2021 was an extremely mixed year for me: I graduated from my MA programme with a Distinction, but I also experienced a couple of bereavements that hit me very hard. At the very end of the year I adopted my beautiful cat, who continues to be a source of joy, though I’ve never had to deal with this many dead rodents before, so that’s been a fun new challenge.
2022 was, on the whole, quieter; the highs weren’t as high, the lows weren’t as low. A lot of plans fell through. I applied for PhD funding but didn’t get it, so that’s been indefinitely put on hold. I intended to relocate back closer to my family, but the prohibitive rental market put paid to that. I started and then quit a job (technically I had already been doing the job for a while before that, but I accepted a permanent contract at the job and then quit). Still, there have been a few small accomplishments that are worth mentioning, as well as several things I’ve enjoyed a lot over the course of the year which I’d like to talk about.
Writing
I didn’t really have a big writing project last year—in 2021 I had my dissertation, and two years before that I wrote a book, so maybe every other year is fallow for me? That said, I did keep up my regular writing practice, which is usually 500 words a day, six days a week. A bit of quick maths tells me that amounts to 156000+ words in a year*, which is definitely novel-length, and a relatively hefty one at that. A huge amount of those words, though, are film reviews which go up on my Letterboxd page. While of course this “counts” as writing, maybe it’s a distraction from really focusing on a more personal or long-term project which might require a bit more stamina or depth. That’s why, for 2023, I’ve decided to put the film reviews on indefinite hiatus (probably not for the whole year, but that’s TBD) while I work on some other ideas. Since making that decision, I’ve already made significant progress on a long short story which has been patiently waiting among my drafts for a while, and I’m feeling very positive about it… though I kind of miss my film reviews. Maybe I can somehow make time for both!
Of course, I did do NaPo again last year. I can’t remember how many years I’ve now being doing it in a row, but it’s a really enjoyable tradition for me, even if I barely write any poetry for the rest of the year these days
*Nowhere near an exact figure, because in April I usually set a goal of one poem a day rather than the 500 words (and they can vary hugely in length), but also, I often write much more than 500 words. So who knows!
Reading
I took on a big reading project last year, which was to read Ulysses by Bloomsday. I couldn’t find an edition I really liked, that was both readable (decent paper and print size) but also had good annotations, so I actually ended up reading most of it on genius.com—it’s all on there, since it’s out of copyright in the US! There are user-generated annotations of wildly varying quality, and honestly I think that trying to read them all ended up slowing me down and disrupting my flow. I also read two readers’ guides concurrently, and I think that I should have stuck to just focusing on the text and then filling in the gaps with the readers’ guides rather than using the heavily annotated version. Still, I can definitely say that I’ve read Ulysses, which at one point in my life I really never thought I would!
While that took up quite a bit of my reading time in the first half of the year, I did still exceed my reading goal on Goodreads, for the second time in two years. I read 50 in 2021 and 59 in 2022, which is a huge leap from where I was for several years before, when I really lost my mojo for reading for a long time (a combination of factors played into that). I should say that that count included audiobooks, rereads and graphic novels/TPBs, but as far as I’m concerned it’s all essentially reading. I love audiobooks, and some of my favourite “reading” experiences have been listening to an Elizabeth Gaskell audiobook on a long walk. I find that I usually have just as much retention of things I’ve listened to as things I’ve read—sure, it’s possible to get distracted, but I am entirely capable of getting distracted while trying to read too, or of not doing it because I don’t have time, or because the light isn’t good enough in my room (my clip-on lamp broke!), or whatever. I don’t think I listen to audiobooks at the expense of physically reading; I think they just increase the amount of time I can devote to enjoying literature.
Apart from Ulysses, my biggest discovery last year was Theodore Sturgeon. I had previously known the name, but he was just one of many Golden Age or adjacent science fiction writers I’d never read (I think Heinlein was pretty much the only one I had). I vaguely knew that he was the model for Kilgore Trout, which I think gave me a distorted view of him. On looking into it a bit more, I think Vonnegut mostly took the piscine name and the fact that Sturgeon was down on his luck when the two men met—nothing, really, about his writing style or who he was as a person. Thanks, again, to audiobooks, I made my way through most of his bibliography—everything that’s on the Audible Plus catalogue, which includes Some of your Blood (my baptism by fire to his writing), Venus Plus X, More Than Human and To Marry Medusa. I was completely taken aback by how ahead of his time he was, both in his enlightened attitudes towards sex and gender (years before Left Hand of Darkness!) and his ideas.
