Perhaps surprisingly, New Year Resolutions are welcome in this house. While not ignoring their arbitrary nature there is surely value in offering everyone a chance at a clean slate, no matter how temporary it may be. If this time of year and the goals people set themselves result in even marginal positive gains, there should be rejoicing in the streets. There is not nearly enough celebration of the small, daily, gradual victories life demands. Applaud the great accomplishments, no doubt, but be willing to do the same (at a lower volume) when the little thing done often enough adds up to a wholesale change.

As far as resolutions in this household go, the only one that could be considered outlandish is a desire to start learning Portuguese. There is one program in particular that has great reviews that will be the starting point; bit by bit perhaps it will add up to the point where, one day in the far future, reading a novel or holding an intermediate conversation in the language is possible. Beyond that, there is the usual daily(ish) journaling by pen and paper, desire to read more books than the previous year (shouldn’t be that difficult), and maybe one last go at a marathon if the winter months aren’t too brutal on a training regime.

Javier Marías’s A Heart So White will be the first read of 2024. He had such a unique style, begging for others to try and rip him off while inevitably falling far short of his accomplishments. It is unabashedly literary without the stuffiness that term connotes, using its energy to embed large questions about identity, love, obligation within the core of an always-engaging premise. Every page reads so unlike anything else you’ll find in contemporary fiction — there are elements of internal gazing that are prevalent in other European writing, but you can’t help wondering how much those similarities are purposeful or tied to something in the original Spanish. Having watched interviews he’s done in the past decade or so (thank you, YouTube’s closed caption translation feature), he exudes the energy we should hope for in all our authors. Thoughtful, unassuming in appearance and demeanor, aware enough to know they’ll be asked to grapple with questions of meaning while avoiding seeming as if he has lost all contact with the real world. The real world being, of course, where he learned a thing or three about meaning in the first place.