I tried again and failed to top the Christmas poem I wrote previously, so if you’re feeling in the mood to read something Christmassy, you can check that out here. I’ll try again in 2024!
MY YEAR IN MEDIA
BOOKS
I did a ton of reading in 2023, mostly listening actually, while I do chores or yard work or take care of a rowdy toddler, but still, I burned through a lot of books that way. Here’s my top five I read this year (not all were written this year and they’re in no particular order):
DARK EDEN by Chris Beckett - A spaceship crash lands on a distant world with no sun, the only light provided by glowing organisms that cover the surface. Hundreds of years later, the story centers on the descendants of the original three stranded astronauts. Inbred, superstitious, primitive and yet courageous, kind-hearted (some of them) and curious, the descendants have built a budding new civilization, twisted the original stranded astronauts into myths, and got a lot of strange ideas into their heads about how to behave. A stunning funhouse mirror vision of unbreakable and incorrigible humanity. Breathtaking.
RECURSION by Blake Crouch - A scientist invents a machine that can alter the fabric of reality using people’s memories. From there, all hell breaks loose. Impossible to categorize, summarize, or put down. Owes a debt to Octavia Butler’s “The Lathe of Heaven”, but a worthy successor, and there is no higher praise.
SEA OF RUST by Robert Cargill - Verner Vinge is the master of making an alien being a main character and yet somehow making the alien relatable and sympathetic and getting you completely on board with their story. (See A FIRE UPON THE DEEP, which I didn’t read this year but is an all-time classic.) With this book, Robert Cargill has done the same for a robot. Post-apocalyptic, inhuman yet almost unbearably human, thrilling, literary yet with a plot that never flags for a moment. A must read, and I have a lot of Cargill’s other books in my queue for 2024.
THE END OF ETERNITY by Isaac Asimov - Superficially similar to RECURSION, but also completely different in its world and scope and strangeness. A universe-spanning department of super beings that protects the infinite timeline from unauthorized multiversal alteration… until something goes wrong. My favorite Asimov novel I’ve read, which is of course really saying something. Oh and somehow, there’s a totally believable love story at the center of it.
ANALOGIA: THE EMERGENCE OF TECHNOLOGY BEYOND PROGRAMMABLE CONTROL by George Dyson - My favorite non-fiction of the year. Not really what the title says—it’s much more a book about history than technology. Really interesting stuff about the deep history of the Pacific Northwest, and an always-useful reminder of just how bad we screwed over the Native Americans to get the land we’re all living on now. Unsanitized history almost always comes as a shock, and this book is no exception, but it was also a ton of fun and filled with fascinating details and tidbits and weird connections.
One thing I notice is that all five of my favorite books this year are written by white dudes. On one level that kind of sucks. I will say though, that I read a lot of books by women and non-white people this year, and liked a number of them, just none in my top five, and I’m not going to condescend by masking my real opinion in the name of fake diversity, which I consider more distasteful than a simple lack of diversity in a small sample size.
My reading list this year did skew somewhat more male and quite a bit more white than in previous years. I had been engaged in a long-term project to become better acquainted with Black authors, and while I can always do more of that, I’m proud to say that after five or so years of effort, I have in fact become quite a bit more conversant with the breadth of Black literature, while simultaneously quite a bit more aware of how much MORE there is I haven’t read yet. Having made some progress, I turned my attention this year to reading a lot of sci fi from the last couple of decades that I had missed, with predictable results from a racial breakdown perspective.
In 2024, though, it’s definitely time to seek out more non-white-male authorship, sci fi or otherwise. Putting a marker for that down here, and at the end of next year I’ll see how I did.
MOVIES
Everyone is saying this was a great year for movies, but honestly I’m not sure I agree. The two things I really loved were THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (which actually didn’t even come out last year but which I saw in February) and GODZILLA MINUS ONE, which I saw last night. I would highly recommend those to anyone, although Godzilla has some super duper dark themes and you definitely need to be able to absorb emotional pain to cope with it.
I was really looking forward to Fincher’s new one, THE KILLER, but it left me cold. I thought the script was woefully underbaked, and although I could watch Michael Fassbender chew scenery in just about anything, I was pretty bored and didn’t much care how it ended.
I was also really looking forward to Scorcese’s KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, which I thought was perhaps the worst movie I saw this year, certainly the worst in a theater. Too long, plus somehow simultaneously too preachy and too morally muddy.
The basic problem is that the two white guys who drive the action of the film were horrifying. They were cold-blooded thieves and murderers who walked the Native Americans into a trap, stole their land on thinly veiled legal premises, and ultimately murdered most of them. The film that should have been made (and that, in interviews, it seems like Scorcese sincerely wanted to make) is a tragic drama with a young native woman as protagonist, and the white men as foils who victimize her repeatedly and ultimately kill her, but can never break her spirit or that of her people.
