annual NYE post

goodbye 2025

2025 was tiny bunnies in the yard and a hundred transient blackbirds in the trees, April snowstorms and long autumn walks, unexpected house repairs and too many vet visits (Vesper is fine now, thankfully), and a lot of avoiding the internet and re-reading fairy tales.

This website is overdue for an update. I’m not around enough to understand all the WordPress things anymore. For awhile all of the images vanished and then they all came back particularly large. We’ll see how this post goes. Hopefully sometime in 2026 I’ll be able to sort it all out.

We went to Nightwood at the Mount again this year, first time seeing it with snow which made it even more magical. It has quickly become my favorite end-of-year tradition, wandering through light and sound in the cold.

This year I re-taught myself how to fold origami cranes, to do something simple and quiet and repetitive without any reason beyond having little paper birds where there previously were none. There are flocks of them all over my office now, in colorful piles.

2025 brought the gorgeous Folio Society edition of The Night Circus (illustrated by Cristina Bencina with a new introduction by me), the most vibrant, shiny new edition of The Night Circus from Acrylipics (currently on sale!) and a sparkling tea blend inspired by The Starless Sea from Old Growth Alchemy. 

It is possible that there have been additional beautiful things afoot this year that may be arriving in 2026. I remain eternally grateful that these stories continue to be wrapped in such creative, tangible packaging by so many wonderful artists.

I wrote a lot this year. 

Not as much as I might have liked, as a number of unexpected time-consuming things appeared along the way, but I have more pages than I did this time last year, and some of them might even end up in the book.

It’s not a book yet. It’s not even half a book. It’s still mostly word soup but maybe there are some sentences floating around in there as the words cling to what might be their proper neighbors.

It’s very hard to write a book right now. Writing has never not been hard for me and now I’d use the typical analogy of pulling teeth but pulling teeth seems fast, at least. It always takes me ages to find my way through a story, and this one feels slower than usual though if I stopped and did the year math it might be average. There’s an analogy in here somewhere about slowly chipping away at a tooth to accomplish the removal but that sounds terrible. 

(I had one of those classic anxiety dreams the other night where my teeth were falling out only this time they were made of gold and labradorite, make of that what you will.)

(The entire end of 2025 writing sentiment is expressed in depth and much more perfectly by my friend Chuck Wendig over here.)

I am currently contemplating some different tactics in an attempt to get more words on paper in 2026. Tricking myself back into that creative bubble. Attempting to be more tactile about the whole process. We’ll see how it goes.

Favorite books I read in 2025:

Lolly Willowes – Sylvia Townsend Warner

The River Has Roots – Amal El-Mohtar

The God of the Woods – Liz Moore

Wild Dark Shore – Charlotte McConaghy

The Everlasting – Alix E. Harrow

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter – Stephen Graham Jones

Honorable mention for Cat Nap by Brian Lies which is a wonder. Highly recommended if you like cats, art, art history, picture books or any combination thereof.

Favorite video games I played in 2025:

Blue Prince

(that’s it, that’s the list)

It would be unfair to put anything except Blue Prince in this category this year as it is not only far and away my favorite game of the year but easily one of my favorite games of all time. 

This is everything I ever wanted in an atmospheric puzzle game, from the art style to the music to the gloriously layered mysteries. There is so much story here to find in empty rooms and red envelopes and clues hidden in plain sight. I love this game.

A large, sprawling mystery of a house is precisely where I wanted to be this year, slowly exploring and marveling and uncovering. I’m on Day 125 and I still have more secrets to find.

And of course I already ordered plush Swim Bird.

Beyond Blue Prince I did very much enjoy Avowed and also Hades 2 though not quite as much as original flavor Hades. I replayed a lot of things this year (new game+ for both Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Elden Ring, started a new Animal Crossing island), I played several games I am nowhere near finishing (Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, Ghost of Yōtei, Oblivion Remastered), I bounced off Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 because I’m terrible at turn-based but I watched lots of it when Adam played it and it deserves every bit of the acclaim, and here at the very end of the year I have become oddly enamored of Two Point Museum even though I am not normally a management sim person, it is a delight.

This year sounded like the Sound Bath playlist on Apple Music and synthwave radio on Lofi Girl and so much Florence + the Machine.

