Here’s a rundown of everything I read/watched/played in 2024! Unless I forgot something, which is likely. I probably won't make this a regular thing, but I had fun doing it!
Suspending judgement because I’m only halfway through, but so far: very very very good.
Now, this is how you do a novelisation!
You know those books that come along exactly when you need them? I read this right after having a big exciting funding application rejected. Tore through it, cried a lot, loved every single word.
Beautifully, delightfully strange! I need to read more Alexandra Kleeman post haste.
Deeply unfair that Darnielle is an impeccable novelist as well as an impeccable lyricist. Leave some talent for the rest of us, why don’t you?
90% of this book was breath-takingly beautiful, and 10% of it was horrifically fatphobic. At one point, there was a single line indicating a bit of wry self-awareness of the fatphobia. Quite frankly, though, that counts for very little when you’ve spent multiple chapters describing your fat character as the most disgusting thing on earth. Winterson is one of my favourite writers ever (Oranges are Not the Only Fruit permanently rewired my brain) so I’m not angry, just deeply disappointed.
I am grouping all these poetry collections together, because I’m not sure I have much to say about any of them individually. They were all extremely good and I liked them a lot, but in some cases it took a while. Often, when I read a poetry collection, it don’t get into it until about 75% through. At that point, a switch will flip in my brain and the wonder comes rushing in. I suspect it’s because each poet’s work has its own logics and vocabulary; I have to learn it before I can truly understand what’s going on.
These are, objectively, some really good essays. The book wasn’t quite what I hoped it would be, though. It stated a lot of things that I already knew and believed. The best parts were the moments where it got beyond that political starting-block, and got to engage with deeper, messier, weirder stuff. The essay about ghosts was the best in the book for this reason. I wish there had been more essays like that. Possibly it just wasn’t written with me in mind – which is fine.
I deeply respect Gregory Maguire for building a writing career based on doing the same thing over and over again. If it was anyone else, I might be inclined to see it as a cynical cash-grab – but there are few writers whose creative instincts I respect more than Maguire’s. Wicked is another book that permanently rewired my brain. After Alice was a beautiful and gutting engagement with Victorian race politics. I loved it.
It also gave me a visceral jolt of… nostalgia? Home-sickness? I haven’t lived in Oxford for years, and my feelings towards it are profoundly mixed these days. After Alice described its geography in loving detail and it made me feel something very intensely. I couldn’t tell you what the feeling was.
A lot more focused and contained than I thought it was going to be, and I really enjoyed that. Loved the art, loved the setting, loved the core concept.
There is a beautiful horrible conjuring trick that this book pulls towards the end, and as I read it I could feel my mind expanding like those galaxy brain memes. How sadistic and thrilling it is for a writer to give you something and then immediately take it away.
A classic of trans autofiction for a reason! It’s every bit as good as everyone says it is! I’m glad I had an edition with an author’s afterword, because the ending was very jarring. Intentionally so, and to great effect, but I was glad I could follow it up by reading an explanation of why Binnie wrote it that way.
The person who recommended this book to me said that the main character was intentionally unlikeable. This was not my experience: I loved Maria. Even as the narrative took great pains to show me just how unhealthy all of her choices were, I was cheering her on. I just think that everybody deserves to make self-indulgently bad choices at some point in their life!
I didn’t get on with this one. You know that old adage about how pretty much all dystopian fiction is just ‘what if the things that are currently happening to brown people happened to white people’? This felt like the embodiment of that. To be fair: maybe the translation wasn’t great, maybe I wasn’t the intended audience. Whatever the reason, it just didn’t land.
There was a lot that I enjoyed, but my overriding feeling is frustration. ‘Oooooh, is something sinister happening or is it just dementia?’ Why not both? No iteration of this question can ever be more interesting than the interplay between the two!
I like to think I’m a pretty good writer. Above average, for sure. I read the first sentence of Hummingbird Salamander and immediately had to stop because I was so bowled over by how good the writing was. This book made my writing look like babyish scribbling, and showed me just how much further there was to go. I love that it did that; I’ve got to get to work.
