Happy New Year

Looking back at 2024 while looking forward to 2025

It’s the last day of December as I write this so I guess I should stop pretending that there’s still time in 2024 and start doing the expected (anticipated, even?) retrospective of the year. The year has had its lows and lulls for sure, but I want to focus on the highs, or at least on the more positive of it.

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1. Writing…

While I’m still (forever) struggling with consistency on this platform, when I look at my archives I see an honest effort at writing and sharing my writing. I took a stab at writing about different things, at taking different directions, regardless of whether they fit under the umbrella of “crônicas” (though I guess most of them still did). In 2024 I wrote about books, about history and history-writing (and the humanities at large), about memories, and even took a stab at fiction. I could dissect the problems with each and every one of the texts I shared in the past year (believe me, no one criticizes me more than I do), but I come now to feel like they’re all a little bit of me, bumps and all, and at the end of the day (or of the year), what matters to me is that I took the risk and shared them with you. And I don’t like to talk about numbers, because those are not the reason why I’m here, but I do like to consider how each was received—and there were some expected responses and some surprises. I guess that’s been one of the fun things about writing these personal thoughts to a public audience: you never really know what will hit and how.

For 2025, I don’t promise more frequent posts, but I certainly want to be more mindful of being (or at least trying to be) more consistent. I’ve come to realize I really enjoy writing longer posts with a little more meat on their bones, a spark of the carefully nourished researcher that will always live in me, but I definitely do not want to turn Juliana, cronista into Juliana, academic. Perhaps the way forward lies, like most things in life, in a balance between all these different genres and formats I explored this past year, and I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

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2. …and reading…

This morning, I just finished my 82^nd book of the year. That’s a lot, but this number is in no small part due to the fact that, more often than not, I read books on the shorter side (according to Storygraph, 65 of these books had fewer than 300 pages). To still consider the quantitative side, before moving to the qualitative, 32 of the 81 fall within the “women in translation” tag, a slight increase over the 29/80 that I registered last year, and mostly new-to-me authors.

If 2023 was the year when I decided that horror could be a genre possibility for me, 2024 was the year of being surprised by memoirs, some of which have even shown up here and there: Nastassja Martin’s In the Eye of the Wild, Nona Fernandéz’s Voyager (after her Space Invaders last year, she might be gaining space as one of my favorites), Annie Ernaux’s Passion Simple in French, Ágota Kristóf’s The Illiterate, Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters (big up to Kate from A Narrative of Their Own for reminding me of my brief college-era obsession with the Beats), and the surprisingly hilarious duology of Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. And the year of diving into essayistic non-fiction, starting with Kate Briggs’ This Little Art, and my newly rekindled desire to read to learn.

That is not to say that it was all flowers. Even as I’ve come to develop a pretty decent nose for books that I will like, sometimes I end up reading something that doesn’t click. And it has happened. I mean, I wouldn’t trust someone who read over 10 books and loved all of them, to be very honest. Still, I am pleased to be able to say that, despite this, I continue a streak of finishing novels regardless of how much they annoy me—and unfortunately this year had two of these, both acclaimed in their respective niches: Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch and Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (the latter you may now know is the one picture in and behind the reading flop discussed on this post). I guess you could say I’m not their audience, and that is perfectly fine. It happens. Not everything is ever perfect.

The end of the year always brings this need for creating the top of the tops, lists of the best of the best, and surely enough I have succumbed to this feeling too. But I’m giving it a twist this year, inspired by a post on Instagram by sitting.wishing.reading: so here’s a list of 10 books that have stayed with me from 2024.

1. Nastassja Martin, In the Eye of the Wild (trans. from French by Sophie R. Lewis)

2. Elsa Morante, Lies and Sorcery (trans. from Italian by Jenny McPhee)

3. Sheila Heti, Motherhood

4. Ágota Kristóf, The Illiterate (trans. from French by Nina Bogin)

5. Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

6. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

7. Bruna Dantas Lobato, Blue Light Hours

8. Ia Genberg, The Details (trans. from Swedish by Kira Josefsson)

9. Alba de Céspedes, Forbidden Notebook (trans. from Italian by Ann Goldstein)

10. James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

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3. …and everything else

In late November, I began seeing people already compiling their best of 2024 lists, which bugged me. As I shared in the Notes, it seems to me that this preemptive conclusion of 2024 with a whole month to spare was wasteful, a way to rush headfirst into a future that is not yet here and doesn’t have to be. This is not a personal judgment of any kind—I used to be that person, and I think I still am a little bit. But as everyone did balances of how the year went with four weeks still of it to go, I just wanted to make sure I held space for surprises, for December to be its own month like all others before it, and not just a prolonged conclusion to the year.

