Less news, more books! This year, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century taught me more than a thousand digital quick takes, while the first volumes of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle offered more psychological insight than the whole of Twitter. Instead of frying my brain with monkey-at-typewriter thinkpieces affixed with click-chasing headlines (the wonderful Guardian, of course, never stoops so low), in 2015 I’m committed to slowing down my information intake – and accepting that the codex, with no disruptive hyperlinks and no panoptic Chartbeat trackers, is actually a superior form of information technology.  I’m absolutely committed to reading all of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels this winter ... an Italian escape into the power and constructs of female friendship seems like just the thing to help sustain me until the warmer temperatures return.  To try to experience art and theater in smaller venues where assignments don’t necessarily take me. There are revolutionary things happening in smaller opera venues like the Industry in Los Angeles that have strong implications for the future of the art form.  My new year’s resolution is to watch more movies when they are in theaters. I tend to see films on Netflix, HBO, or airplanes months after everyone has already seen them, which leaves me open to spoilers. Plus, when I admitted to Jim Jarmusch that I had seen his film Only Lovers Left Alive on a plane, he gave me the dirtiest look ever. Next year: watching movies in the theater, FTW.  I promise that in 2015, I am finally going to watch The Americans. I was sceptical of the first season, but now that all the critics are loving this show, I just feel woefully behind. I see a giant binge in my future where I mainline the first two seasons of this FX show about Russian spies in 80s America before the third season starts on January 28th.  My cultural new year’s resolution is to see more live theatre, and I’m going to start by following Sheila Heti’s All Our Happy Days Are Stupid to New York to watch its off-Broadway debut in February. Canadian theatre is something I love, but at the moment I support it more in theory than in practice. This year I’d like to skip buying a few boring drinks out and save some of my meagre income for a good theatre ticket every now and then.  Life is beginning to seem too short for any number of long novels, but Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is my project for 2015. Also quitting social media. Wait, I already did that a few weeks ago. I guess rejoining social media, so I can quit again by midsummer.  I ramped up my freelance career and in the process, I lost time to simply relax with a good book. I used to read one to two books a week, but these days I’m lucky if I can squeeze that many in a month. But I’m not interested in stuffing myself with the latest releases. This is the year to finish reading the rest of Toni Morrison and Colette’s catalogue.  To find censored versions of all my favorite rap songs, so my three-year-old can enjoy them as much as I do. Plus, the censored versions can be more fun, like “I’m not a player I just crush a lot” or “Shame on a Nuh.” My wife should be happy. Just don’t quote me, boy, I ain’t said nothin’ yet.  To see every Oscar-nominated movie so I can school (and then lord my victories over) anyone who’s ever beat me in the Oscar pool. Watch yourselves.  I’m going to watch more foreign films. I don’t like reading subtitles, which has led me to avoid them. As a result, I’m rather horribly ignorant of great works of art spoken in languages other than English and French. It’s time to fix that.  Social media is like a swarm of termites chomping through the wood that is my time. I must get this under control before I lose my mind. I need to learn how to dip my toe into Twitter and Facebook maybe once or twice a day, engage with whatever is happening, and then get out. It isn’t just that hashtags anger up the blood and cloud the mind; there are real consequences. One direct result of wasting hours arguing with strangers (and, to be fair, punning with friends) is that I’ve read fewer books in 2014 than in any of my post-Dr Seuss years. This needs to change. It will change. There’s no reason why I can’t maintain a busy job as a film critic and also maintain my literacy. There are too many Penguin Classics I bought as an undergrad with their spines unbent on my shelf. That ends in 2015.
Never mind getting fit or giving up smoking, will this be the year you finally read In Search of Lost Time? Our critics share the arts-related things they’re determined to do in 2015