I rang in 2024 the same way I rang in 2023 – on my parents’ couch, watching the ball drop on TV with my mom. It was an exceptionally uneventful year for me personally, with most of my time spent either in bed or on the couch. I had plenty of time to read and watch movies and TV, plus appreciate some small creature comforts. Here’s what made my year a little bit better, in no particular order:
Movies
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986)
I loved this movie when I watched in high school in my friend’s basement and I loved it even more this past year when I watched it after binging the entire original series. The plot is a little convoluted, but basically the Enterprise crew have to go back in time to 1980’s San Francisco and kidnap a humpback whale in order to save the world. The Wrath of Khan is a great movie, but The Voyage Home is everything I love about Star Trek (flimsy plotting in service of an interesting concept, weird acting choices, compelling dialogue, bold costumes, accidental homoeroticism, Mr. Spock. The only thing missing is an alien planet made out of styrofoam.)
Joe Pera: Slow and Steady, dir. Marty Schousboe (2023)
I never know if an hour long comedy special counts as a movie or not, but whatever, it’s listed on letterboxd so I’m putting it in this category. Joe Pera is one of my favorite comedians of all time, and I mourn the cancellation of his Adult Swim show, Joe Pera Talks With You, every day. His first special, released for free on Youtube, is indeed slow; not just Pera’s delivery, but the jokes themselves, which tend to unfurl over the course of several minutes, building in surprising and delightful directions. The show made me laugh harder than I had in a long time, and left me feeling warm.
What a Way to Go!, dir. J. Lee Thompson (1964)
This movie has possibly the most stacked cast of the 60’s: Shirley MacLaine, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Dean Martin, Gene Kelly, Bob Cummings, Dick Van Dyke, PLUS the most divine costumes by none other than Edith Head!! It’s a bananas movie about a woman whose four husbands become tragically rich after marrying her, bringing more misery with every million dollars, then dying in bizarre accidents. The jokes often fall flat (largely a pacing and editing issue) but the production design is so delicious it doesn’t matter. Just watch this mid-movie costume sequence (designed as a spoof of big studio films) to see what I mean.
Mikey and Nicky, dir. Elaine May (1976)
It’s hard to talk about what makes this movie great without spoiling it. Nick (John Cassavetes), a small-time mobster, is convinced his boss has ordered a hit on him and calls his childhood friend Mikey (Peter Falk) for help and the two spend a night roaming the streets of Philly together. Cassavetes and Falk are unsurprisingly excellent together, and Elaine May knew exactly how to make their performances shine. It’s the kind of movie that makes you stare at your dark TV screen without moving for a while after it ends.
A shit ton of noirs
I went on a real film noir kick this year. I love the quick, stylized dialogue, the high stakes, the seedy characters, the chiaroscuro lighting. They’re formulaic but not predictable, and often technically excellent. It’s a genre that I find rewarding to watch broadly, as the movies are all on some level in conversation with each other. Some highlights of the year included In a Lonely Place, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder My Sweet, and The Big Sleep (duh).
Television
Reservation Dogs
It’s rare to find a comedy that actually makes you laugh out loud, and rarer still to find one that so expertly balances that comedy with moments of darkness and sincerity. Reservation Dogs has a killer ensemble cast that expands every season, with its scope widening to include a fuller picture of several generations, all haunted by similar cycles of grief, and all finding resilience in their own ways. Plus, I am a sucker for heists and shenanigans, aka much of the plot involving the four central teenage characters.
Jeopardy!
Despite airing every weeknight since before I was born, I’d never watched Jeopardy at all until about a year and a half ago, when my sister and I watched the Pluto TV Jeopardy channel for a few hours a night one week in the summer. It eventually became a favorite habit of mine while more-or-less housebound in Philly over a lonely autumn. Without a regular routine, and alone in my house for hours on end, having something to do every night at 7:00 exactly1 added some much needed (if meager) structure to my time. Maybe next year I’ll get into soaps.
(Sidenote: fuck Ken Jennings for crossing a picket line to film during the WGA strike, and shoutout to all the Tournament of Champions contestants who refused to do so.)
