Image: hey nothing at Vinyl in Atlanta, Sept. 18. 2025
For the first five months of 2025 I was on medical leave from work for cancer treatment. For another two months beyond that, I was working from home and wasn’t venturing out of the house too much as I recovered. I consumed a lot of media this year because, for long stretches of time, I couldn’t do much else besides read, watch, or listen to things. Here are some lists and notes on my favorites.
Books
Photo by Susan Q Yin on Unsplash
In somewhat of a chronological order, here are the books that I finished this year: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Twain, James by Everett, Yoga by Carrère, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by Schwab, The Rest of our Lives by Markovits, The Wilderness by Flournoy, My Brilliant Friend by Ferrante, I Cheerfully Refuse by Enger, and Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand by Chu.
Here are the books I started and am still in the middle of: Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vara, V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Carrère , Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It by Doctorow, Flesh by Szalay, The AI Con: How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future That We Want by Bender and Hanna, Native America: The Story of the First Peoples by Feder, and Your Name Here by DeWitt and Gridneff.
This year I spent more time than I have previously stalking the major literary awards (Pulitzer, Booker, Kirkus) to keep my list of possible reads fresh. However, nothing tops the Tournament of Books for quality, quirkiness, and community building. ToB published its 2026 shortlist a couple of weeks ago, and I plan to read several of them before the brackets begin in March.
Favorite: This year, I got the most out of Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère. It might have been the time that I read it (right as treatment started getting intense), but I’ve been a huge fan of his weird, self-reflective autofiction for years. Yoga is a rambling memoir that starts out being about a settled, content person at a silent retreat and turns into a harrowing narrative of mental illness, grief, and treatment. I enjoyed his depiction of meditation and felt gauzy and comfortably lost in the last section of the book where he is teaching and recovering from shock treatment and divorce in Greece. I continue to be drawn to stories that play with the line between fiction and lived reality.
TV/Movies
Photo by Alex Litvin on Unsplash
Here are the movies and TV shows that I remember watching this year: Frankenstein, Alien: Earth: Season 1, Survivor: Season 48, Survivor: Season 49, One Battle After Another, Bugonia, Eddington, Sinners, The Beast in Me, South Park: Seasons 27 and 28, The Bear: Season 4, The Phoenician Scheme, The Lowdown: Season 1, Hacks: All Seasons, The White Lotus: All Seasons, The Rehearsal: Season 2, Pee-Wee as Himself, The Righteous Gemstones: Season 4, Severance: All Seasons (minus the last two episodes, which I don’t think I’m going to watch), Weapons and The Substance.
Favorite: I have never seen anything like The Rehearsal’s second season, detailing Nathan Fielder’s sometimes serious, sometimes comic exploration of the airline industry. He threads a narrow needle eye between paying attention to hard to find, valuable, uncomfortable insights and absurdist humor. I was in awe of Fielder’s exploration of Capt. Sully Sullenberger’s biography and his heroic emergency landing in the Hudson River. The reveal in the final episode is shocking and impressive.
Music
Image by: me! at Shaky Knees this year
Live shows this year: End It/Cloud Nothings/Superheaven at the Masquerade, Joy Oladukon at Variety Playhouse, Shaky Knees music fest at Piedmont Park, Kristy Lee at Eddie’s Attic
Artists that I found this year: hey nothing, Cameron Winter, Leyla Ebrahimi, boygenius, Die Spitz, Mdou Moctar, Jungle, Lambrini Girls, Teen Mortgage, Beaches
Favorite: My favorite live music event of the year was the quiet and reflective Joy Oladukon concert that Jenn and I saw in February. After listening to her music a bunch over the last four years, it was a treat to see her again. She carries some strong Tracy Chapman energy into her performances, but she also is very much herself.
My favorite playlist of this year, weirdly, was the one I built for my treatment appointments. I’ve written about it more here, but essentially this was an opportunity to turn a difficult thing I had to do every day into some self discovery. I ended up with a list of 2 songs each from 35 of my favorite artists; not a “best of all time” list, but a curation of what I wanted to hear each day during a tough two months. Have a listen:
I also really enjoyed the playlist my friends contributed to for my Halloween costume party this year:
