Some 2026 Resolutions

Getting my curious squids in a row

Happy New Year! According to the Discworld Almanac, 2026 is the Year of the Curious Squid, a fish apparently quite revolting to eat but easy to catch. Because it’s curious, you see.¹

I’ve never really been one for new year’s resolutions, in part because I’ve never really cared for New Year’s as a holiday or day of celebration. New Year’s Eve, in particular, has long been my least favourite excuse to celebrate—there’s a sort of desperately frantic, every-person-for-themselves² quality to NYE parties, an obligation to outsize merriment³ that wouldn’t be so bad if the venues weren’t so crowded, expensive, and cabs so scarce at the end of the night.⁴

There’s also the simple fact that I’ve been a student or academic since I’ve been out of diapers.⁵ For me, New Year’s Day isn’t January first, it’s the day after Labour Day.

That being said, it’s not as if the ticking over of the year is entirely without meaning for me. And if I’m honest, part of my antipathy to new year’s resolutions lies in the fact that for the better part of my life I’ve been terrible at keeping them. It’s only been in the past few years that my resolutions have actually found resolve. Regular gym-going is one of them—the past three years, the only weeks I haven’t worked out three to six times have been ones where I’m travelling or ill. Getting up early and writing is another one, to the point now where it’s no longer really an effort to roll out of bed at 5am.

And this past year, The Magical Humanist represents another successful resolution. Go me!

So, having accomplished what I consider, in my humble opinion, a quite successful first year in this space, I’m thinking about what I want to accomplish this coming year. What is it I want to do here, and in related projects?

With one year under my belt, I’m cautiously optimistic that The Magical Humanist will have some staying power for at least a few years. One year from today I’ll revisit these resolutions, see how I did, and make some new ones.⁶ I’ll spare you my more personal goals, but here are my aims for The Magical Humanist, my own writing and teaching more generally, and those aspects of my life most closely related to those first two categories.

Maintain the Momentum. I wrote fifty-two posts in 2025—one per week, though not one every week. All, or most, of my instalments here were fairly substantive, as I averaged just over 3700 words per post. Believe it or no, I want to write more here in 2026, though not necessarily in total word count. While I’ll certainly be putting up the usual longish essays, as is my wont, I’ll be trying to mix things up a bit too and intersperse shorter and more occasional pieces. Which leads me to my next resolution, which is to write—

More Occasional Pieces. By which I use “occasional” to mean essays marking an occasion—this moment in history, or commemorating events or certain authors I admire. My first attention-grabbing piece this past year was my essay marking the tenth anniversary of Terry Pratchett’s death; given how central Sir Terry is to this space, I have to imagine that March 12^th will always feature an encomium on him. Beyond that, I was recently reminded that I share a birthday with my favourite poet, W.B. Yeats—look for something on him on January 28. There’s also Bad Poetry Day in August, a host of specific days marked in The Lord of the Rings, or such literary days as St. Crispin’s Day (October 25). I’m not about to go crazy with this, but it’s something to keep the creative juices flowing.

Write About Writing. As I’ve mentioned in a few recent posts, I’m on sabbatical this winter, and my sabbatical project is writing a novel. I don’t know how granular I want to get about the details of my writing process, but there will be a whole host of things running through my mind pertaining to the substance and themes of the novel. Expect them to get an airing here.

Resume the Discworld Rereads. This isn’t so much a resolution as an affirmation. Anybody who subscribed here because of my Discworld content, fear not! My essay on Reaper Man (#11) should see daylight before the end of January. (Hopefully you’ve enjoyed one or two of the essays I’ve posted in the interim, but I’ll be getting back to Sir Terry soonish.)

Read More. My wife and I spent ten days over Christmas at my parents’ house in Ontario, in which time I read four books—two of which were quite chunky (600+ and 400+ pages). Whenever I visit my parents, I read a lot, because that’s how we spend our mornings there; whenever I go on vacation, I read a lot. I read constantly at all other times too, but over the past ten-fifteen years, reading online and doomscrolling has taken up more and more of that energy. One big resolution this year, especially on sabbatical, is devote at least an hour or two a day to sitting in the comfy chair in my office reading—especially the large stack of novels I’ve purchased but haven’t yet cracked. There is, I firmly believe, a much greater benefit to reading physical books, or even just books, period, full books, in any medium or format, than the drive-by piecemeal reading one tends to do online.

Rethink the Classroom. This is a big one, but a slow burn, something to mull over the next eight months. As I’ve written about here—and will continue to write about—the humanities is in a parlous state. Even without the advent of generative A.I., we’d be up against it—some days it seems everything in our current culture and economy is arrayed against focus, thoughtfulness, and the kind of slow, deep, critical reflection that is integral to the study of art, literature, culture, philosophy, history, and so forth; there is little patience for any sort of activity that isn’t easily monetizable, little value placed in intangibles.

But of course, we are beset with generative A.I. It’s already hollowing out students’ reading and writing and research capacities and will only get worse. Even if the A.I. bubble bursts catastrophically and it’s shown to be the delusion it is, LLMs are not likely going anywhere—they’re too convenient, and too many people have already become reliant on them. I fear English classes going forward will become increasingly remedial.