The problem is, for me, if that’s the movie you want to make, you can’t cast Leo D and Bobby D in the two white men roles. First of all, Lily Gladstone (who plays the female lead), despite her very real talent and quality performance in this film, simply can’t be a bigger star or more magnetic on screen than the two biggest Respected Movie Stars of their generations. If it’s those two in a Scorcese movie, we know what the dynamic is, and there’s no getting out of it.
If that was the movie he wanted to make, he should have cast two unknowns in the male leads, and he should have hired a woman to write it with him. Instead he hired Eric Roth (FORREST GUMP, DUNE, a million other things), who is an incredible writer, but this is a very Male movie, and a woman would have been the right move. He also should have cut at least an hour out of it, but that’s a different conversation.
GODZILLA MINUS ONE is a total throwback. It’s melodramatic but not campy, unironic and shakespearian and brutal, until the end when it unfortunately cops out, but take away the last ten minutes and I think it’s a masterpiece. In stark contrast to KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, the scripting here is brilliant. It takes an implausible premise and a complex world and uses it perfectly to set up an isolated situation where the primary characters have to fight the monster and we’re not sitting there wondering why the powers that be aren’t intervening.
Within that absolutely classic Godzilla sandbox, the film finds room for a heart-wrenching and delicately-handled story amidst the ruins of Tokyo and aboard wooden boats, hunting mines and finding a sea monster—and ultimately a reason to go on living in the face of unspeakable horror. Yes, you have to read subtitles, but it’s worth it. See it in theaters if you possibly can.
I’m looking forward to MAY DECEMBER before the end of the year, which may be great and will almost certainly be strange and interesting. Other than that, it’s all a countdown to Dune Part 2 at this point for me.
TELEVISION
2023 is the year I finally admitted there is just too much television. Most of it is terrible. I watch pilots and I’m almost never interested in watching a second episode, except for the handful of obviously great stuff that everybody in my demo loves, and I don’t have interesting opinions about most of that, I just like it.
I do still watch a lot of sports, but that’s not what this newsletter is about, but Go Huskies on New Year’s Day!
MUSIC
Writing about music is really difficult, and I don’t totally know what to say except here are my four favorite discoveries of 2023:
METRIC - I really like Matthew Yglesias’ newsletter, it’s just the right mix of politics, policy coverage, thoughtful takes, and dumb jokes for me, and he’s not too snarky most of the time. He’s also a huge Metric fan, and I finally checked them out this year and was super impressed. Great energy, catchy melodies, high-level musicianship and band tightness. Both of the FORMENTERA albums are great but my favorite is actually 2009’s FANTASIES. Great for working out, too.
BORN TO RUN is obviously a very famous album, but I’d only really heard the title track. I did an album-by-album chronological listen to Springsteen’s catalog this year (I’m doing a series of them for very famous artists that I’m not currently familiar with), so I listened to this one a few months back. Holy cow! I actually think this is a perfect album, making it only the third perfect album I’ve ever heard (Dark Side of the Moon and Black on Both Sides are the other two). Helps that it’s only eight songs. Most things are too long but this isn’t.
KHRUANGBIN VIBES - The Texas-born funk-fusion instrumental band Khruangbin was a discovery of mine from a couple years back, based on their Tiny Desk Set. Now lots more people have heard of them, and they’ve actually gotten so big that their unique sound has defined a youtube genre, and a resulting series of playlists that are the most vibey, most laidback, chee thing on the internet as far as I’m concerned. Background music of the gods, IMO.
KAYTRANADA’S BOILER ROOM SET - I really like Kaytranada and think he’s doing something super interesting musically, but the video feed on this Boiler Room set transcends mere music and becomes a reality TV show, for my money. If you have 45 minutes to spare, watch the whole thing and just watch the characters circulate and interact. Just an absolute scene going on there, every single person a character. I’ve watched it like ten times this year and I notice new things every time.
That’s my year in media! Hope you found something to dig on in that pile. I will be back next Sunday with one more original story for 2023, and then it’s on to 2024, which doesn’t feel like it can possibly be a real year. It will be the fourth year of this newsletter’s existence, and I’ve got some fun and exciting things planned, besides 26 more stories of course!
In the meantime, as always, you can help me out by liking, commenting, and sharing this newsletter with others. Merry Christmas or whatever other holiday it is that you might celebrate, and Happy New Year!
I agree 100% on the Banshees of Inisherin - I loved that Movie! And Recursion was the first Sci Fi book I have read in literally years - it was great. Here comes 2024!