“Time of all things / is most variable,” James Schuyler writes in “Await.” For me, time felt particularly variable this year. Days passed as if they were months; weeks passed as if they were seconds. Nothing like having a newborn to make time feel like taffy.
2025 was largely a year of rereading for me. For various essays, I returned to Muriel Spark, Robert Frost, and Thomas Pynchon. For pleasure, I dipped back into The Stories of John Cheever and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy. For my son, I read, and reread, and rereread, Jon Klassen’s brilliant and macabre I Want My Hat Back. (I gasped when reading that board book’s conclusion for the first time. Subsequent readings haven’t really lessened the shock.)
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