Tuesday Tea: Do you have any reading resolutions? Plus, a poem!

Hello, 2025! We see you...

[photo: Kelly Sikkema/Unsplash]

From our (about-to-eat-homemade-pizza-and-watch-old-movies) house to yours: Happy New Year! May 2025 bring you delightful things.

Our bookish plans for 2025 are not more formalized than ‘Read good books.’ We are 100% OK with that.

Baked into that simple statement is the commitment to read books that feel right and to abandon as quickly as possible titles that are not working for us. We like to think savoring all we read is also implied.

Before we get to your reading resolutions, a poem to say goodbye to 2024:

New Year’s Lament by Lisa Richter

I am writing you this letter from the bottom of the ocean
where my eyelids are bottle caps and my stomach turns
burnished copper. Maybe it is time for a new oral tradition.
All day I flicker and sometimes I go out and leave
in my wake the faintest trace of sweat and hibiscus.
Maybe I am an embryo. By which I mean the procedure
of un-making a forest, a sidewalk moving of its own accord.
Who am I, though, to speak of what space confers
by way of singing? Maybe salutations are in order.
Once, we made hats of our secret inadequacies
and laughed as we tossed them into starlit reservoirs.
We are all on this planet reinventing-ourselves-years-old
and today it is all of our birthdays. Some mornings
I am a winter tangerine, others a sewing machine
from the turn of the last century, the kind your mother
used to make your clothes with. The supermarkets
are all closed today, as are the mosques and synagogues.
Cemeteries are open but the ghosts are all hungover
in their graves. Deep in my body an insidious god
has stashed a ransom note. I’ve swallowed so many stars
a black hole gapes in my chest. I drape my arms
in canary velvet, avail myself of plant life. I subpoena
my memories of the past year, but now it’s too late.
They’ve decamped for a home that is shaped like a teardrop.

Spill the tea: Do you have any reading resolutions?