the Sacred Ginmill Closes)

Nonfiction: John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead; Siddhartha Deb's The Beautiful and the Damned; Anna Goldsworthy's Piano Lessons; Priscilla Gilman's The Anti-Romantic Child; Sarah Bakewell's Montaigne biography; Peter Terzian's interesting little anthology Bound to Last; and (I am late to the party) Michael Lewis's Moneyball.  It was a reread, but Francis Spufford's The Child That Books Built remains one of the few books I can think of that it pains me not to have written myself.

Most prized addition to book collection, courtesy of my mother: Green's Dictionary of Slang.

Didn't read a ton of YA this year, but can definitely recommend Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking books and Catherine Fisher's Incarceron series.  Tow Ubukata's Mardock Scramble was a surprise and a delight; also very delightful was Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone.

Much enjoyed new installments in ongoing stories by Lev Grossman, Charlie Williams, Kate Atkinson.  Also: LEE CHILD!

Most perfect light reading: Doris Egan/Jane Emerson's Ivory omnibus and City of Diamond.  But I was lucky in my light reading this year, I'd have to say: I loved Mira Grant's zombie trilogy, and found the first two installments of Patrick Rothfuss's fantasy series utterly addictive.  Best zombie book was Max Brooks's World War Z, though: I couldn't get it out of my head after I read it, and kept on telling people about it at parties even when it was not suitable.

A small selection of books I reread that still speak to me very loudly (really I'm always rereading a lot for teaching- and research-related purposes): Roland Barthes's The Neutral; Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow; Bernhard's Wittgenstein's Nephew; Markson's Reader's Block; Conrad's The Secret Agent; Dostoevsky's Demons.

A few performances that especially astonished me: Stravinsky's Nightingale and other fables at BAM (and the ombromanie of Philippe Beau!); Philip Glass's Satyagraha, at the Met; and Krapp's Last Tape, with John Hurt and also at BAM.  Music from Nico Muhly and Thomas Bartlett has been an ongoing delight.  

The film that most preoccupied me: Helen Hill's The Florestine Collection, completed after her death by Paul Gailiunas. 

The TV series that I want to live in, thus recent preoccupation with fictions of alternate realities: Fringe.

I don't listen to enough new music to make good recommendations in a broad sense, but new albums from P. J. Harvey and Gillian Welch are both remarkable.

Books to look out for in 2012: Sarah Manguso's The Guardians: An Elegy; Marco Roth's Transmission; and Heidi Julavits's The Vanishers.

I probably read a better range of books in 2010, but that is because I was on sabbatical.  In 2011 my thoughts were much engaged with books I was writing and books I was teaching, most of which are not really prominently represented here.  I continue to have a deep-seated obsession, though, with Swift's Tale of a Tub...

Fifteen things

At the Millions, some things about my year in reading.

(NB I started writing a list titled "Ten things about my year in reading," only list-making has a natural tendency to escalate!")