I’ve been enjoying the Youtube channel Rewilding Jude – no, scratch that. During the very bleak days of early November, when I was flattened by Covid and political grief, I watched this guy’s videos (along with this one about the undammed Klamath River) like they could be blueprints for a survivable life. So I’m following Jude’s lead in setting goals for this year, rather than making resolutions I’ll inevitably break or choosing a theme word I’ll most likely forget. I’m keeping my favorite existing goals – read and log a hundred-some books, ride Lenny every chance I get – and adding a few new ones.

They’re not marathons, let’s be very clear on that point. I’d like to do some longer bike rides with Jeremy, taking BART or a ferry to the East and South and North Bays. I’d like to learn some good recipes for Rancho Gordo beans. I’d like to finish college algebra and start a new math course on Khan Academy. I’d like to fill at least one of the watercolor sketchbooks I got for Christmas. Of course I have work and writing goals as well, I am a serious grownup person (not really) and I do need to figure out where I can most usefully help protect the vulnerable under this authoritarian regime. But it’s our 25th wedding anniversary so what I really want is to celebrate my delightful husband and enjoy our clever, funny, kind children. I want to live as if I were already in the Good Place. I want more time with the people I love.

What Jude and the Klamath helped me to do in November was to lift up the wobbly structure of my inner life and replace its crumbling foundation of naive optimism with one of tragic hope. It’s a shame we won’t live, but then again, who does?

Hard to write about this book without spoilers, so let me just say I raved to the group chat that this deserves to be as well known as Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and a dear Goth friend got it from the library and read it and replied Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Which is the correct reaction.

One of the most spectacularly unreliable narrators I have encountered, telling an entirely different story from the one she thinks she is. So brilliantly and exquisitely done. Just read it. (NYRB Classics is about my favorite publisher these days, reprinting so many twentieth century women writers who should be incessantly praised.)

This was Katherine May’s pandemic book, a book haunted by lockdowns and mass death. Needing to feel grounded, May dug into the earth beneath her feet. Not in an ickily sentimental way – she makes it clear that Whitstable’s stone circle is modern, and that the sacred spaces of Dungeness are its WW2-era sound mirrors and Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage. She admits that her garden is a mass of weeds and that staying up late to watch meteor showers is tiring and chilly.

May’s pragmatism makes awe accessible. She learns the names of wildflowers (viper’s bugloss! Known to Australians as Salvation Jane or Paterson’s curse) and attends a class on bees. I listened to this book between drives to Rancho Viejo and bike rides to Heron’s Head, my own sacred landscapes. Big storms are coming. There’s no way out but through, and enchantment is one of the ways through.