Volume 3, No. 37: My Bookish Sweetest Things from Year 5783

On Rosh Hashanah and sweetness

Greetings, bookish friends! Rosh Hashanah was last weekend, and while I didn’t make it to dinner with my family, I did share a delicious meal with my best friend. I also spent a while thinking about the sweetest things from the past year. This is a family tradition. Every year at Rosh Hashanah, everyone writes down their sweetest thing (or things) on a slip of paper. We put them all into a basket, past it around, and read them out. We’ve been doing this for more than 20 years now. My mom has all the slips saved in an album. It’s an incredible record.

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, involves several traditions surrounding sweetness. We eat apples and honey to symbolize hope for a sweet year ahead. This is where my family’s sweet things tradition comes from—we don’t share what we’re proud of or thankful for, or what we loved or enjoyed the most. We share our sweetest things.

Part of why I love this tradition so much is that it reminds me, always, every single year, that sweetness exists no matter what. A sweet thing can be tiny, and often is. One particular cake or swim or sunrise walk. My dog snoring. A delicious hot shower after a cold walk, followed by the feeling of clean pajamas on my skin.

Sweet things can also be enormous, of course, but they do not have to be happy. One of my sweet things from this past year is my best friend, and that we (finally!) live so close to each other. Out of all the moments we’ve shared in the past year, the first sweet thing I thought of regarding her was all the voice memos of me crying that she has listened to. I honestly couldn’t count them. The crying, the meltdowns, all the muck I’ve been wading through this year—none of that is sweet. But sobbing into a voice memo knowing someone I love and who loves me is on the other end, listening, witnessing, holding me—that is the sweetest.

What makes something sweet? I don’t know how to explain it, but I know it when it’s happening. Despite dealing with a lot of job insecurity and several big and unexpected expenses this year, I have managed to save a little bit of money. I haven’t reached my savings goal, but I’ve saved some, and that’s an accomplishment I’m genuinely proud of. But it is not a sweet thing. Not all accomplishments are sweet. Not everything that brings us happinesses, comfort, pride, excitement, or even joy—is sweet.

Sweetness is something specific. It’s some alchemical combination of gratitude and groundedness. It’s a little bit mysterious. For me, it’s a bodily feeling. For me, sweetness is about indulgence—as in, giving myself over to beauty and deliciousness. Sweetness comes when I don’t hold back, when I don’t refuse the gifts.

I’m all for recognizing our accomplishments, celebrating when we get through something hard, and expressing love and gratitude to the people and places we care about.

But let’s also talk about the sweetness.

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My Bookish Sweetest Things from Year 5783

• Listening to Ross Gay’s The Book of (More) Delights while driving back and forth from Ashfield Lake during the last week of August.

  

• Reading and falling in love with so much 20th century queer lit, and feeling my brain and heart come alive.

• Reading poetry and drinking my tea in the early morning, before looking at my phone or tuning into the outside world, during the Sealey Challenge in August.

  

• Three perfect afternoons spent reading at Wells Provisions, while sipping on rose hibiscus lemonade and eating delicious shrimp and grits.

  

• A cozy March weekend I spent reading graphic novels, including Snapdragon and Garlic and the Vampire.

  

• A June weekend I spent rereading How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, crying, and writing.

• My annual December reread of Circe, and especially the day I finished it, walking along my beloved ridge with my pup, listening to Perdita Weeks narrate the last few paragraphs as the sun set.

  

• Listening to The Lord of the Rings on audio while baking cookies last December.

• The new library: working and reading there, checking out zines from the zine collection, wandering the stacks, picking up holds, sitting on the balcony, and generally reveling in all its gloriousness.

  

If you’d like to share any sweet things from your year, bookish or otherwise, I’d love to hear about them.