What I watched and read this year

In 2024, for the first time, I kept a record of the media that I took in this year. Well, not “media” in the news-media sense (however relevant that might have been), but in the sense of books, films, stage shows; and to a lesser extent, journal articles, magazines, TV series, and long-form online content.

Methodology

Every time I finished a work, I wrote down the work’s title, author, year of composition (if available), and the date I finished it, along with a one-letter annotation of its kind (b for book, f for film, etc.), and two kinds of formalized tag: ♲ for things I had viewed before and ⭐ for things I decided were good enough to… well, to merit a star, I guess. Those criteria were certainly arbitrary and momentary. I felt a self-imposed pressure to “calibrate”: the pressure to award a star increasing with the time elapsed since the previous star.

A star means “good” or “recommended”; I didn’t bother to distinguish “bad, terrible, avoid” from “decent, meh, whatever,” but maybe I should have.

I tracked “ebooks” (under e) separately from “books” (under b). Quickly I realized that the distinction was arbitrary and meaningless; but as I look back over the list, I also realize that my e entries are a more wildly mixed bag: b corresponds to my reading a real book cover-to-cover, whereas I ended up using e indiscriminately for whole books (Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes) and single short stories (Doyle’s The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton). Of course, if I’d distinguished “short stories” differently from “novels,” I’d have had trouble classifying novellas; and in fact I already had trouble deciding whether to label certain works (Poe’s “Maelzel’s Chess-Player”) with e or with j for “journal article.”

I didn’t generally track “poems” as a category, which largely spared me from the same thorny questions of length re: poetry. I confidently recorded Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism in June (and gave it a star); but it felt silly to record Coleridge’s Kubla Khan in December, and I certainly didn’t record “’Ware Wire” or “Dulce et Decorum Est” or “Nix”.

I also didn’t record “music” as a category. I very, very rarely sit down and listen to music as an activity in itself. (Exception this month: Buckner & Garcia’s Pac-Man Fever (1982). “Ode to a Centipede” alone would have earned a star; but the album as a whole? well, I’m glad I didn’t have to decide.) Of course I listen to lots of individual songs in the car, but that’d be too many to track by hand anyway. At the same time, I did record Gayden Wren’s “A G&S Christmas Carol” (arbitrarily annotated as f-ilm), despite the YouTube recording’s having no visual component.

Tracking the “date” of a work also proved arbitrary. Many works I read in translation. Sometimes the translator’s name and the date of translation were obvious; sometimes only the original author and/or date of composition; sometimes only the date of publication (Karl Werder tr. Elizabeth Wilder, The Heart of Hamlet’s Mystery, 1907). Sometimes the English text I was reading had no direct correspondence to any collation of texts published in the author’s lifespan (Parables and Paradoxes again: a collection of translations by many different authors, published in 1961).

I decided never to record a work I didn’t finish. Very rarely, this pertained to a work I had intended to view all the way through but which turned out actually insufferable (Wallace Stevens’ “The Comedian as the Letter C”; Marvel’s Secret Invasion; I’m sure there were movie examples, but of course I failed to record them). More often, this pertained to a “comfort viewing” (mine or my wife’s) of something that would have gotten the ♲ tag anyway, abandoned halfway due to interruption or sleep (mine or my wife’s): The Fellowship of the Ring, Die Hard, Elf. But my being on my phone or half-dozing for the majority of a movie wouldn’t disqualify it. I wasn’t trying to record only the movies good enough to keep me on the edge of my seat throughout, but also the boring bombs (Castle of Fu Manchu (1969); the Berle/Caesar/Thomas vehicle Side by Side (1988)). The omission of unfinished viewings meant that I watched many, many episodes of TV shows that I didn’t record. Nor did I care to expend the effort recording each individual TV episode; so I just recorded when finishing an entire season. Of course that didn’t work for shows like Seth Meyers’ Corrections (is it even a TV show?), which has no seasons per se. And it leaves unrecorded the sheer volume of, say, Seinfeld reruns watched out of order; not to mention all the shows we’re in the middle of (Curb Your Enthusiasm S2, ALF S1, Only Murders in the Building S4, Bob’s Burgers S15).

