Best of 2018

Here we go again.

Books

According to Goodreads, I read 43 books this year. It was a pretty good reading year, thanks to Kindle and the ability for me to read before bed without keeping my glasses on (the font on my Kindle is enormous). Here are my three favorite books published and read in 2018.

This novel was a wonderful exploration of loss and love at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, outlining what survival looks like in the immediate aftermath of death and much later in life. Perhaps the best writing at the sentence level by a contemporary author I read all year.

Another meditation on death, this time taking on the question of what we would do with our lives if we knew when we would die.

Guy Branum is a wonderful comedian, and in this memoir he relates what it was like growing up in the California Central Valley very, very different: not only gay, but also enormous. He relates that feeling of being different as a child to the feeling he continues to have about being different in the gay community.

Music

Last year I had a couple of albums I essentially had on repeat for weeks if not months at a time. This year, these are the six I repeated again and again. I also luckily saw four of the artists live in 2018 and will see Robyn and Snow Patrol live next year.

CHVRCHES, Love is Dead

CHVRCHES continue to put out wonderfully soulful, meaningful pop electronic music that makes me think and dance. To this song, I want to stomp my feet and bang my head.

Greg Laswell, Next Time

Is Greg Laswell the musical equivalent of Mumblecore? Perhaps. I love the depth and resonance of his voice though. He can also be very random, as with this song, which I don’t pretend to understand, but which I also love.

Janelle Monae, Dirty Computer

Once I heard this song, I thought, “Yes, she’s finally taken her rightful place as Prince’s inheritor of all things funky and sexy.”

Robyn, Honey

It’s taken some time, but this deeply strange album has really grown on me, especially after seeing it as a journey through loss, love, and rediscovery and reconnection. This song kills me.

Snow Patrol, Wildness

I need to write about Snow Patrol at some point, because they hold a very deep place in my heart, in the sense that they make me the saddest and happiest of any band I know. They aren’t my favorite artist (oof, another list I suppose), but there are songs that completely ruin me or completely uplift me unlike any others. This song was easily my song of the year, in that I would literally play it on repeat for hours at a time for days at a time, for several stretches of the year. Astonishingly, it also became a song that completely uplifted me and ruined me through the course of the year.

Tune-Yards, I can feel you creep into my private life

Tune-Yards is deeply, deeply strange. They were glorious in concert: the band’s leader is an expressive, emotional, impressive virtuoso. This album contains some admittedly weird songs and there are emotional notes here, but mainly I listen to this band to hear things I will never hear anywhere else. This song however is just perfect and such a freaking energy bomb. The break at 3:08 is certainly one of the best breaks I’ve ever heard.

Movies and TV

TV I started and want to finish: Big Mouth, Casual, Claws, Pose, Sharp Objects

TV I haven’t started by plan to: Forever, The Good Place, GLOW, Homecoming, Lodge 49, Maniac, One Day at a Time, Schitt’s Creek (I KNOW; I KNOW), Wanderlust

Movies? I swear I saw some that I really liked, but none are coming immediately to mind. I just saw Roma and The Favourite and loved them, so I’ll just say they were my favorite movies of 2018!

Podcasts

I listen to a lot of podcasts, but these were the ones new to 2018, or new to me, that I really liked.

A deep dive into the war on terror and the development of a terrorist.

A weekly podcast with some serious sass about all things pop culture.

The brilliant minds at Radiolab decided to make an album of songs devoted to each of the Constitution’s amendments. Each episode takes a few of the amendments and explains them and then airs the song composed for them. Informational and entertaining. Dolly Parton does the song for the 19th amendment!

A little Bill Simmons can go a long way, but this podcast tackles a different rewatchable movie each episode and goes deep. I cherry-pick episodes, but the Michael Clayton and My Best Friend’s Wedding episodes are very good.

For those who want their news digestible but deep, this is a great daily podcast that takes one thing in the news and goes deep. It’s far less annoying that the NYT’s The Daily, which is almost unlistenable.

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