I do (mostly) love Everybody Scream but the Florence album that was on continuous repeat this year was Symphony of Lungs. The original version of Lungs was on constant repeat a million years ago when I was writing The Night Circus, so this album feels both familiar and beautifully different, like revisiting a place that isn’t the same anymore and you aren’t, either, but it feels comforting in its strangeness.

And within that strangeness it’s this track that’s my new favorite, one that I’m not sure I ever even remembered the title of the first time around in those circus days. This one feels like a different time, a different place, a different story in my head.

I will, as usual, not be online that much in 2026 but I will post anything of import here and on bluesky and instagram and I’ll likely still be retumbling pretty things over on tumblr. 

Time keeps feeling like it is slipping by, back here in the ice and the snow again, but we hold on to real things as it passes: kittens and love and paper birds, lights in the woods and stories crafted by often-tired human hands.
By erin, ago

goodbye 2024

I’m not sure what to say about 2024. It was a year. It’s over now. It went by quickly but seemed endless at times. I flipped through a dozen photos of baby goats on our 2024 calendar. Many things were terrible but there were baby goats to count the days with as they passed.

It was a year of coordinated number book anniversaries: The Night Circus turned 13 on September 13th. The Starless Sea turned 5 on November 5th. I would have done something festive if I’d thought of what and had the energy or the time. Let’s pretend there were parties, somewhere, dressed in technicolor and dipped in gold.

(Also Adam & I had our 10th wedding anniversary and Vesper turned 6, she was not being helpful with all of the nicely-numbered anniversaries but it’s okay because she can’t do math.)

This year a bunny spent a great deal of time in our yard eating the clover. One day in the spring while we were sitting on the back porch the tiniest fawn I have ever seen wandered up and tucked itself into the tall weeds near the trees maybe fifteen feet away from us and stayed there near invisible all day for baby deer daycare, standing up occasionally to stretch its tiny legs. Now that the snow is back there are fox prints again, circling the house, silent unseen pacing in the cold.

This year brought the gorgeous Books Illustrated version of The Starless Sea, the Vintage Classics version of The Night Circus, FairyLoot‘s beautiful editions of both books and Folio Society‘s centennial edition of Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter which I wrote the introduction for. 

(Next year has more pretty things in store, I will share them whenever I am able to.)

I had a slow writing year. I am a slow writer at the best of times and the last while has been decidedly not so best. I have bits and pieces and fragments and I don’t know how they fit together yet.

I spent more time figuring out what the new book isn’t but hopefully that will get me closer to figuring out what it is. I know the place, I know these people, I know the mood. I know who’s playing that piano down the hall and what’s skulking out in the shadows in the garden. I need to figure out the way to thread the story through it all.

I sometimes say I got to write The Night Circus in a bubble, because no one was waiting for it, and for The Starless Sea I had to try to create an imaginary bubble to write in. I think I need some imaginary bubble reconstruction for this one, a stronger space to seal myself away from everything so I can listen to the story better.

I had a slow reading year, too. Much of the to-read pile languished unread. I read bits of things and nonfiction on [redacted] topics and a fair amount of books but only fell in love with a few of them, slight volumes savored briefly in between research reading, a new adventure by a beloved author and a French classic from 1913.

Favorite books I read this year:

Linghun by Ai Jiang

The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) by Alain-Fournier

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart by GennaRose Nethercott

Moonbound by Robin Sloan

The Melancholy of Untold History by Minsoo Kang

(Honorable mention to Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song which I read last year but was published in September. I have not seen it on nearly enough best-of-2024 lists, it is wonderful.)

Favorite video games for 2024 (in two categories this year!)

Favorite video games I played in 2024 (appropriately, the year of the dragon):

Dragon’s Dogma 2  – I bounced off the first one fairly early but I loved everything about this, from the long perilous traveling around the map to the fact that my best armor didn’t involve pants. 

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree – I wasn’t sure it would live up to the main game but it does and in some ways it’s even more glorious. (Except for the final boss which is hot nonsense.)

Dragon Age: The Veilguard – Dragon Age: Inquisition is the game of my heart so my expectations were high and this met them in a lot of ways. Emmrich is my new favorite BioWare romance. I wish the whole game was longer. I hope we don’t have to wait another 10 years for more.

