Hi!
Like many people, I like to reflect on the art and culture that most made an impact on me over the year. Because I take in so much art in the course of an average year, I don’t think in terms of “favorites.” (One of my crankiest opinions is that nobody over the age of six should have a favorite movie or book.) But I want to acknowledge the stuff that stuck with me. At the same time, I’m not reading or watching as much as I used to. So this isn’t anywhere near a comprehensive year-end list so much as an abbreviated diary entry.
If you want to read more about any of these pieces of art, I wrote about almost all of them in this very newsletter over the past year and you can find the original posts in my archive.
The Best Reading Experience of the Year
For the first time in a while, one reading experience stood way out above the rest: Anna North’s novel Bog Queen. It braids together three narratives that eventually reveal the secrets of a young woman’s millennia-old, perfectly preserved body that is accidentally found in a bog during a murder investigation. I’ve already given this one as a gift several times and I’ve heard no complaints from anyone else who’s read it at my recommendation.
Honorary mentions for this year include Patricia Lockwood’s hilarious and somehow weirdly tense Covid-era novel Will There Ever Be Another You, and Jon Raymond’s outstanding God and Sex, both of which rattle around in my head at the weirdest times.
The Comic That Stuck With Me
I can’t stop thinking about Jesse Lonergan’s Drome, a death-metal graphic novel epic that is the most joyously experimental book to come out in a very long time.
Additionally, I absolutely loved G. Willow Wilson’s latest comic with artist M.K. Perker, The Stoneshore Register, which is about a refugee who goes to work for a dying newspaper in a weird and magical coastal Washington town. And just last week I read Brian K. Vaughan and artist Niko Henrichon’s astounding Spectators, which is an incredibly horny book-length novel about two ghosts who bond over watching living people have sex while the world around them ends in just about the dumbest way possible. It’s a blend of Terry Southern, Kurt Vonnegut, and Milo Manara’s erotic comics work, and I think it’s going to stick with me for a long time.
The Music That I Kept on Repeat
In the end, it was kind of not a great year for music! I fell in love early on this year with FKA Twigs’s album Eusexua, and it turns out that no other album came close to that one in terms of repeat listening. Even her companion album to Eusexua that came out last month, Eusexua Afterglow, failed to capture the compulsive listenability of the original album.
I found some singles that worked for me throughout the year, of course, but the only other albums that found themselves working into my regular rotation were HAIM’s I Quit and Noah Cyrus’s second album I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me.
And of course Kesha continues to be my most-listened artist. It’s good to have her back making bangers on the regular.
The Most Enjoyable Podcast of the Year
Just at the end of the year, tiny local news podcasting empire CityCast finally launched a Seattle edition, and it’s become a daily listen for me. It’s a roundtable format show in which a rotating cast of smart local media types opine on the latest local headlines, and while I dutifully listen to many news podcasts, I actually look forward to listening to this one every morning.
Other than that, it’s been an abysmal year for podcasts. Aside from CityCast, I haven’t found any other entertaining or interesting new shows all year long. And many of the podcasts that I regularly listen to have pivoted to video this year, which means I spend a good deal of time listening to people talk about things that I can’t see. It’s possible that video is going to kill the utility and enjoyability of podcasts for me within the next couple of years.
Which is a shame! Podcasting is a medium that felt at its best like the golden age of blogging—inventive, irreverent, and indispensable. But now the medium is finally being monetized to death.
The Movie I Can’t Stop Thinking About
Man, I still think about One Battle After Another multiple times a day. What a huge, weird, satisfying accomplishment of a movie. I love Paul Thomas Anderson even though some of his movies don’t click for me—what the fuck even was Licorice Pizza?—but with this one, he’s made a lifelong fan who will go to the theater on opening weekend every time.
But it’s been a pretty great year for excellent movies. Sinners, Weapons, and Sorry, Baby were all stellar movies that I’ll revisit in years to come. And the comic book nerd in me was giddy over Superman being done right after many dark decades of filmmakers fumbling the character.
But with all that said, it seems like middle-of-the-road movies are actively getting worse, on average. Bland movies like Ballerina or M3gan 2.0 feel simultaneously rushed and ponderous, hitting all the necessary marks with zero flair or artfulness. Genre fare feels less curious and more safe with each passing year. Or maybe I’m getting older and crankier.
And Then There’s TV
I watched a lot of stuff that I liked ok, but the two biggest hits for me were sci-fi shows on Apple TV: The second season of Severance and the first season of Pluribus. Both shows attracted some criticism for being willfully slow and taking time to unpack their central mysteries, but I’m a hundred percent on board for both. Let’s allow TV to be more like novels, okay? Weirder and slower is just fine with me.
Also, Netflix’s Death By Lightning, a four-part miniseries about the assassination of President Garfield, was a tremendously fun and funny historical drama. Sure, it simplified some of the details and overexplained itself in the first episode. But you can’t argue with Michael Shannon (playing a good guy for once,) Nick Offerman, Bradley Whitford, Matthew Macfayden, and Shea “goddamn” Wigham starring as the villain of the piece, Roscoe “goddamn” Conkling.
And Finally, Let’s Talk About Socks
Yes, socks. Two weeks ago, my pair of Danish Endurance quarter pro sports socks came out of the laundry with a hole in them. Ordinarily, that would not be the inciting incident for a recommendation. But I wore that pair of socks on almost every one of my long walks, virtually every Saturday for four years. That’s literally thousands of miles, followed by a washing and drying before going out on the road again. Put another way, that pair of socks almost circumnavigated the globe with me before they gave out.
The socks were so trusty and reliable that I just stopped thinking about them. But now I’ve ordered other styles of Danish Endurance socks for everyday use, and I’m just as happy with those socks as I am with the original pair. Forget Darn Tough and just say no to Bombas—Danish Endurance socks are the best I’ve ever worn.
That’s All for This Year
Thanks for reading this far! I’d love to hear any enthusiastic 2025 recommendations you simply can’t keep to yourself. And I hope you’ve had a great holiday season and that your New Year’s Eve and Day are splendid. I’ll see you later on in January.
Paul
Paul Constant 