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Some books: I’m not having good luck with books this year! But I read some alright ones! Kiel Phegley, Strikers and Stephanie Hoyt, Prove It and Cat Sebastian, We Could Be So Good.
Some tunes: Games We Play, “Girl Shaped Crater” which i have been listening to on repeat like an insane person. Oh and Kittie’s “We Are Shadows,” which is SO good and also it’s great that while I am experiencing a personal metal revival via this playlist for the 13yo in my heart, so many bands I liked at that age are coming back. And The Decemberists in general, but specifically I’ll Be Your Girl, this time around. 2024! The year I become a Decemberists guy! As I have already said! A lot!
Some eyeball stuff: I am still watching a movie a week and I rewatched The Social Network which is still just phenomenal. Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher, absolute TITANS of film, coming together to make a movie about something as stupid as Facebook lawsuits and every second of it is perfect. Sorkin’s a prick, but that man can write dialogue, babey. And everyone’s just acting the hell out of it. Andrew Garfield’s beautiful face haunted with emotion, Jesse Eisenberg’s blank disinterest that you somehow know is because he’s too busy thinking about something else to be present… Fantastic.
I also watched Poor Things which was so much weirder (POSITIVE!) than I was expecting and while the story was fine to good, the sets and costuming are going to be what really stick for me, just absolutely beautiful and stylized and fun to look at for the whole runtime. Also, Emma Stone was GREAT. I don’t care about awards, but for sure she deserved whichever one of those things she won.
Alright, that’s it! See you next month! Love you!
I know I mentioned The Decemberists’ Hazards of Love the last time around, but I’d only listened through it once, I think, and since then I have listened to it… many more times through. I love an album that really feels like it’s MEANT to be heard as an album and is also good enough to actually bother doing it. I’ve never been a big Decemberists guy though of course like any sane person I do have some favorites including “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” and “Los Angeles, I’m Yours” and though I have given myself some shit for never bothering to investigate further and thus missing out on many years of enjoyment of this album, I also know that with all things, sometimes stuff just comes to you at exactly the right time and 2024 is my year for Hazards of Love, I guess.
And, after listening to I’ll Be Your Girl several times, the Decemberists in general!
I also spent a lot of time this first quarter of the year listening to Metric’s Formentera which is just 48 minutes of strangely danceable beats under kind of bleak lyrics, which feels appropriate for the world where we’re living in. “All Comes Crashing” kind of kicks my ass like brand new every time – When push it comes to shove / We do not fall out of love / We double down, we do not fade / For all I know / This might be my last night / If that’s how it goes, there’s no one / I would rather be lying beside – like, good god damn, folks!
I also got super into Art of Doubt, so perhaps 2024 is the year of the Decemberists and Metric? Sounds good!
One of my resolutions this year was to watch one movie a week and that’s been going pretty good! I’m ~allowed to rewatch, so I have hit some favorites, but we recently watched The Bodyguard on a whim and it ripped.
Every time I watch a Kevin Costner movie I’m just a little bit amazed that at one point he was basically like, THE biggest movie star in the world and could pretty much do anything he wanted because he’s just not really that good looking (though handsome and human in a way that I feel kind of disappeared from big movies because everything’s a comic book movie and everyone’s ripped and jawsome) and he’s really not particularly charismatic or compelling and YET! By the end of the movie you’re pretty much sold on him and it’s kind of inexplicable and wild tbh.
This one had all the pieces though: Whitney is so beautiful and the songs are so good and all the pieces work just right — hearing “I Will Always Love You” at the bar… CINEMA! — and the harrowing rescue at The Mayan Theater… what a SCENE! It wasn’t necessarily good by any real definition, but it was a MOVIE, and everyone had human looking teeth instead of bathroom tile veneers and I will take what I can get in this day and age.
Also men should always be cutting fruit with a knife in their hand and eating it from the blade. Things would be better if they did.
Okay, that’s all for now! Bye!
Rereading the Captive Prince series – These were a great time the first time around and even without a family emergency making me desperate for a distraction, they were great the second time around as well. These books understand the beats they need to hit and they hit the absolute shit out of them.
Tunes: The Last Dinner Party’s Prelude to Ecstasy, The Decemberists’ Hazards of Love, Momzer’s “Coyotes and Snakes” (this is an old grad school professor’s band! lmao), Green Day’s Saviors, Kim Petras’ “Head Head Honcho”, “16 Carriages” (duh), French 79, and an ever growing playlist of stuff I listened to in my youth.