Favorite video games I played with Adam this year (we play a lot of games together where we trade the controller back-and-forth or I just help with puzzles and yelp at jump scares):

Astro Bot

Stray

Alan Wake 2

Silent Hill 2

We don’t play a ton of tabletop games but we’ve been playing a lot of Escape the Dark Castle this year with varying degrees of escape success but it’s always fun. It’s easy to learn, different every game, and delightfully creepy.

This year sounded like Fleet Foxes and Lofi Girl Halloween and Zelda on piano and Radiohead and Vitamin String Quartet. When trying to choose a single song that sounded like 2024 I kept going back to this one and this version of it in particular, from several solstices ago. 

I will likely not be online terribly often in 2025, not that I am online that much anyway. (Currently I am most active on bluesky and tumblr and instagram, more or less in that order.) I am going to attempt to have a year that has fewer screens and more fountain pens and bunnies and clover, continuing to be a woodland hermit.

Around here we will be writing a book (mostly me) and taking naps in the pink sparkle unicorn house (mostly Vesper).

I hope your 2025 has some warmth and softness and magic in it.
By erin, ago

goodbye 2023

2023 was mostly quiet when it wasn’t loud. For the latter half of the year our house was under construction and being painted so it was busy and hectic and now that it’s cold everything has calmed and quieted again.

This year brought Night Circus tea from Old Growth Alchemy and announcements of new editions of books and it still amazes me that these stories get to be contained in such beautiful packages and interpreted in such magical ways.

I wrote a lot this year. I wrote backstories and sidestories. I wrote an introduction to something that has not yet been announced and I dug deeper into this book that is not a book yet. I don’t know how much of what I’ve written this year will end up in whatever this book turns out to be but I’ve excavated more of it, I’m more familiar with this place and these people now and next year will be about getting to know it all better and hopefully figuring out more of its secrets. 

I realized earlier this year that each book I’ve written ends up having both a thematic piece of music (that I tend to listen to over and over and over while writing) and a motto that I keep, each on a silver ring.

The Night Circus theme is Delirium’s Aria and its motto is Esse Quam Videri.

The Starless Sea theme is borrowed from Dragon Age Inquisition and its silver-engraved motto is Know Thyself.

This year I found the piece of music that is the new book theme, and I am currently wearing a silver ring engraved with the phrase that has become its motto on my right hand. The book itself is still a mess of unfinished threads in need of weaving but it is beginning to find itself, out there in the dark.

I got back into writing with fountain pens this year which was entirely the fault of my friends Mallory O’Meara and Lauren Panepinto and their InkWitches stream on twitch. I’d had a few long-neglected pens and now I have… more and a rather obscene amount of ink in a rainbow of colors. I’ve been slowly filling notebooks with multicolored bits and pieces of the new book.

Current pens in heavy rotation are my Opus 88 Jazz, Nahvalur Horizon and Benu Talisman (all broad nibs) and I always have a couple of TWSBI Ecos kicking around. Some current favorite inks include Taccia Utamaro-Umemurasaki, Wearingeul Persephone and oh so many inks from The Birmingham Pen Company, particularly Eroded Bronze and Chrysanthemum. And for the holidays Adam gave me this gorgeous Edison Dragoness pen. 

The Books Illustrated edition of The Starless Sea will be arriving next year (you can keep up with its progress by signing up for their newsletter). It has been an absolute joy watching Anne Yvonne Gilbert‘s illustrations as they’ve evolved over the past few months. They are all gorgeous and surprising but here, for New Year’s Eve have this one, because somewhere in this liminal space between years it is snowing, and somewhere within that snow there is an inn and its lanterns are lit. 

I am no longer on twitter, I hadn’t been there much at all of late but earlier this year I deleted all my posts and closed up shop there after 15 years. I am of course still on instagram, I am slowly getting used to bluesky and I’m forever using tumblr as a mood board. 

Favorite Books 2023

The Sundial – Shirley Jackson
The King of Elfand’s Daughter – Lord Dunsany
The Keep – Jennifer Egan
Sleeping Giants – Rene Denfeld (March 2024)
No One Will Come Back For Us – Premee Mohamed
White Cat, Black Dog – Kelly Link
The Naming Song – Jedidiah Berry (October 2024)
The Saint of Bright Doors – Vajra Chandrasekera
Starling House – Alix E. Harrow
Black River Orchard – Chuck Wendig

Favorite Video Games 2023

Baldur’s Gate 3

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

The Last Campfire

(I haven’t finished Baldur’s Gate 3 yet, I’m in the middle of Act 3 and my PS5 chose this week to die so please send tiny prayers to the Sony cloud save gods for me.)

