My favorite discovery of 2010 was Meghan Daum. Her first book was a collection of essays called My Misspent Youth, and I read it this year at once aghast that I hadn’t known about it before, and grateful to be able to come to it both fresh and late. Soon after, I sat on a beach in Maine, where the pretty scenery had a hard time competing for my attention with Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in that House, Daum’s wrenching, funny memoir of real estate obsession and a more undefinable search for that thing called home. When I got back from that vacation, I put off more pressing reading responsibilities in favor of Daum’s novel The Quality of Life Report, which I loved hard and got sort of stuck in my head. A couple months after that reading binge, Daum almost died when she came down with a rare case of typhus. I’m so, so glad—in that slightly embarrassing but wonderfully pure way that we tend to feel about people we have a sense of devotion and connection to because they’ve given us great writing—that she’s okay.

I found out about Daum, in part, because I was following the coverage of Emily Gould’s memoir And The Heart Says Whatever, a book Daum blurbed and which was positioned as a sort of heir of My Misspent Youth. I was annoyed by the New York feature that seemed to draw slightly lazy parallels between the two smart, pretty lady writers, but having read both their books, it was less far off than I wanted to believe it was. Anyway, I loved Gould’s book. I cried at the end.

Aimee Bender’s aching novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake was probably my favorite fiction of the year, though I’ve been (a bit belatedly) wrapped up in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom for the past week, and am finding it as amazing and painful and funny and generally genius as everyone promised it would be. I’m  torn about whether to huddle up with the last 75 pages of it before going out to celebrate the end of 2010, or whether to savor it a bit into the new year. This year I also read Philip Roth’s absolutely incredible and in no way overrated American Pastoral, making it kind of a big year in my life for big books by Great American Writers about sadly falling apart families and suburbia and idealism and trying hard to be good and do right by the world.

I also really enjoyed Elif Batuman’s justly praised The Possessed, and Sara Marcus’s vivd, impressive history of riot grrrl, Girls to the Front. I read a lot this year, and wrote about a lot of what I read, but as I’ve been reading Freedom I’ve been craving more reading experiences like it—not more books like it, which would be unfair and impossible, but time spent absorbed in books without worrying about taking notes and forming serious opinions about them. It’s getting harder and harder for me to read without doing that, which I’m okay with, and mostly can’t stop myself from doing anyway—until I let a story take me away without feeling any responsibility towards it, and remember what it was like to stay in bed all day with a book when I was a kid, not worrying what would come next.

For many years, I loved New Year’s Eve. I made a habit/ritual of remembering where I was and who I was with and what I did every December 31st, and mentally, somewhat masochistically, running through it every year. I was also the unofficial repository for other people’s basic recollections of those occasions, sometimes called on to remind everyone where we’d been the year (or 2 or 3) before. At some point in college I stopped being able to remember (possibly around the New Year’s spent at Alice’s parents’ house, getting drunk and then sick from too many—but not really that many!—margaritas). But I cared about doing this so much that the habit of loving the holiday naturally carried over, after the night stopped feeling quite so promising and important, through several years of doing not much and then being disappointed when something magic and memorable failed to materialize. This year I feel like I’ve finally sort of reconciled with all that. I’m putting on a new dress and going out. It’ll be fun, but more because it’s Friday than because of anything truly meaningful. (Which, to be optimistic in a resolution-y kind of way, might be the healthier outlook.) But I will be pulling out my notebook later this weekend and trying to account for all the years I used to remember, because I still can’t quite help myself.