Also as inspired by a longtime internet friend, I have been listening to a new song every day and a lot of those have been winners.
The 2024 NHL All Star Festivities, my annual love, but in particular the Skills Competition.
Okay, that’s all I got for today! Love you!
It’s 2024! I want to get back to sharing stuff I liked! LFG!!
I read 120 books in 2023 — 31 of which I did DNF — and though I don’t put a lot of stake in star ratings generally, I did give four of those books five stars, basically meaning that I loved them a lot and also thought they were exceptionally well made.
Ryan Andrews’ This Is Our Pact is a graphic novel with a nice story about a kid getting lost in the woods and the fantastical things he encounters therein. It’s done in an extremely limited color palette and yet manages to be so unbelievably beautiful, I spent many long minutes just staring at panels in awe.
Parini Shroff’s Bandit Queens is the most fun I’ve had with a horrifying situation in a long time! I loved the premise as blurbed, but by the end of actually reading it I was just obsessed. Probably my most successfully and frequently recommended book this year.
Kevin Wilson’s Now Is Not the Time to Panic is the book I loved most that I was most surprised by because I thought the plot sounded a little thin, but the characters here are so compelling and the narrative voice so engaging that I ended up absolutely delighted.
Manon Steffan Ros’ The Blue Book of Nebo is the most emotional suffering I’ve endured in just 120 pages in my life. The narrative voices are great — and the alternating POVs worked exceptionally well — and the bit about the hare… Really enduringly painful.
Honorable mentions to Cat Sebastian’s Tommy Cabot Was Here, Isaac Blum’s The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen, Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, Kiku Hughes’ Displacement, Alice Winn’s In Memoriam, Stephanie Clifford’s The Farewell Tour, Sacha Lamb’s When the Angels Left the Old Country, Lisabeth Posthuma’s Baby and Solo, Clare Pooley’s Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting, John Allison’s Giant Days series, and Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, which I am still working my way through but enjoyed reading immensely to close out the year.
Also a full solo paragraph shoutout to Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse books. I read the first one in like, 2015, and for some reason got a bug up my ass to read the rest this year (probably because of Libby tbh!) and I had a fantastic time. These are not good books, though they are sometimes better than average, but I really loved Sookie and her goofy-ass world and even when the books were bad, I had a fun time. Nothing was a graver disappointment to me this year than watching True Blood and seeing how little of what made Harris’ books worth my time made it to screen.
I read a lot this year and I reviewed every single one of them, so I’d call 2023 a success! I only recently like, absorbed the fact that I guess a lot of people are weirdly competitive about the Goodreads yearly challenge? And/Or beat themselves up about it really badly? So I am here to tell you not to do that! Reading should be fun or challenging in a way you find satisfying, not a chore. I set a goal because I like reading and it makes me a better writer and it makes all my neurons feel more active and zippy, but I don’t feel bad if I don’t hit my goal. If you do, don’t set one! Or set a really low one! Reading good! Feeling bad bad!
I didn’t really watch anything at all in 2023 or at least nothing worth noting. I have been using Letterboxed like a good little person addicted to sharing their opinions compulsively on the internet, but it’s mostly me saying, “I watched this movie when I was twelve and it’s still pretty good,” so. I did watch Bros which I thought was really charming and funny, and also No One Will Save You, which I absolutely L-O-V-E-D. I thought Metal Lords was also a really great time that nailed being a teenager in a very specific way. Honorable mentions to The Dirt, Heaven Help Us, and My Bodyguard, which I also enjoyed a lot!
The only TV I watched this year was True Blood, as previously mentioned, and I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone, so. Alexander Skarsgård F-O-R-E-V-E-R though.
Oh wait, I also watched the second season of Shoresy which was fine if not as transcendental as the first, and also I think we watched some Game Changer, which I do genuinely love.
As surely you know if you’re reading this, I did make a playlist every month in 2023 — shoutout to March and July and October in particular — and I listened to a lot of music — 83,911 minutes as of Spotify Wrapped time supposedly — but not as much or as intentionally as is usual for me. (Something I’d like to change in 2024!) Mostly I just listened to “Naive” by the Kooks a lot and also “The Way You Do the Things You Do” by UB40 for some reason?
But I did get pretty into Screaming Females (who then broke up!) and Glass Animals a bit and Tigercub and the Linda Lindas and I think listened to “Ottawa Rockstar” by WHALESTALK way more than I think Spotify actually credited me with. Why they’d lie I don’t know but it’s suspicious. I also listened to Weezer and the Cure a lot, but Spotify said I listened to Fall Out Boy more than any other band but I don’t even remember listening to them almost at all (I didn’t like the new album, booooooo me.) so… What is the truth?
