2025 was a year like any other. I’m terrible at writing these retrospectives, hence why it’s already February and I’m just now publishing it. Which is worse, posting a year in review in two a month after the year starts, or sending out the yearly wrapped/recap/some-other-fancy-name two months before the year even ends?
Jonathan Snook opened his 2024 recap post musing, Sometimes I wonder if doing these recap posts at this point are masturbatory. It’s a great opening and the statement is not without truth. His recaps are a bit more introspective than mine, where I just compile my consumption habits for the previous year, and who else is really interested in that besides me?
It’s been far too long since I’ve done a personal year in review. Let’s take a look back at what I read, listened to, and watched in 2023. Reading I read forty-three books in 2023! That’s a total of 13,759 pages, with an average book length of 320 pages. The shortest book was 21 pages (Clap Back, by Nalo Hopkinson), while the longest book was 608 pages (Death’s End, by Cixin Liu).
2020 was quite a year, wasn’t it? Last year’s roller coaster both thrilled and nauseated me, and at different times made me happy, sad, depressed, confused, excited, fulfilled, overjoyed, and despaired. Is that enough adjectives? Those will have to do, because 2020 brought on so many different emotions that my vocabulary is not large enough to describe it.
Music was a bit of a mixed bag for me in 2019. I listened to less music than usual because my commute was reduced drastically, so I had less time to check out new music and rediscover old favorites. However, music brought me one of proudest moments of the year when my daughter randomly said to me, “I need to listen to more Rapsody.
As the decade draws to a close, I thought I’d make a list of some of my favorite books, albums, and movies released or published in the 2010s. For when the dog bites. And the bee stings. In no particular order: Books Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates The Sellout, Paul Beatty The Storied Life of A.