January's Pairing: Isabella Hammad & Laurent Saillard Pineau d'Aunis.

On reading and drinking across the year and already picking favorites.

I entered the year reading the same book I exited the old with. The last days of 2023 crept by without much reading or drinking—my body seized with an amorphous anxiety and possible brief bout of stomach flu. And because “I saw virtue in being true to myself, and to my shapeless inner turmoil” I did not read as swiftly as I usually do, and packed the book with me (for an undefined, or yet to be determined length of time trip) unfinished. It was in this transitional, transitory head space that I started and finished, on either side of the year, Isabella Hammad’s¹ Enter Ghost.