Other stuff: these shorts from Target, traditional Carmex in the jar, the Edmonton Oilers, birria tacos, letting Crystal cut my hair, NARS soft matte tinted lip balm, seeing the nothern lights from my backyard, sourdough toast with fig jam and salami, getting back into comics some, sitting in a bathtub staring at MPLS when the Panthers eliminated the Bruins, Donut County, being cancer free enough that my doctor said she could – quote- ‘start treating me like a regular patient’ – unquote, Good and Gather Double Chocolate Chunk Granola with Noosa Vanilla, checking out books from the library via Libby, paying $50 a year for a Queens Public Library card (though because of bullshit budget cuts the benefits have decreased significantly), tteokbokki, Unpacking (which, to be fair, I might have played in 2022), being able to ask Crystal to draw me stuff because she’s gotten so good, meeting two of my favorite friends IRL for the first time and getting to surprise them with hockey tickets right behind the bench, Odd Mart, and the Savannah Bananas.
Okay, thank you for joining me on this journey! I know I will enjoy many more things to come in 2024 and hopefully I will, like, actually share them! ♥
It really seemed like things were getting better there for a minute, didn’t it?
Anyway! In the spaces between my brain going, “We :) are :) living :) through :) a :) plague :),” I have tried to compile some of the stuff I loved best this year! I did a lot of music listening and a lot of reading and not a lot of much else, so let’s see where 2021 shook out!
  I didn’t read my first KJ Charles this year, but I did get very into Spectred Isle and Slippery Creatures which I did read in 2021. Charles has a masterful way with both worldbuilding — something I don’t usually care about since I’m not a supernatural/historical/scifi/fantasy person! — and romantic tension, but also manages dialogue that’s fun and snappy without feeling forced between characters that are likable and interesting.
  My most listened to artist according to Spotify this year was The Tragically Hip which is absolutely true, and I got into quite a few other artists this year — Goat Girl, Deaf Poets, Father John Misty, Shakey Graves, Tyler Childers, Meg Myers — but I think the album I listened to most — and often started over from the beginning as soon as it ended — was Miya Folick’s Premonitions. Every song is great and the album as a whole works incredibly well and I couldn’t be more grateful to the algorithm serving it to me, even if it was a couple years late. I’d be remiss not to shoutout the live version of “Thingamajig” which puts me through an emotional blender every. single. time.
 My favorite book this year was Elif Batuman’s The Idiot which took me almost two years to finish, but only due to a mix of personal problems and the whole world going to hell. It’s an exceptional book, somehow about nothing and everything simultaneously, funny and really heartfelt, thoughtful about the experiences of a young adulthood that looked nothing like mine and yet still managed to be incredibly relatable. As previously noted on Twitter, I cannot properly express how hard or how many times I’ve laughed at, “Dracula had a totally different experience at the zoo from that of other people.” 
I read a ton of queer sports romances this year, both while on my Unlimited Summer 2021 journey and not, and though most of them were fine to very bad, I did read quite a few that were great.
    
Rachel Reid’s books are all very solid, but I was particularly fond of Heated Rivalry and Role Model and I think Ilya Rozanov is going to go down as one of my favorite characters in the last five years, easily. A.L. Heard’s Hockey Bois was the best book with a bad title I read this year, charming and sweet and very much about the romance of adult domesticity. Ashlyn Kane and Morgan James’ Winging It was also really charming with a fun cast and some good hockey cameos. Cait Nary’s Season’s Change was a dream, one of my favorite reads this year, full of characters I loved and cared about and with sharp writing better than basically everything else I’ve seen in the genre. Sorry you have to wait ’til February to read it!
Some other stuff I’ve loved this year, both new and more deeply: this vertical mouse, All or Nothing: Toronto Maple Leafs, these maxi dresses, sitting the fuck down whenever humanly possible, these food storage containers, Flipped, this goofy light, baseball — particularly the Dodgers and the Padres, Kringle Cream, Fear Street: 1994, these reusable water bottles, Walking Alice on YouTube, sleeping under this weighted blanket, laying down on the floor in a pile of pillows, Paramount+, these sweaters and these cropped hoodies from Target, and the Minnesota Wild.
Happy almost New Year! Here’s to high hopes and low expectations for 2022! I hope this year treats you kinder than the last and I hope you’re kinder to yourself than you ever have been before. I love you! Be safe! ♥
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