Oof. Intensely readable, brutally honest, funny as hell in a very grim way. The structure was brilliantly put together. The more I hear about it, the more convinced I am that becoming famous at a very young age is among the worst things that can happen to a person. The more convinced I am that celebrities in general should not exist. This is not the only important take-away of this book, but it’s the one that sticks in my brain.
I picked this up and flicked through it while I was scanning some zines at my local library. I’ve read a couple issues of the Buffy reboot comics before; I have deeply mixed feelings about them, but it can mostly be boiled down to ‘they read like mid fan-fiction’. A couple of really fun ideas and smart choices, but a relationship to the source material that I fundamentally disagree with. I think that in the (laudable) pursuit of making Buffy the Vampire Slayer less problematic, they’ve made something more comfortable to engage with but ultimately less interesting. This specific issue was fun and cute but had the exact same problem. I loved the art, though.
My partner and I saw this as a last-minute Valentine’s Day date – so last-minute that we couldn’t get seats next to each other, in fact. I didn’t care: this musical means a ton to me and I was so excited to share it with them. As soon as the overture kicked in I started crying, and I didn’t really stop until halfway through Act 1.
To the people who sat directly behind me and talked through most of the climax: why would you do that, I hate you.
Our seats were literally as far away from the stage as it was possible to be, and it was still astoundingly good. Testament to what an incredible show Hadestown is.
Impeccable set design – they perfectly captured the vibe of a bland, sterile, non-threatening, uncaring medical building. That moment when all the doors finally opened for the beach scene was breath-taking, exhilarating, wonderful. I can’t judge how good an adaptation it was, but Act 2 felt a little over-stuffed.
I haven’t read the book, and all I knew about the story was that it involved sad clones. I found it deeply frustrating! I wanted Kathy to take that boat and run away, I wanted her to rage and scream and make them pay, I wanted her to recognise that a prison with a lovely view is still a prison, that it isn’t – cannot ever be – enough. Not providing me with that is an artistic choice I respect, hats off to Ishiguro.
What really made this, though, was the fact that a large school group was also in the audience. This meant running commentary from around thirty teenagers. They were extremely invested in the romantic drama. Occasionally, they got so outraged they had to be firmly shushed by their teacher. I wish I could experience all theatre this way.
Wow, so that’s what it’s like to have your soul torn out of your body multiple times in a row!
In some ways I liked this more than the Mountain Goats concert? It was lovely to have Petrie introduce the opening acts herself. The audience participation was great. It just felt a lot more personal! Very good, very meaningful, very healing. I hadn’t realised how much I was missing specifically British political anger in my media.
I was never going to like this, due to having had a teenage hyper-fixation on Wicked, during which I watched about fifteen different bootlegs and developed extremely specific opinions on how all the leads should be played. I really did not like it, though. My reasons are numerous enough that I might end up writing them up in essay form at some point, we’ll see.
As I posted on Mastodon at the time: Diablo Cody needs to write more films about horror and gender, two just isn’t enough!
A stranger, wilder beast than the musical – it took me a while to get on board but the climax thoroughly won me over. I love how hard the film leans into the fact that Veronica kinda does want to kill all these people. I love that JD is her shadow self. I love that it ends with her more or less becoming him. Much grimmer than the musical, I’m here for it.
Jordan Peele is a genius and my new favourite film-maker. In my opinion, Us was the stronger film by far, which makes me very excited to see if Peele continues the upward trend with Nope.
A compliment/complaint: Us was so scary that I did not sleep until 5am that night. Had to keep getting up and checking my bedroom for doppelgangers. I haven’t been that spooked by a film since I was fourteen years old.
Loved, loved, loved this. Fairly early on, we joked that it was ‘Annihilation but British’. I stand by this assessment!
There was one particular scene that managed to make me simultaneously laugh and cover my eyes in horror. What more can you want from a film?
A masterclass in taking an incredibly simple concept and spinning it out into all-encompassing despair.
This film is about being Black and autistic. I have a lot of feelings about it; complicated by the fact that I am only qualified to talk about one of these things.
Paul Atreides sucks and I hate him.
I’ve been in a constant state of ‘rewatching Buffy’ for about a year and a half now, which suits me just fine. I love this show, it was profoundly formative for me, shame it was made by Joss Whedon.