Star Trek (The Original Series)
I talked about The Voyage Home already, but Star Trek deserves its own listing under TV. I’d seen a good handful of episodes already, mostly with my family when I was a teenager, but I’d never sat down and watched the whole thing from start to finish. It’s a riveting blend of some of the best and worst episodes of television ever made. The writing is at times deeply flawed – a fascinating reflection of 1960s white male progressivism – but always unafraid to delve into the philosophical and political. Not to mention the production design is constant proof of how much you can achieve with two dollars, colorful lighting, and a dream.
Fellow Travelers
I haven’t actually watched the last few episodes yet, but Fellow Travelers is like television made in a lab to appeal to me specifically: doomed romance, multiple timelines, McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare, queer people in varying degrees of repression, flirtation via reciting poetry. AND it features some of the worst old age makeup ever put on television!? Huge accomplishments all around. That said, it’s always risky to praise something you haven’t finished, so I reserve the right to take back my recommendation until I reach the finale.
Books
Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin
I mostly read ebooks from the library this year, and this was the only one that I went and bought a hard copy of after I finished it, as well as preordering Emily Austin’s next book. Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead is a darkly funny novel about a deeply anxious, death-obsessed atheist lesbian who accidentally gets a job at a Catholic church. Austin deals with a lot of the same themes I’ve been chewing on in my own fiction, and I kept thinking back to this book for weeks after I put it down. It’s also some of the most insightful writing about mental illness I’ve ever encountered, perfectly portraying the weird patterns you can fall into, the impossible-to-explain bad decisions that slowly fuck up your life, and the near-Sisyphean task of pulling yourself back out again.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
I usually try not to be annoying about things I’m reading, but I did send screenshots of some passages of this book to several friends because they so perfectly captured feelings I’d been struggling to articulate about early moments of the pandemic. In 2014, Emily St. John Mandel published Station Eleven, a novel about a Shakespeare troupe performing in a post-apocalyptic, pandemic ravaged society. In 2020, HBO was in the midst of shooting a TV adaptation of the book when Covid hit. In Sea of Tranquility, Mandel weaves together stories of different pandemics throughout history and into the future. She’s clearly reflecting on her own experiences – one of the characters is a writer whose novel about a pandemic is newly popular at the beginning of 2020 – but the story is speculative fiction, with much of the plot revolving around time travel. It’s a beautifully written, deeply compelling story that I couldn’t put down.
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib
I loved Hanif Abdurraqib’s poetry collection A Fortune for Your Disaster when I read it in 2021 (I copied the last poem out by hand and taped it to my wall), so it’s no surprise that They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill was also a personal favorite. Many of the essays in the collection are about music, and Abdurraqib has the powerful ability to make me invested in bands I’ve never really cared about while getting me to think more deeply about the ones I already love. It helps that we have some of the same favorite artists – The Wonder Years and Nina Simone and Bruce Springsteen – but it doesn’t really matter. Some of the essays that stuck with me the most were about singers I’d never listened to or sports stars whose careers I knew next to nothing about. Abdurraqib is a beautiful writer, and while his prose is simple and straightforward, you can always tell it was written by a poet.
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
Minor Detail got some press attention earlier in the year when its German translation was scheduled to win the LiBeraturpreis Award only for the ceremony to be cancelled because of the genocide in Gaza. The response from other writers, readers, and publishers was what brought the book to my attention in the first place and I assume I’m not the only one – there was a long wait to check the ebook out from the library. Minor Detail is a short, haunting novel based on the true story of a Bedouin-Palestinian woman who was raped and murdered by Israeli soldiers in 1949. It’s told in two parts, first following one of the soldiers responsible and then shifting focus to a modern day Palestinian woman who becomes obsessed with the crime when she finds out it happened on her birthday. Shibli’s sparse prose is as beautiful as it is disturbing. She keeps her characters at arms length, describing their actions and forcing the reader to assume their emotions. It is a stunningly good piece of writing.