I’ve already started making changes, but a lot more—a LOT more—needs to be done. I’ve been reading some people on this subject (some of them here on Substack), and that will be an increasingly central part of the sabbatical project as the year goes on.

Organize My Books.⁷ I did a very rough count earlier this semester, and I estimate that my personal library—half of which is located at home and the other half in my campus office—currently comprises somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2500 books. I gave up on organizing them in any systematic way a long time ago; for a long while it didn’t really matter, as I could maintain a general sense of where everything was in my head. That’s no longer the case: increasingly I find myself having to hunt for books and forgetting whether they’re at home or on campus and having to spend too much time poring over my shelves (and stacks where they’ve exceeded available shelf space). It’s past time to pull them off the shelves and sort them.⁸

Break Up With Spotify. This one’s been a long time coming. My wife has already gone this route, and after reading Cory Doctorow’s new book Enshittification, I’m now pulling the ripcord too. My relationship to the music I listen to has become terribly attenuated in the streaming universe, especially when almost the entirety of recorded music is available at the slightest whim. Couple that with how little of the money you pay for this convenience goes to the actual musicians, and the fact that Spotify (and streaming more generally) is becoming increasingly glutted with A.I.-generated crap, and I just don’t think that kind of convenience is worth it. Indeed, the very frictionlessness of the service is one of the central problems: I’m of the mixed-tape generation, and the very friction of that sort of physical media is something I miss.

I’m not enough of an audiophile to start buying vinyl, but I’m going to start buying whole albums again. And, yes, online.⁹ It’s not that iTunes is not itself a massive shitshow, but at least paying for music sends somewhat more money in the artists’ direction. My Spotify premium account expires January 4^th; after that, I’m deleting it from my computer.

More Cats. I have been, I realize now, very parsimonious with sharing pictures of my cats. That isn’t fair to any of you, dear Readers. I’ll try to make a point of ending posts with a cat. Today’s is a picture of Catesby at her derpy best.

Happy Year of the Curious Squid, everybody!

NOTES

1. From Jingo, Discworld #21: “He fished for Curious Squid, so called because, as well as being squid, they were curious. That is to say, their curiosity was the curious thing about them. Shortly after they got curious about the lantern that Solid had hung over the stern of his boat, they started to become curious about the way in which various of their number suddenly vanished skywards with a splash. Some of them even became curious – very briefly curious – about the sharp barbed thing that was coming very quickly towards them. The Curious Squid were extremely curious. Unfortunately, they weren’t very good at making connections. It was a very long way to this fishing ground, but for Solid the trip was usually well worth it. The Curious Squid were very small, harmless, difficult to find and reckoned by connoisseurs to have the foulest taste of any creature in the world. This made them very much in demand in a certain kind of restaurant where highly skilled chefs made, with great care, dishes containing no trace of the squid whatsoever.”

2. A friend of mind once summed it up perfectly to me. There are two days of the year, he said, on which you’re under social pressure to enjoy yourself: your birthday and New Year’s Eve. If you’ve got good friends and family, your birthday is easy, because it’s all about you. New Year’s Eve, by contrast, is everybody’s birthday.

3. One resolution for this year: to use the expression “Choreography and Merriment!” more frequently to herald celebration. When Mr. Milchick pronounced this in the final episode of Severance season two’s final episode, then proceeded to dance quite astonishingly with a full marching band, I had three thoughts: (1) “What the actual fuck?”; (2) “I didn’t think it was possible for this season to get any weirder”; and (3) “I am TOTALLY going to proclaim ‘Choreography and Merriment!’ whenever I and my colleagues have an impromptu pub outing. And then promptly forgot until just a few weeks ago.

4. For a long time now, my perfect NYE has been a quiet night in with my partner, cooking an elaborate meal and watching a movie. This year I’m making pasta from scratch for sweet potato ravioli.

5. When I started my first-ever sabbatical, it was jarring to reflect that that September was the first one since I started preschool in which I wasn’t starting new classes, either as a student or a teacher.

6. A practice employed by all my favourite podcasts.

7. That sound you heard just now? That was my wife punching the air and cheering.

8. But Chris, I hear some readers asking, why not just use an e-reader? Well, two reasons: one, I vastly prefer reading physical books—as noted in my resolution to read more, reading actual books, for me, is good for the soul. And two, see the footnote immediately below viz. physical media. Should the apocalypse come and our devices become just so much plastic and silicon, books will be worth their weight in gold (which won’t be much because gold will also be worthless, but you get what I mean).

9. One of the stupidest things my wife and I have done was to throw out our CDs several years ago in a spate of clutter-purging. Between us we had several hundred, none of which we listened to any more as CDs. We thought, reasonably (it seemed at the time), it was silly to have these taking up space. Believe me when I tell you there has been a lot of teeth-gnashing and breast-beating these last few weeks that we didn’t think to invest in space-saving CD binders and just toss the jewel cases. Learn from our error! Don’t dispose of your physical media!