This year sounded like Sigur Rós and Danse Macabre and Fleetwood Mac and lots and lots of Vitamin String Quartet. This one is not the aforementioned new book theme, but it is the opening track on the constantly evolving new book playlist that I put on every time I sit down to write, so now these opening notes feel like opening a door.

Whatever you accomplished or didn’t this year please know that it was enough just to get here to this night when one year tumbles into the next. And I hope that whatever 2024 brings there is some softness in it, and some brightness, and some wonder.

By erin, ago

goodbye 2022

This year was filled with chickadees. They come and go but right now there are about a dozen who frequent the bird feeder. They follow us around when we go outside and sometimes land on the windows to peer into the house.

We had blue jays this year, too, a family of them that arrived when all the littlest ones were still small and fluffy.

And there was a bunny in the yard last week, the first we’ve seen here, hanging out around near the bird feeder and sitting quietly in the snow beneath the bushes.

2022 was quiet, filled with soft things and fluttering. Many things happened and long-awaited projects were released into the world but most if it felt as though it was happening around me, wings beating somewhere nearby. I was ill for a chunk of the fall (chronic things being more chronic than usual) so most of the latter half of the year turned in self-care directions. Warm beverages and blankets and softness and slowing down.

2022 was all these beautiful things that were created in part by me but so many other artists brought such life to stories new and old and I am so very grateful to have all of these objects out in the world.

The Phantomwise Tarot, available wherever tarot decks are sold from Clarkson Potter.

New UK paperback editions from Vintage of The Night Circus & The Starless Sea. The Waterstones editions have new exclusive content.

The astonishingly beautiful Books Illustrated editions of The Night Circus with illustrations by Anne Yvonne Gilbert.

I threw away more words than I wrote this year, but what remains in the aftermath is better and has both more personality and more mysteries. I shall be spending 2023 trying to learn them, if not solve them. It has secrets I have not discerned yet, rooms I haven’t figured out how to open.

It might have a title? I’m not sure yet, it is sitting here, misshapen and unfinished, trying a title on like a hat, to see if it suits. I will know better once it is more book-shaped.

2023 will probably be a quieter year for me. This year had several things and surprises, most of which are in the stack above. For next year I am hoping to spend more time alone getting to know this creature in its little hat better so that you all can meet it, someday.

I had an odd reading year. The last few years I’ve had difficulty reading for a number of reasons and I’ve been feeling like my reading gets overwhelmed by new things so I tried to read older things and more nonfiction. I am a slow reader at the best of times and I have somehow become even slower.

I have piles of books I wanted to read this year and never got to (related: I have barely gotten to anything in the blurb request pile in a timely manner lately, the last book I managed to blurb I had almost a full year before publication) but I’ll be tackling more of the to-read pile over the next while, particularly Chuck Wendig’s Wayward which I’ve had for ages & I am really looking forward to curling up with it for a good long time. (Vesper keeps sitting on it, so it seems a good book for curling up with).

Favorite Things I Read in 2022

Such Small Hands – Andrés Barba, translated by Lisa Dillman

A Haunted History of Invisible Women: True Stories of America’s Ghosts – Leanna Renee Hieber & Andrea Janes

House of Mist – Maria Luisa Bombal

Wading in Waist-High Water: The Lyrics of Fleet Foxes – Robin Pecknold

The Broken Tower – Kelly Braffet (sequel to The Unwilling, I love these books to bits)

The Golden Age, Book I & Book II – Roxanne Moreil and Cyril Pedrosa

I played a lot of Elden Ring this year. A lot. I am two alternate endings away from platinuming and I will probably manage it eventually. I have mentioned at various times in the past that I really like consuming stories in non-book formats, particularly while I’m writing, and the story in Elden Ring is so gloriously mysterious, discerned through environments and item descriptions and odd encounters. You sink into this world and its poison swamps and piece together its myths as you go, and all the while everything is trying to kill you and usually succeeding. It is beautiful and harsh and teeming with secrets. I cannot describe how much I love it. It is quite possibly my new favorite game of all time.

Favorite Video Games I played in 2022

Elden Ring, obviously.

Tunic, which I co-played with Adam. We passed the controller back & forth & took extensive handwritten notes to figure out that one particular door & the whole thing was a delight. I am impatiently waiting for the plush fox to be in stock at fangamer.

