curledup roundup: Dec
Final roundup of 2024 :')
The 12th and final roundup of this wild, magical, busy, big, expansive, sparkly year… I hope you all have enjoyed these monthly compilations—sometimes prompt, sometimes very much not. It’s been a chance to collect reading-related things that brought me joy, inspired me, and made me think, and I’ve loved sharing them with you. Enjoy this smattering from December!
To get ahead of it: I, too, am appalled that I haven’t read the Harry Potter books yet at my 30 years of age (I have watched all the movies, I’m not a monster). But! It’s never too late to find the magic! I read Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets this month. The first two movies remain pretty loyal to the books, almost scene for scene. But I know there is so much more back story, character development, world building coming my way in the rest of the books and I can’t wait. Reading these as an adult person though, I can’t help but giggle at the fact that this small boy keeps finding himself in rooms and situations he simply has no business being in! What do you mean an 11-year-old is saving the fate of a centuries-old school! I love absolutely everything about it.
I stopped by the Central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and—oh my—it is stunning. I found myself on its Wikipedia page and discovered that it’s meant to look like an open book from above (cute!), and that it faced decades of pushback and delays starting as early as 1889 until its opening in 1941 (not as cute). I meandered around—they have a James Baldwin photography exhibit in the lobby right now—in awe of its architecture, and it reminded me of this quote. I already wholeheartedly agreed with this sentiment, but living in New York has made it infinitely more true.
Beauty in architecture matters. What you walk down the street, the buildings are not just bricks and mortar; they are the guardians of your day.
A beautiful building makes you feel less alone. It tells you that someone cared. Care enough to make a window curve just so, to lay the stones like poetry, to stretch a tower toward the sky like a dream reaching out.
Beauty in architecture stops you. It makes you pause, breathe, tilt your head just a little.
It says, This is a place worth being in.
This is a world worth noticing.
I’m 100 years late to the party, but I’m in the process of diving into the world of Virginia Woolf. I read A Room of One’s Own and was unsurprisingly—to use her word—agog at the expanse of her mind poured into that book. Her exploration of truth, her thesis that space, money, other basic needs are required to wander and create fiction, her balance of realism and optimism — all truly singular. I’m currently reading The Waves and the writing is absolutely luscious. Writers and writing like this make me wish I could go back to college and study it all the live long day.
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Related, and perhaps a rebuttal to Woolf’s room, this passage by C.S. Lewis: Favorable conditions never come
Spent Christmas at an Airbnb in upstate New York that had the most glorious built-in bookshelves I’ve ever had the pleasure of spending time near. And I was thrilled to find that it wasn’t just for show—the host had impeccable taste in reading material. I wish I could freeze time and spend days and weeks and months making my way through his collection.
Was gutted to hear about the passing of Nikki Giovanni this month. Her poem about the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 was the first time I realized how words could make a real and tangible impact, how words could heal. She was funny and deep and saw the world in a way all her own. There was no other writer like her.
Lithub doing the lord’s work with The Ultimate Best Books of 2024 List. They compile “69 lists from 39 outlets, which collectively recommended more than 1,200 individual books” and organize which books made the most lists across the internet. This led to my purchase of both Martyr and All Fours.
Dogs of Summer was a phenomenal, if not stressful, snapshot of girlhood. The author does an incredible job of articulating the angst and intensity with which girls—through our ten-year-old narrator—experience the world, including and especially the other girls around them. This experience of obsession and fascination is a very specific one. Our narrator is learning who she is—and who she’s not—through the lens of her friend Isora, of course revealing much more about her than Isora in the process. It’s both disorienting and formative and messy, and the author handles it with such care. The writing was so rich, but juvenile at the same time: painting this masterful picture, and then popping the bubble by spelling something wrong or exposing a naive, ten-year-old thought. It’s like if My Brilliant Friend and Eighth Grade had a baby in the Canary Islands of Spain.
On days when Isora wanted to die I felt like I wanted to die too. According to Isora, the best way to do it was to fill the bathtub all the way to the top with hot water and then slash your wrists. Sometimes I wondered how she knew so much stuff I didn’t know, and then I got sad because I didn’t have a sadness of my own—my sadness was the same as Isora’s except inside by body. It was kind of like a fake sadness, like two copies of the same sadness, like a knock-off sadness. That was me. I had no real reason to be sad, so I just made one up.
Was scrolling on Instagram as one does (every day, but especially during the limbo between Christmas and New Years), and came across this post, with a passage from some of Rayne Fisher-Quann’s writing. It was a visceral, needed reminder for me during this stretch of time where we’re inundated with talk of resolutions and goals. The act of becoming yourself is a creative, personal, soft one that, in my experience, is often hindered or limited when hard measurements and looming achievements are placed on it. As we usher in a new year, I hope to keep this top of mind.
Last but certainly not least—this has absolutely nothing to do with reading, but it felt vital to include. My son, Ham, modeled for J Crew :’) Thanks to the talented Ally + Hayden for this iconic opportunity.
Thank you for being here. Excited for what’s to come in 2025. Happy new year to you and yours :)