a few of my favorite things (2024)

not a gift guide, I'm sorry to say

I am the person who never tires of year-end lists, who wants to see every detail of your Spotify wrapped, and who (despite being a largely terrible and unmotivated gift giver) reads all the curated gift guides, even for niche profiles that will never fit me. If you are also this kind of person, here’s my year-end best-of for you.

• Substack stats would say my best post was the most recent one, viewed some 3500 times: Why Go to Church, Anyway? (Incidentally, the least read post, at 899 views, was The books I read in Greece, but if you think that’s going to make me stop writing such posts, think again.)

• Of the 44 books I added to my read-in-2024 list, the only ones I unreservedly love are:

  • Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, in which a woman in Australia moves into a convent after half a life of ecological activism. She prays and cooks and cuts down on the convent’s single-use plastics, and tries to eradicate a plague of mice that descends. In understated prose, these quiet events still somehow become compelling, and raise the kinds of questions I’m always asking: What matters, really? What does it mean to be good? Activism? Prayer? Global? Local?

  • All the Living by C.E. Morgan. After agonizing over dozens of books for our Advent book club at church, when it came time to choose, this was the only one I wanted to re-read, and I think it’s because the prose was beautiful and because while the land and its scape were major characters, there was nothing agenda-driven about the story. It was a controversial pick. “A romance!” one woman proclaimed. “Depressing!” another declared. “It has me absolutely mesmerized,” said a third. “I’m going to read it again.”

  • The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics by Mari Joerstad. I had dipped into this at different points over the last few years, but after Helene I sat down and read it from beginning to end, and I am working on letting its ideas reshape my brain.

  • Unalone by Jessica Jacobs, poems in conversation with Genesis that help me stay in conversation with it, too. But obviously I’m biased.

• This band you’ve probably never heard of.

• Other albums: those from Chappell Roan, Gillian Welch, MJ Lenderman, Charli xcx, Waxahatchee, Adrienne Lenker, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Vampire Weekend, Laura Marling, and Cassandra Jenkins. Here’s a playlist of my favorite songs released in 2024. It’s really good.

• Seeing live music: Katy Kirby, Waxahatchee, Nickel Creek and Kacey Musgraves, and MJ Lenderman (I write by faith; we will see him on Saturday). We were supposed to see Vampire Weekend, cancelled due to Helene; and Gillian Welch rescheduled for 2025.

• I was a little guarded when it came to Illinoise, because I didn’t want something I love so much to be marred. I probably should have written more about it this summer, but I was worried about beginning to become a parody of myself. For now, I’ll just say that it was beautiful; and experiencing it alongside my sister and my daughter was some strange outside of time gorgeousness I would not trade.

• I watched My Old Ass on the laptop in bed with Jack and quietly wept. We saw Wicked in a run-down theater in small town Kentucky alongside some of our favorite performers who originated the roles for the Broadway Children’s Theatre back in 2019. And Fall Guy with Rosie at Asheville Pizza and Brewing was surprisingly charming. Did I see any other movies this year? I have no idea.

• The absolute best tv shows of the year for me were Hacks (which was also on this list last year, may Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder live forever) and English Teacher — the new sitcom from Brian Jordan Alvarez, whom I’ve loved on TikTok for a while now for his impressions of elementary school teachers and waitresses in the south. There was a scene in the pilot of English Teacher where two teachers in the cafeteria talk about students being “less woke” (“he said I had to teach ‘both sides’ of the Spanish Inquisition, he got so upset, he started crying…”) that felt so real and so hilarious that I was won over completely before we were five minutes into the show.

  • And recently I have also enjoyed: Man on the Inside, the new Michael Shur undercover spy in a nursing home show; Shrinking, a show that wonders how messed up your therapist is, with an incredible cast and funny lines and sometimes some cheap emotional moves; and Colin from Accounts.

  • Can I also say how much I have been grateful for the mid-tv fare that sometimes my whole family can watch together, that requires no brain cells and is only ever mildly entertaining? Here I mean Matlock, High Potential, Elsbeth, The Diplomat, Only Murders (yes, it’s mid), and maybe even Young Sheldon.

  • Let me not fail to praise the tv show wherein every episode is the same, and I fall asleep before it’s twenty-two minutes have ended: Frasier.

• Similarly, TikTok. Like a cliche, I downloaded it during the pandemic, and now I actually love the comedic clips and bits of songs and relaxing cooking montages and finally I’m on quilttok and crafttok, too.

• Dressing like a woman in a 90s Christmas movie. I realized, as I put on a “vintage” dress from maybe 1990 earlier this week, that especially at Christmas, I like to dress as if I could be a mom in a Christmas movie from my childhood. Give me a long dress, a paisley print, a men’s button-down, some black tights. An oversized velvet collar, a trench, a French braid, a matching sweatsuit and a sweater with sleeves big enough to hold all my secrets.
  

  

  

• This year I bought an armless chair, which apparently is called a gamer’s chair. I do not game. But I do like to sit crosslegged at my desk, and I kept bruising my thighs on the plastic arms of the previous chair.

• Solo hikes.

  

  
  

• Embarrassingly, this linen two piece set from amazon. I have it in black and blue.

• Seeing Mary.
  

  

  

• Visiting Texas. Not moving there. Do not recommend. But visiting, when the bluebonnets are in bloom? Yes.

• Teenagers in foreign countries. I’m actually not jealous that Scott is taking the adults to Scotland. Would rather travel with teenagers any day, especially if they’re like the ones I took to Greece.

• Having a second home. Not, to be clear, a vacation home. Not a beach house. But another place that feels like a place you belong, where you can go almost any time you need to? This is a great thing to have.

• Candles. Electricity, it turns out, is not so reliable.

  

  

• Water stations.

  

• Quilt pieces, and other scrappy projects.

  

  

  
  (You can find a dozen tutorials for making a utensil roll to keep in your bag for when plastic is the only offered option. Like this one.)

• This year I have loved preaching (and teaching preaching, which I did for the hybrid Mdiv at Duke). I don’t like re-watching myself, but here’s the first sermon I preached after Helene.

• When we put the basement back together after the flood, I decided it was time to commit to having a writing desk again. I have loved it, and also felt it glaring at me.

Time to go to a holiday party. Don’t worry, I’m wearing Advent blue.
Tell me your favorite things so I can sneakily check my messages and avoid people at the party.

xx

Amy
PS: Buy people copies of my books for Christmas.
Dangerous Territory is now available in an updated second edition and as an audiobook! Buy it in paperback or ebook at Bookshop, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.
Where Goodness Still Grows is available wherever books are sold.