NieR:Automata. I’d played Replicant when version 1.22474487139 came out and liked it a lot but I loved Automata, the aesthetic and the music and more than anything the way the narrative is layered across multiple play throughs.

Honorable mentions to Mundaun, A Little to the Left & Cozy Grove, all of which are potentially excellent games for non-gamers, by the way, for very different moods. (Creepy, Organized & Cozy-with-Ghost-Bears, respectively.)

This year sounded like the NieR:Automata soundtrack on piano and Dance Fever and Midnights.

This year we started collecting video game soundtracks on vinyl, to listen to in the library with cocktails or mocktails and a flopsy kitten. The Hades soundtrack is always in heavy rotation, and Slime Rancher, too, but more than anything 2022 sounded like Zelda & Chill. Going to try to extend the chill into 2023.

Every New Year’s Eve I do a year ahead tarot spread, one card for each month clockwise in a wheel and a single card to sum up the general tone of the year. Traditionally I then forget to look at it for the rest of the year and only remember to check when New Year’s rolls around again. My summation card for 2022 was Justice. We’ll see what 2023 has to say for itself later.

May 2023 bring more soft, wondrous things, fluttering in the snow and peering in the windows.

By erin, ago

goodbye 2021

I spent this year in my house. In my yard and in my woods, getting to know the birds and finding leaks in the roof and measuring the year in blooming flowers and changing leaves and snowfalls.

It was a sleepy kitten year, spent in a singular space with a particularly sleepy kitten (well, sleepy when she was not chasing mice) but despite the sleepiness things still happened. We celebrated our seventh anniversary and Vesper’s third birthday and a decade of The Night Circus and two years of sailing The Starless Sea.

I wrote small things this year.

When 2021 began I thought it was going to be a year for continued big messy drafting of the new book but instead it was a writing year spent on several other projects entirely, all of them unexpected and precise. The scale shifted to zoomed-in and detail-oriented when I had expected wide-ranging impressionist swooshes. It was a year for precise sentences and carefully chosen words. I think it made me tired. I am tentatively hoping for more zoomed-out writing time in 2022.

Most of those 2021-composed small things are secrets for the moment. One may remain a secret but has already found its reader and the others will be revealed in time.

I will be attempting to spend as much of 2022 away from the internet as possible. Social media in particular made me extra tired this year even with frequent hiatuses so 2022 is going to be one great big hiatus.

I will not be vanishing entirely, it’s difficult to vanish entirely. I will be posting occasionally on Instagram (standard assortment of kittens and birds and books and snow) and newsworthy things will be posted here and on twitter as well.

Most of 2022 will be spent sorting through all of these bits and pieces and dark hallways and cherry blossoms so I can slowly coerce them into something resembling a book when I’m not playing Pony Souls, I mean Elden Ring.

Happy-Making Things 2021

Befriending the chickadees. Westman Atelier liquid lip balm in Garçonne. Season 3 of What We Do in the Shadows. Ecclesia stars and peonies. Lesser Evil Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Popcorn. New Jellycat Gryphon friend (his name is Gus). The Somnia Tarot. Philips Hue light bulbs. Ethan M. Aldridge’s Night Circus illustrations. BPAL’s The Grey Columns (a perfectly balanced blend of grey and white amber, touched by a hint of smoke). Treana 2018 Red Wine. Jon Carling’s Traveling Witch. Painting the guest room Benjamin Moore Gentleman’s Grey (which is blue). Season 2 of The Witcher. Books Illustrated’s upcoming version of The Night Circus illustrated by Anne Yvonne Gilbert. Darla Jackson bunnies. The Folio Society edition of Howl’s Moving Castle that Adam gave me for Yule.

And of course, Todd Doughty’s Little Pieces of Hope: Happy-Making Things in a Difficult World, which last year was happy-making lists on Instagram and this year is a whole book of wonderments with illustrations by Josie Portillo and it is one of my favorite books I read this year.

I had possibly my most low-volume reading year ever. I almost called it “worst” but it wasn’t that, it’s just that I only managed to read a tiny fraction of the books I wanted to read for a number of reasons. There are too many books and not enough time in good years, and this year my brain was not attentioning particularly well for reading. There are so many (so many!) books I am very much looking forward to still waiting in the to-read pile including The Letters of Shirley Jackson and Kelly Braffet’s upcoming sequel to The Unwilling, The Broken Tower (out January 25th!)