Watched series 5 towards the beginning of the year, and it utterly blew me away. Transcendent storytelling. Probably my favourite series of Buffy and Angel combined?
Went back to watch The Bad Series (3 & 4) afterwards, buoyed by the knowledge that the show I like wasn’t just irredeemably terrible for the rest of its lifetime. It’s… it’s a struggle. I’m only six episodes into series 4 and it feels like it’s been a billion years.
The disparity baffles me. There were no major changes in the writers’ room (aside from David Greenwalt’s departure between series 3 and 4)! Did they all just spontaneously forget how to write for two years?! How did this happen?!
This was where our scientific investigation into Joss Whedon shows ended, because we got bored. Good characters, lack-lustre world-building, excellent set and costume design, consistently weird pacing.
If you only watch one TV show this year, make it this one. Modern day Shakespeare. You too will go bananas over scenes that are basically just stock photos of ‘people in office’.
Objectively excellent, but too much second-hand stress for me. This restaurant is simply not worth it, I was rooting for all of the characters to leave.
I’m in such a strange place with Doctor Who right now. I loved Gatwa’s first series… right up until the finale, which was truly dire. RTD finales being mostly bad isn’t really new but this was the first time I’ve been disappointed by one in real time, because when I watched the first RTD era I was a child with low standards.
I still haven’t watched the Christmas special. I hear it’s alright. I’m honestly not all that eager to get to the new stuff, despite the fact that I spend a frankly ridiculous amount of my life talking and thinking about Doctor Who.
The next series will probably contain a ‘Midnight’, or a ‘Turn Left’, or – for more recent reference points – a ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ or ‘73 Yards’. Because of this, I’ll probably watch it. My expectations have been lowered, though, and that kind of sucks.
Now, this is the Doctor Who that I’m excited to be watching! Venusian karate! Storylines with ambitions way beyond their budgets! Nepo baby companion! Random bleeps and bloops in place of a soundtrack! Homoerotic arch-nemeses! It’s got everything.
I talked about this in my Crawlspace interview! It’s in the source code here.
Series 1 was fun enough, series 2 was great, series 3 was amazing, series 4 was a slightly baffling and disappointing return to ‘fun enough’. It’s so short you can blitz through the entire show in about a day, though, so I’d still recommend it.
Absolutely unhinged. I love it so goddamn much.
Like any Dragon Age game, it’s good but it’s bad but it’s good but it’s bad. The specific things that were good/bad really surprised me, though – it wasn’t the balance I’ve come to expect from a Dragon Age.
The combat, for example, is amazing. The story is gripping and fun, but missing all of the sociopolitical complexity, the cultural depth, the moral crunch that I love about this series. There’s that semi-famous Tumblr post about how every time a new game comes out, the fandom devolves into completely incomprehensible debates about fantasy politics. I don’t think you can really do that with this game – which is a real shame.
Sometimes I wonder how this happened, and then I remember that for a good 50% of its development cycle, this was going to be a live service multiplayer game. Every day I thank God that Anthem fell flat on its face and saved us from that fate, but it still echoes through the game we did get. You can see its multiplayer history in the UI, in the combat, in the narrative design. Sigh.
First time playing an Ace Attorney game, because I experienced the first trilogy via let’s play! This one was… odd. Lots of very strange decisions, narratively. I’m not sure if they worked or not but they sure were interesting.
Mostly I just loved actually playing an AA game, rather than watching it. The game feel is impeccable.
I was losing my mind at the opening cutscene alone. This game is bonkers.
Possibly the most effectively gutting ludic storytelling I’ve ever encountered? Especially that moment with Royal towards the end. If you’ve played it, you know the one.
Fun, but I think I need to try it on a harder difficulty setting. I have these expeditions into horror beyond human comprehension down to an art!
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered fiction about this particular moment of the internet? I’ve definitely never seen it executed so unbelievably well. Mandatory reading for anyone who spent too much time on Tumblr in the early 2010s.
Take the content warnings seriously, and make sure you catch the epigraphs at the beginning of each section because they’re some of the best I’ve ever seen.