Bad Cree by Jessica Johns
Most horror I’ve encountered explores the psychology of isolation – part of the effective destruction of the protagonist lies in separating them from any external support. In Bad Cree, Mackenzie, whose dreams are starting to leak into her reality, confronts her haunting by returning to the Alberta reservation where she grew up and seeking help from her mother, sister, cousins, and aunts. Her family members in turn look to their broader community for advice and information. It’s a huge shift from the typical white ghost story; as Mackenzie sinks further into supernatural danger, her community expands, and she reconnects with family members she hasn’t spoken to in years. Johns crafts an incredibly effective story, and her choices made me rethink what makes horror work in the first place and what tropes and structures I’ve assumed were necessary but might actually just be familiar.
All six of Jane Austen’s novels
I think it’s good for the soul to have a real Jane Austen Moment at least once in your life. I had a major Pride and Prejudice Moment a few years ago, watching the 2005 movie over and over and listening to the audiobook at my temp job. For a long time I assumed that Austen’s books were either dry old classics or silly, empty romances – in reality, they’re neither. They’re sharply funny social commentaries, with deeply drawn characters and (yes) swoon-worthy romances. But Austen’s women aren’t just interested in marriage for love; it’s also a necessary financial and social move, and she doesn’t shy away from showing how complicated that is to navigate and how ugly some pragmatic marriages can become. I read through her entire catalog from August to October, and found it the most rewarding reading experience of my year.
Miscellaneous joys
Salted orange juice & seltzer
Since being put on a high sodium diet for my POTS, I quickly discovered that there is only so much salt you can add to your food before your taste buds protest. I spent some time early in the year trying different brands of commercial sports drinks and powders (all varying degrees of disgusting) before I just started making my own salty concoctions. As it turns out, a 12-16 ounce glass of orange juice is the perfect combination of acidic and sweet to mask a scant quarter teaspoon of table salt. (Lemonade also works well. Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi does not.) Topping the glass with seltzer improves the taste of a cheap juice brand, and makes the whole thing feel a little fancy. Or, if you're feeling extra fun and funky, you can make what I call a dining hall mimosa and mix your orange juice with Sprite, something I did often in college where the juice was weirdly thin and bland, and needed all the extra help it could get. Regardless of whether you have POTS or not (the salt can obviously be omitted), a little sparkling orange juice is just delicious.
Scented candles
Okay, a kind of no, duh statement, but scented candles are one of my favorite little luxuries. Even a cheap one can improve your quality of life for a few hours and make your house feel cozier. I’ve particularly enjoyed Paddywax’s Apothecary Vetiver + Cardamom and Near & Native’s Black Fig.
Bar shampoo
For my birthday this year, my parents gave me a box of nice local bath products, including a bar of Pine Tar Shampoo from Prospect Harbor Soap Company. I’d never used shampoo in bar form before, and was instantly converted. It smells amazing, lasts forever, makes my hair beautifully soft, and there’s something wonderfully illicit about the feeling of rubbing a bar of soap directly on your scalp. (Or maybe that’s just me, neurotic rule follower that I am.) The main draw, though, is that the whole thing is plastic free and locally made – I linked the one I have, and though I recommend it, I’d seek out my local farmers market or granola-y co-op rather than ordering online, which is efficient but kind of defeats the environmentally friendly part.
The Mavety Sweater Pattern by Wavelengths Crochet
I crocheted four sweaters and three vests this year, and the Mavety Sweater was my favorite pattern I followed. It’s made with a bulky yarn so it works up fast and has a cozy, chunky fit with a cute texture. I made this one for my little sibling’s Christmas present (the appliqués were my own addition, not part of the pattern, but talk about kitsch!) and didn’t want to give it away. I’m already planning out the one I’m going to make for myself.
2023 is over.2 Here’s to a new year that’s hopefully better than the last – or at least equally full of small delights.
xoxo,
Franny💋📺
p.s. are any of you on letterboxd? right now i’m only following my sister’s boyfriend and Ayo Edebiri
Jeopardy is on at 7:00 in Philly and 7:30 in Maine/I think most other places. 7:30 is a better time if you ask me, and I wish the PA channels would get with the program.
This took longer than I expected to write, and it’s arguably too late in January now for this kind of post, but really who cares? This is not Timely and On Trend Connoisseur.