Likewise, any books I started but didn’t finish this year didn’t make it into the list. There’s a continuum, too, between books I’m actively reading (Le Ton beau de Marot (1997); An Experiment with Time (1927); Dante’s Paradiso), books I started long ago and haven’t yet come back to (Baugh’s History of the English Language), and books I’ll never pick up again.

Perhaps in 2025 I should record when I start a thing and when I finish it. Recording only the end-date makes a graph artificially “spiky”; for example, on 2024-02-17 I finished both William Yardley’s Avellaneda’s Continuation of Don Quixote (1784) and Louis Sachar’s Wayside School is Falling Down (1989), but both had been “in progress” for quite a while before that.

Also: I read Wayside School is Falling Down aloud to my wife (who’d missed out on it as a kid), and confidently recorded that as a re-read. But I also read her all of Dante’s Inferno, trailing my own reading by several months — by the time we finished Inferno, I was well into Purgatorio — and didn’t bother to record that as a “second reading” of Inferno. On the third hand, I read W.V. Quine’s essay “On What There Is” for the first time in February, and then again a month and a half later, and recorded that as a second reading.

I recorded entries for short films (The Big Shave (1967), Captain Kidd’s Kids (1919), both via HBO Max); and recorded films that I watched via YouTube as the content provider (L’Inferno (1911), The Great White Hope (1970)); yet I didn’t bother to record YouTube videos that “weren’t films,” whether from Captain Disillusion or CppCon.

Book clubs

An aspect that I don’t know how to work in without a lot of tedium (for both me-the-categorizer and you-the-reader) is the existence of “constellations” of related works, some of whose connections are obvious and some of which aren’t. Two obvious small constellations (both involving long-form o-nline pieces that I bothered to record only because they were part of constellations):

2024-03-22 f Susanna Fogel, Cat Person (2023) Hulu
2024-03-23 o Alexis Nowicki, "Cat Person" and Me (2021) Slate
2024-03-23 o Kristen Roupenian, Cat Person (2017) New Yorker
[...]
2024-06-16 f Richard Linklater, Hit Man (2023)
2024-06-30 o Skip Hollandsworth, Hit Man (2001) Texas Monthly

Much larger constellations relate to works I discussed in book-club meetups this year:

Recommendations and breakdowns

I bothered to record my consumption of 9 o-nline pieces, 12 s-tage shows, 22 seasons of t-elevision, 27 m-agazines, 56 dead-tree b-ooks, 62 j-ournal articles, 119 e-books (of wildly variable length), and 200 f-ilms, for a total of 507 items. (Wow!)

The films that in my arbitrary scheme merited a star were:

2024-01-01 f J. Lee Thompson, Return from the Ashes (1965) ⭐
2024-02-11 f Michael John Warren, Oh, Hello! on Broadway (2017) Netflix ⭐♲
2024-02-11 f Stanley Donen, Singin' in the Rain (1952) ⭐♲
2024-03-02 f David Lynch, Dune (1984) Max ⭐♲
2024-04-11 f Gayden Wren, A G&S Christmas Carol (2020) YouTube ⭐
2024-05-04 f Andy Fickman, Reefer Madness (2005) Prime ⭐♲
2024-05-18 f Steven Spielberg, E.T. (1982) NYPhil ⭐♲
2024-07-30 f John Badham, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976) Prime ⭐
2024-08-09 f Mike Cheslik, Hundreds of Beavers (2022) Prime ⭐
2024-08-09 f Richard Marquand, Return of the Jedi (1983) Disney+ ♲⭐
2024-08-11 f Steven Spielberg, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) Alamo ♲⭐
2024-08-11 f Jan de Bont, Twister (1996) Max ⭐
2024-08-16 f Sidney Lumet, Deathtrap (1982) Prime ♲⭐
2024-08-17 f Sidney Lumet, Deathtrap (1982) Prime ♲⭐
2024-08-23 f Gary Larson, Tales from the Far Side 1 (1994) archive.org ⭐
2024-08-23 f Gary Larson, Tales from the Far Side 2 (1994) archive.org ⭐
2024-09-20 f Dick Lowry, Project ALF (1996) Prime ⭐
2024-09-20 f Steve Rash, Under the Rainbow (1981) Prime ⭐
2024-09-27 f Victor Fleming, Gone With the Wind (1939) Max ⭐
2024-11-23 f Edward Berger, Conclave (2024) Jacob Burns ⭐
2024-12-23 f Jason Reitman, Juno (2007) Hulu ⭐
2024-12-26 f Raoul Walsh, The Roaring Twenties (1939) ⭐♲
2024-12-30 f Richard Donner, Scrooged (1988) ⭐♲