These are my favorite books that I did manage to read this year, though half of them don’t actually come out until next year.

The aforementioned Little Pieces of Hope: Happy-Making Things in a Difficult World by Todd Doughty
The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig, a big, brilliant horrorscape that’s drowningly immersive in that signature Wendig way.
Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol by Mallory O’Meara, which is like having the perfect seat at the bar for a drink or five accompanied by buckets of utterly fascinating history.
The Paradox Hotel (February 22, 2022) by Rob Hart, a delicious locked room mystery in a hotel for time travelers that has everything the conceit implies and more, including dinosaurs.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (July 12, 2022) by Gabrielle Zevin, a sprawling modern epic of life and love and the creative process in general and video games in particular.

And my very favorite thing I read this year, which is of-the-moment in the best of ways and quite possibly a masterpiece, is Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel & it will be published on April 5, 2022.

I finished far more video games than books this year, which says something about attention and immersion and interactivity. Picking favorites was difficult. Top Five:

Demon’s Souls – I was not previously a Souls game person. When we got a PS5 (thanks be to the gaming gods) we picked up the Bluepoint Demon’s Souls remake and I thought I’d try it and I got utterly obsessed. The mood and the architecture and the atmosphere and the spaces, it’s all so much of what I love in an immersive environment.

Death’s Door – Adorable crow reaper! Puzzles! Secrets! Gorgeous score and beautiful animation! Zelda-esque in the best of ways.

Control – I have heard so many people rave about Control for so long and it took me ages to pick it up and I’m so glad I finally did. The Ashtray Maze is easily one of my all-time favorite gaming moments.

Deathloop – I did not think Deathloop was going to be my jam but it totally was? Stylish, quirky, puzzle-game-dressed-up-as-a-shooter with a fantastic soundtrack.

Slime Rancher – I’ve always wanted a game that brought back the feeling of walking around the world of Myst and weirdly, Slime Rancher was the game that brought it, with its ancient ruins and precious slimes.

Honorable mentions (I should have done a top ten) to Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Bowser’s Fury, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Astro’s Playroom & in particular Radiohead’s Kid A Mnesia exhibit (is it a game? Is it a virtual museum? I don’t know, but it’s a wonder.)

This year sounded like distant train whistles and the crackling of virtual fireplaces and the Persona 5 Royal soundtrack and that perfect version of Everybody Wants to Rule the World from BioShock Infinite and so much Radiohead nostalgia.

But this soundtrack in general and this track in particular is what I put on more often than not, over and over again, to keep things moving even when everything felt stagnant, and somehow it always worked.

Happy New Year, darlings. Keep moving.

By erin, ago

goodbye 2020

I began this year on airplanes. In bookstores and in theatres, meeting hundreds and hundreds of lovely people and signing so very many copies of The Starless Sea. Drinking post-event Cabernet and trying to remember what day it was or what city I was in, pausing too briefly in hotel room after hotel room and the whole time I had a head cold and I joked that I didn’t want to leave my house for the spring and then I didn’t.

I didn’t leave my house in the spring or the summer or the fall and now the snow is falling again.

Things that were happy-making in a long dark year:

Jeni’s ice cream. The fire pit we got for the backyard. Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab perfume oils (particularly Candy Apple Smut, Baby’s First Ballista & Venus Genetrix). My new camera that takes very good photos of birds and kittens. Getting a towel from my perfect husband for my 42nd birthday (he also gave me a sword). This Ethan M. Aldridge illustration. S’mores made with turmeric cardamom black pepper caramelized coconut mylk chocolate. Taylor Swift’s folklore on vinyl. Chasing Vesper around the library while she chased a mouse. Blood Milk’s Sacred Heart of Hecate ring. Knitting with Malabrigo Rasta yarn. The Alex Eckman-Lawn paperback cover for The Starless Sea. Flailing about Dragon Age 4 teases with people on the internet. The El Goliath Tarot. Catching cherry blossoms in Animal Crossing. Becoming long-distance friends with the extraordinary Dani Carr. This cast iron roast chicken recipe. And Todd Doughty’s happy-making posts on Instagram.

I didn’t read much this year at all. I’m always a slow reader and I never get through as many books as I would like but this year was particularly bad for my attention span. I did procure a lot of books so I am well-stocked for 2021 and beyond.