I review pretty much everything I read/listen to here on Goodreads.
Language learning
As I’ve blogged about a couple of times, I decided to start learning Irish this year. I made a lot of progress! According to Duolingo’s stats, I was in the top 1% of learners for the year. I’ve been in the Diamond league basically forever (can’t ever quite seem to make that top three in the semi-finals or whatever it is). At time of writing I have nearly hit a streak of 365 days!
Of course, Duolingo is all very well, but by itself it’s not the best way to learn. I also completed the Dublin City University online courses (available on FutureLearn) up to 104. I’ve been taking a break from them for the last couple of months because they ended up being quite a significant time commitment, and I was struggling to keep up, but I definitely hope to continue with them in the not-too-distant.
Gaming
I have to admit I didn’t play a ton of games last year, and most of what I did play wasn’t new: I completed The Outer Worlds around the start of the year, which I enjoyed a lot—I’d describe it as Fallout in space, but with more of an overt anti-capitalist message, which ticks a lot of boxes for me. I’d also say that the companion NPCs are better-developed than in Fallout, on the whole (at least in my experience/memory—the only game in the series I actually completed was F:NV). While it obviously did attract an audience, I feel like it flew under the radar more than it deserved, though a sequel has been announced so I’m looking forward to that.
For most of the year, most of my gaming hours were sunk into Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. While I enjoyed the experience of playing it at the time, I have to say that the story hasn’t really stuck with me that much. It was my first time playing an AC game (apart from once attempting to play the first one on a janky PC, years ago, and giving up), and I know it was a bit of a departure for the series, moving closer to an RPG format than previous entries. Still, it’s ridiculously overstuffed with sidequests, sometimes tiresome procedurally generated ones, which makes it start to feel a bit repetitive after a while. I couldn’t help but compare it unfavourably to HZD, which I nearly platinumed (everything except a couple of dummies I didn’t knock over) and which I think has an excellent storyline and compelling gameplay. That said, there were some subplots and relationships I really liked, especially the Silver Islands storyline with Kyra, and anything involving Alcibiades. The voice acting is very variable, though—it feels like some of the actors barely understand the lines they’re delivering, and the emphasis is pretty consistently off.
To bookend the year (I think I started this right at the end of 2022, anyway—maybe it was right at the beginning of 2023? Oh well), another Fallout-adjacent game, Pentiment (which shares a director, Josh Sawyer, with F:NV). This game is clearly an immense labour of love, heavily researched and steeped in literary references; it only exists because of the opportunities afforded by digital distribution and a service like GamePass, which allows for niche projects like this to be funded.
Viewing
I won’t go into too much detail here, as I’m planning a podcast episode or two about my favourites of 2022 in the near future. I’ve already blogged about House of the Dragon and The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself, but other discoveries this year for me included The Orville, which I never expected to like but found myself totally won over by (I should say I skipped season one, which is supposedly the weakest). Another was Hacks, which had somehow flown under my radar but has rapidly become a favourite. I also binged pretty much all of Work In Progress late in the year, as well as finally watching The Comeback. The TV standout, though, was probably Severance—I can’t say enough good things about it: it functions as a compelling drama, an inspired sci-fi and a commentary on workplace culture and exploitation.
I have a list on Letterboxd ranking all the 2022 movies I’ve watched so far, as well as pretty in-depth reviews for almost everything I watch (plus that podcast episode I mentioned), so I won’t repeat myself here. I’ll just say that it was a great year for animation: The House, Turning Red and The Sea Beast were all standouts this year. Like everyone else, I really enjoyed Everything Everywhere All At Once (though maybe not as much as everyone else); I enjoyed 3000 Years of Longing and Blonde much more than most people.
I’m going to wrap this post up now so I can publish it while it’s still January (honestly, I forgot about it for a little while and it sat half-finished in my drafts—whoops!). 2023 looks set to be a year full of changes, and I’m excited to see what’s around the corner. Have a good one!
Panicky in the UK 