The books:

2024-02-21 e E. C. Bentley, Biography for Beginners (1905) ⭐
2024-02-27 b Barry Pain, Exit Eliza (1912) ⭐
2024-04-10 b Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th ed (1872) ⭐
2024-04-13 e Ted Chiang, Liking What You See: A Documentary (2002) ⭐
2024-05-07 e Daniel Dennett, Where Am I? (1978) ⭐
2024-05-11 b Maria Leach, The Thing at the Foot of the Bed (1959) ⭐♲
2024-06-05 e Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism (1711) ⭐
2024-06-09 e Mark Twain, About Magnanimous-Incident Literature (1878) ⭐
2024-06-15 b Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet (2019) ⭐
2024-07-26 e Garrison Keillor, At the New Yorker: My Own Memoir (2013) ⭐
2024-08-03 b James Thurber, The 13 Clocks (1950) ♲⭐
2024-08-17 e H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror at Red Hook (1925) ♲⭐
2024-09-06 b Alfred Gingold & John Buskin, Snooze (1986) ⭐
2024-10-15 e Andrew Fabbro, Winning with the Bongcloud (2010) ⭐
2024-10-28 b Strunk & White, The Elements of Style (1949) ♲⭐
2024-11-01 b Kernighan & Plauger, The Elements of Programming Style (1974) ♲⭐
2024-12-19 e Stephen King, The Revenge of Lard-Ass Hogan (1975) ⭐

And the rest:

2024-02-03 j W.V. Quine, On What There Is (1948) ⭐
2024-03-23 j W.V. Quine, On What There Is (1948) ⭐♲
2024-05-29 t Paul W. Downs, Hacks S1 (2021) Max ⭐
2024-06-17 t Paul W. Downs, Hacks S2 (2022) Max ⭐
2024-09-08 j A. A. Markley, Barbarous Hexameters and Dainty Meters (1998) ⭐
2024-09-14 s Garrison Keillor (2024) Peekskill ⭐
2024-12-06 o Noam Chomsky, If the Nuremberg Laws were Applied... (1990) ⭐
2024-12-21 t Jemaine Clement, What We Do in the Shadows S6 (2024) Hulu ⭐

I thought it might be interesting to plot the works’ years-of-creation (via Python); but no, these cumulative histograms are unsurprising. Except that somehow I went this whole year without watching any films from the WWII years — no Maltese Falcon, no Casablanca, no Citizen Kane or Colonel Blimp or Yankee Doodle Dandy or Double Indemnity or Key Largo or Gilda — just a giant lacuna between 1939 (Gone With the Wind, The Return of Dr. X, The Roaring Twenties) and 1947 (The Two Mrs. Carrolls). That does surprise me.

Here’s year of creation plotted horizontally against date-of-viewing vertically (via Python). The blue star at 1872 represents Darwin’s Origin of Species; the one at 2019 is Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet. In the right-hand plot, you can very clearly see a transition from films released in 2023 to those released in 2024; the starred 2024 film is Conclave, which I saw on the big screen, and which I starred for the costumes and set design, the architecture of Rome, much more than for its plot. It might not translate. On the other hand, Hundreds of Beavers (2022) earned its star on the small screen.

My complete 507-element list is here.

Posted 2024-12-31
litclub movies music poetry