December on the internet has become a weird time. Everywhere I look there are end of year photo dumps, gift guides, Spotify wrapped cities, reading challenge results. Before the year has even ended we’re performing nostalgia, demonstrating through social media metrics our accomplishments and productivity, trying to prove to our followers via algorithm how cool and interesting we have been this year. I, of course, am no different. So, as we approach the end of 2023, I’m thinking about all that the year encapsulates, all that I’ve learned and seen and done. This is my 2023 review.
I think the concept of the ‘wrap’ has had a major influence on the way we talk about our experiences at the end of a year. The Spotify format has spread to numerous other platforms, and the idea of an annual ‘wrapped’ has become an ordinary vocabulary term. Recently, I’ve seen plenty of versions of this - Dating Wrapped, Books Wrapped, Crying Wrapped - that try to create narrative using the data of lived experiences. At an end of year team day recently, my manager turned a presentation on our team analytics into our Team Wrapped. I’m sort of fascinated by this inversion of our autobiographical storytelling. Instead of telling a story to transmit our experiences, we construct new narratives through quantitative measures. I don’t think this is an inherently bad way of thinking about our experiences - it’s certainly entertaining - but it feels odd to me. Why do we have to turn our media consumption into a performance review, or share the metrics of our emotional lives?
I do not use Spotify, which immediately makes any data I have to share about my year officially Uncool, but here is what I do have - assembled from the data of letterboxd, apple music, the story graph, and the knowledge and memory of my own human brain - my 2023 wrapped!
My top musical artists this year in listens were Sufjan Stevens and Mitski(both of whom have been in my top five for several years running), which coincides with my favourite album releases of the year: Javelin by Sufjan Stevens, and Mitski’s The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We. My top song in listens was “Expert in a Dying Field” by The Beths; my top song of 2023 is Mitski’s “My Man”.
I lost four earrings, a ring, two umbrellas, my favourite cardigan. I travelled a lot more this year, visiting three countries for the first time - Denmark, Portugal, Belgium - and exploring new places - the English lake district, the southern Austrian Alps, the west coast of Scotland. I learned and practiced and used language everywhere I could, from a class in ISL to trying to converse in local languages while traveling. I saw so much art, spent time alone, challenged myself, learned a lot.
According to my listening data, I was in the top 100 listeners worldwide for the soundtrack to the film The Young Girls of Rochefort/Les Desmoiselles de Rochefort, also one my most watched film of the year(3 watches), so that feels very strange! I watched a lot more movies this year than I think I ever have before. My favourite 2023 release was Asteroid City; my most watched directors included Jacques Demy, Christopher Nolan, and Wes Anderson(mostly in connection to this summer’s releases of Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Asteroid City, respectively.) I explored a lot of new genres and eras of film that I had not previously seen, and ended up really enjoying it.
I spent a lot of the year really really ill. I missed out on a lot of things, I was distant. I felt out of place in my own life. I was the sickest I have ever been, I went to hospitals more times than I can count.1 Five new intensive treatments before life returns. Things are getting better, finally! I started the year in a house where we did not have working heat, and went two weeks without working water, and this year I moved to a new house that I actually really like, with friendly neighbours and good bakeries and I walk to work as much as I can.
In terms of books, my most read authors were largely mystery writers (such as Agatha Christie - this year I loved Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? - and Seishi Yokomizo, author of the Kosuke Kindaichi series including The Devil’s Flute) and poets(Franny Choi, Louise Glück2), as I find mystery novels and poetry collections to be pretty easy, quick reads3; but the writers I will remember most from this year are Carmen Maria Machado(I read In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties) and Jeffrey Eugenides(The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex). Both authors were new to me, all four of these books were absolutely excellent and among my top books of the year. My favourite and most played video game of the year was Tears of the Kingdom, which I feel like is totally being forgotten in a lot of end of year round ups, but is still such a good game. I watched every single episode of Riverdale this year, so I’m going to assume that makes it my most watched show, alongside other notable mentions: Succession, which I watched this year so I could follow the dramatic final season, or Columbo, a new-to-me classic which I spent a lot of the year watching.
Other favourite reads from my year: The Idiot by Elif Batuman(a freshman at Harvard struggles with her first experiences facing young adulthood and the real world), The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison(deals with ideas of beauty, whiteness, racism, and abuse in the lives of a community of young black girls in 1940s Ohio), All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews(the struggle of two sisters with depression, art, family, religion, and death in a Canadian mennonite community) They’re Going to Love You by Meg Howrey(an exploration of the relationships between a former ballet dancer, her father, and his dance instructor partner), The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin(the first interplanetary ambassador comes to an ice covered planet to make first contact with the genderless beings who live there), I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel(notes and mini essays from an unreliable narrator about her life stalking the man with whom she is having an affair), and finally, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka(a murdered Sri Lankan journalist in the 1980s must uncover the truth behind his death and make sense of the life he is leaving behind), which I absolutely recommend.
We keep wrapping up each year with lists and statistics and best ofs and worst ofs. What genres did we listen to? Are we readers? Cinephiles? To what faceless entities did we give publicity and profit? What apps tracked the most of our personal data? It’s weird how we fit ourselves into these boxes and spreadsheets in reviewing our own lives. Why is it so easy to name specific authors or songs, and so hard to name the feelings I felt this year, or the events that most shaped it?
I graduated with my master’s degree. I made it through the first year of my current job. I made a lot of new friends(and said lots of goodbyes, too.) and made so many new connections. I learned how to throw pottery on a wheel, and made my first two pieces. I painted and made collages and read and researched and tried and kept trying. I started writing again! Here in this newsletter, I managed to publish at least once every week for the last four months. I successfully left twitter(okay, fine, x,) and facebook, and have (mostly) stepped away from instagram, and I think I am much happier for it. The future of substack as a viable platform is a bit of a mystery to me right now, and I am seriously considering whether I will continue here moving forward. I do not profit from this site, nor does it profit from me, and given the current state of thingsI have no intention to add paid content at this point. But I absolutely love writing my newsletter here, and I am pretty proud of some of the reflections that have made up cloudtopia so far(probably my favourites currently: full circle and dietary advice); but I am still deciding whether I can continue to be on substack, and if not here, where I could go. The internet is pretty devoid of usable space right now, so we’ll see where this all goes as our community here continues to litigate its future.
This was not an easy year, filled with strangeness and frustration and heartbreak. But also, lots of joy, experience, magic. What more can I say? How do I dilute a year of life, of global horror and personal tragedy alike, into something that makes sense? Life goes on. The end of the year is ahead, but all of this will continue. I hope that this can be an opportunity for reflection, if nothing else, and that the start of the year will bring brightness, opportunity, and new strength.
wishing you a gentle new year,
isobel
oh no!! my metrics!
In addition to my favourite books from this year(all of which I highly recommend), and in lieu of my normal recommendations list, a few of my favourite poetry collections(with much gratitude to the people who recommended them to me) from my reading this year:
Franny Choi, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
Solmaz Sharif, Customs
Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem
Jericho Brown, The Tradition
Forrest Gander, Be With
Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
Louise Glück, A Village Life
I read over a hundred books in 2023, but I feel like it is important to say that this does not make me in any way more smart or more well read; a large number of these books were silly, quick reads, or, often just not good. I read so much and so quickly that there are lots of books I did not really digest and already do not remember well. Plenty of others, of course, were really meaningful and memorable, but this is just to say that in reading I do not think quantity should ever be used as an indicator of accomplishment.