Of the handful of things I did manage to read this year, these were my favorites:

We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry, the witchy 80’s Massachusetts field hockey novel I never knew I always wanted.
Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh, who is a genius. I laughed, I cried, I laughed until I cried, all while our power was out, reading by flashlight.
The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained by Colin Dickey. I adored Ghostland and this is just as fascinating. One of the things I love about Colin’s work is how much of it is about the stories that we tell.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. In many ways this book is to The Starless Sea what Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is to The Night Circus, which baffles and delights me. It is a treasure.
Flyaway by Kathleen Jennings, like Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter had an Australian baby. It is moody and dark and has sharp teeth like the best of fairy tales.
Beowulf translated by Maria Dahvana Headley is a luscious, lyrical gift of language that feels old and new at the same time.

This year I started writing a book that will very likely end up being the new book. It has been a file filled with notes for awhile but now there are pages of prose and characters who haven’t found their names yet and bits of impermanent imaginary architecture. It is a long way from being a book but it is more than it was at this time last year, a million years ago.

In the meantime The Starless Sea came out in paperback in August of this year which already seems like ages ago. You could purchase it or any number of other wonderful books (everything in the pile above is highly recommended!) from an independent bookstore near or far, might I suggest Print: A Bookstore or Gibson’s Concord or Odyssey Bookshop or Oblong Books & Music

I played a lot of games this year. No, more than that.

My game of the year is a fairly even tie between Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Hades. I bought pink rain boots because I liked my Animal Crossing ones so much. Hades made me realize I’m actually pretty good at the kind of game I sometimes find intimidating. (Current record clear time is 19:39.55)

Ghost of Tsushima was epic and stunning and the end of Act II made me cry more than any single moment in a video game ever.

I love a good visual puzzle game and Superliminal was just what I wanted, quirky and smart and beautiful.

I finished A Short Hike in one day and I still think about it, it is a perfect little story game. It is, as the name implies, very short. “a little exploration game about hiking up a mountain.”

I replayed a lot of things this year for purposes of comfort and familiarity including BioShock 2 (I had never done the Minerva’s Den DLC and it’s marvelous) and Horizon Zero Dawn and I am currently in the middle of my fourth replay of Dragon Age: Inquisition which is of course my most favorite game. I am taking my time with it but afterwards I am probably going to replay Origins & Dragon Age II as well, because it’s been that kind of year.

I’ve just started Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity and so far I like it a lot, it’s like smashy smashy Breath of the Wild.

Also recently acquired the Annapurna Interactive Deluxe Limited Edition collection, I’ve played and loved some of these games already (particularly What Remains of Edith Finch and Gorogoa) and I am very much looking forward to the rest of them.

In related gaming news I still don’t have a PS5 despite trying several times to get one (I blame our comparatively slow internet speed) and right now my main goal is to get one before Horizon Forbidden West comes out.

I barely watched any tv this year but I did rewatch all of Adventure Time including the final seasons which I’d never seen and I sobbed my way through the final episode which was bananapants and perfect. I might need “Will Happen Happening Happens” embroidered on something.

We’ve been getting into Critical Role this year, we’re 30-something episodes into the second campaign and I love it, my attention span for watching anything has been terrible but with Critical Role I can sit and knit or whatnot and still follow fascinating complex narratives and it has been soothing in a chaotic sort of way. And there is so very much of it! We are like two years and a bazillion hours behind! It’s kind of nice to have so much catching up to do especially since we don’t leave the house and it is helping me sort of understand Dungeons & Dragons finally. I’ve never played! Everyone always thinks I have! I haven’t! But I’m learning! (Once in awhile someone tags me on twitter about doing campaigns based on my books and whether or not I mind and of course I don’t mind I am flattered beyond belief please please have all the role-playing fun with them!)

This year sounded like the Hades soundtrack and Nothing But Thieves and The Amazing Devil and London Grammar’s Californian Soil and BMO singing about how time is an illusion but mostly it sounded like folklore (& evermore) on repeat and I am grateful to Taylor Swift for these sounds and these words that were in the background of this year like a blanket. I have other favorite tracks but when I told myself to pick a single one for this post as is New Year’s Post tradition, it had to be this one.

Happy New Year, darlings. We can be pirates.

By erin, ago