medieval.juliana

A post shared by @medieval.juliana

And so I did. I’ve played video games with Life Associate and we have started new ones without feeling rushed to finish them before the end of the year. I took some walks, used one day I had to run some errands to take myself to a coffee shop reading date, and walked quite some long blocks. I discovered a new hobby as I took up crocheting thanks to a The Woobles kit and have just purchased three skeins of yarn that now wait to be turned into beginner projects I can’t wait to jump into. I wrote one of my favorite posts of the year for this space and read three of the books that made it into the list above.

I’m in a very different place this 31^st than I was a year ago. With a lot more questions and doubts, but a lot less fear about confronting them. And that’s all I really wanted for 2024.

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4. (and also)

In for 2025:

• sticking to hobbies

• yoga (almost) every day

• asking questions

• embracing the imperfections

• moisturizer

• sitting with discomfort

Out for 2025:

• giving up

• waiting for answers

• expecting perfection

• bad posture

• avoiding difficult conversations

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5. Finally, a Women In Translation wrap-up

• Marianne Fritz, The Weight of Things (Austrian; trans. from German by Adrian Nathan West)

• Nastassja Martin, In the Eye of the Wild (French; trans. from French by Sophie R. Lewis)

• Balsam Karam, The Singularity (Swedish; trans. from Swedish by Saskia Vogel)

• Yoko Tawada, The Emissary (Japanese; trans. from Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani)

• Elsa Morante, Lies and Sorcery (Italian; trans. from Italian by Jenny McPhee)

• Mariana Enríquez, Things We Lost in the Fire (Argentine; trans. from Spanish by Megan McDowell)

• Marta Orriols, Learning to Talk to Plants (Catalan; translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem)

• Scholastique Mukasonga, Our Lady of the Nile (French-Rwandan; trans. from French by Melanie Mauthner)

• Dubravka Ugrešić, Fox (Yugoslav-Croatian; trans. from Croatian by Ellen Elias- Bursać and David Williams)

• Liliana Colanzi, You Glow in the Dark (Bolivian; trans. from Spanish by Chris Andrews)

• Olga Ravn, My Work (Danish; trans. from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith)

• Samira Azzam, Out of Time: The Collected Short Stories (Palestinian; trans. from Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman)

• Nona Fernández, Voyager: Constellations of Memory (Chiliean; trans. from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer)

• Natalia Ginzburg, Valentino & Sagittarius (Italian; trans. from Italian by Avril Bardoni)

• Ágota Kristóf, The Illiterate (Hungarian; trans. from French by Nina Bogin)

• Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, Animal Life (Icelandic; trans. from Icelandic by Brian FitzGibbon)

• Mercè Rodoreda, Garden by the Sea (Catalan; trans. from Catalan by Martha Tennent and Maruxa Relaño)

• Pilar Quintana, The Bitch (Colombian; trans. from Spanish by Lisa Dillman)

• Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies (Omani; trans. from Arabic by Marilyn Booth)

• Margarita García Robayo, The Delivery (Colombian; trans. from Spanish by Megan McDowell)

• María Fernanda Ampuero, Cockfight (Ecuadorian; trans. from Spanish by Frances Riddle)

• Hanne Ørstavik, Ti Amo (Norwegian; trans. from Norwegian by Martin Aitken)

• Yoko Tawada, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (Japanese; trans. from German by Susan Bernofsky)

• Mónica Ojeda, Voladoras (Ecuadorian; trans. from Spanish to Portuguese by Silvia Massimini Felix)

• Bora Chung, Your Utopia (South Koren; trans. from Korean by Anton Hur)

• Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season (Mexican; trans. from Spanish by Sophie Hughes)

• Agustina Bazterrica, Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (Argentine; trans. from Spanish by Sarah Moses)

• Enheduana, The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author (Akkadian; trans. from Old Sumerian by Sophus Helle)

• Ia Genberg, The Details (Swedish; trans. from Swedish by Kira Josefsson)

• Barbara Cassin, Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home? (French; trans. from French by Pascale-Anne Brault)

• Alba de Céspedes, Forbidden Notebook (Italian; trans. from Italian by Ann Goldstein)

• Mieko Kanai, Mild Vertigo (Japanese; trans. from Japanese by Polly Barton)

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  Thank you so much for being here and for reading Juliana, cronista. Your support means a lot to me!