2017 was a sad year for me. I lost three very good men who were central to my life, my family, my history. It made no sense. It made me angry. It made me numb. Every book I read tasted like cardboard. Every song reeked of cheap sentiment. Television series and movies all felt too glossy, contrived. I was bereft of my usual comforts and pleasures.

Then along came The Stars are Legion.  I don’t think I need to describe this book — Kameron Hurley has rightly won prizes and plaudits and widespread recognition for her all-female space opera. I don’t want to talk too much about the politics of the work either — Hurley’s exploration of the relationship between power, sex and violence was interesting but not entirely unexpected. Her philosophical contemplations ran deeper — the concept of total recycling and women giving birth to parts of a world was perfect fictional musing for the existentialist in all of us — but that was still not what hooked me on this work. What I really loved was the way that Hurley’s powerful evocation of emotion under pressure — anger, despair, passion, compassion — managed to budge my frozen heart and blow out the cobwebs settling into my mind.

Suddenly I could feel and think again.  Women fighting futile and inexplicable battles against enemies they don’t fully understand, in the name of misguided ideologies and loyalties, for the sake of saving a world that is randomly cruel and falling apart anyway. Death on every page, death of the body, death of the planet, death of dreams, death of relationships. Talk about parallels with absolutely everything. I stayed awake at nights for a week completing this book. I was of course awaiting some kind of pay off — rebirth, realization, hope — and luckily I got it. This is a book that has strangely helped me to accept and process the inevitable cycle of life.

At around the same time that I completed The Stars are Legion I finally found something that was emotionally, politically, and philosophically compelling to view as well. After spending too much time bingeing on Netflix series that feel generic to me — too slick, too many hooks, no true end in sight, just a never-ending bag of glossy tricks that didn’t satisfy — I discovered a BBC1 (UK) box-set of a six-part drama series called Broken.  This is the story of a flawed (but decent) Catholic priest who is struggling with his faith as he attempts to help parishioners in one of the poorest of northern neighborhoods. There is a single mother struggling both to make ends and to curb her temper, there is a woman with a humiliating secret planning suicide, there is a mother seeking justice for her mentally ill son, shot dead by the police, and there is the policeman struggling with his conscience. Those are just the main characters. Every single person on screen matters in this drama — every single human interaction reveals a little something about the nature of our endless human struggle with forces both without and within. Television drama used to be like this — writ on a smaller scale, digging deeper, speaking to things we know or want to know, giving us pause rather than cheap distraction. Written by one of the keenest observers of the English class system — Jimmy McGovern — and with a cast led by Sean Bean and Anna Friel I cannot recommend Broken highly enough. It is not a Netflix series. You will have to work a little harder to get it, same as you will have to work a little harder to watch it, but I like to think that you will feel better for it. I did. I felt genuinely uplifted by it.

In a year filled with bitter-sweet memories I sought out new, not old music. No endless replays of David Bowie and Tom Petty for me.  Instead I looked for music that would not remind me of anything, music that would take me elsewhere. Shazam helped. I would sit in bars and cafes, point my phone at the speaker and discover new tracks. This is how I found Alice Merton, a German-Irish singer-song writer, who sounds more like Sia than Sinead. Her debut single, No Roots, is a brightly soulful number that will have your shoulders dancing in spite of yourself. In a year when I had no choice but to confront the practical and emotional consequences of a nomadic life this song spoke to my soul.  Rather than choose to be sad about her own lack of deep geographic roots, Merton embraces a life in motion. No Roots is a song of honesty, reflection and acceptance. It is my song of 2017.

Happy New Year, Fellow Aqueductistas.

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Ambling Along the Aqueduct