I'm not going to bother with a Music category this year. Not enough candidates. Just mark down The Catalogue featuring Requiem as the Best Album of 2025 and we'll move right along.
BOOKS
30 books read last year, 18 non-fiction and 12 fiction. The fiction was mostly in the first half of the year, and there wasn't a lot that stood out. A lot of things that were interesting or engaging in certain ways (the turns of phrase, the underlying concept), but less so in others regards (characterization, or the big reveal was something I figured out halfway through the book. Best would go pretty easily to Rebecca Roanhorse's Mirrored Heavens, where aside from one character implausibly surviving a situation with no real satisfying, she pulled together a lot of disparate threads into a cohesive and satisfying conclusion. The book never dragged, the dialogue had some snap to it, a well-written story to finish the trilogy. None of the others really come close.
For worst, as much as the good old boy in Randy Wayne White's The Man Who Invented Florida pushed all my worst buttons, I think I have to give it to Robert Richardson's The Lazarus Tree. It was a mystery, but there was never much tension or suspense. Certainly no one in the village seemed in any rush to solve the murder, and the main character really isn't trying to do that either, so much as figure out what his friend's teenage daughter is up to. It felt like Richardson spent a lot of time hinting at mysteries or secrets to us (but not his protagonist) about different villagers, but none of them were relevant to the actual story. At best, they felt like set-up for some future story, but that doesn't do much for me while I'm reading this.
The non-fiction tended to shift in areas of focus over the course of the year. A lot of baseball early, then a lot of biology in late spring-early summer. The back half of the year ran more to film history, with a little bit of political or archaeological history thrown in. I had a few more possible options here. I enjoyed Blood in the Garden quite a bit, which surprised me given my antipathy to the 1990s New York Knicks. No Name on the Bullet had some details and facts I hadn't seen about Audie Murphy, but a lot of things I had from other sources.
But for the best, I'd pick Roger Kahn's Good Enough to Dream and Edward George's The Cuban Intervention in Angola. Kahn captured a lot of the things I enjoy about baseball, without the irritating nostalgia-tinted perspective that jarred me out of David Lamb's Stolen Season. And Kahn also built a lot of humor into the book when describing the chaos of trying to run a minor league team on a shoestring budget. As for George, he gave me pretty much exactly what I was hoping for when I got curious about Cuba inserting itself into things in Africa. I got a sense of the different powers, the push-and-pull between them, the problems complicating any sort of resolution, and the descriptions of the battles were aided with actual maps and a clear organizational philosophy to the writing. On the Road of the Winds by Patrick Vinton Kirch would be a close third.
Worst would have to be Peter Polack's The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War. It was more narrowly focused than what I was hoping for, concentrating on one extended battle in Angola without going much into the context or history. But it still had time for strange digressions about how many private security companies from South Africa operate in the Middle East these days. The description of the battle and movements of the various sides weren't well-illustrated to where you could picture what happened, and there was little clear flow in how he went about describing it.
MOVIES
First off, films covered as part of Overdue Movie Reviews are not eligible, because they aren't new to me, which is what this is focused on. Which leaves 44 movies, 11 of which were from the 2020s. Which is not a pattern I would have expected at the start of the year. Second most common decade was the '50s (7 movies.)
For best films, for all the late-70s to late-80s comedies I watched, I'd say How to Beat the High Cost of Living was the best of the lot. Or at least the one that made me laugh the most. Kid Glove Killer was a quick, compact but clever little thriller, and Escape to Athena was fun simply for the bonkers cast it had. But the top 2 would have to be two movies I watched very early in the year, No Name on the Bullet and Prey.
The former was great in the way this one person arrives, and his mere presence - because Audie Murphy mostly just sits, drinks coffee, and watches people go by - causes to the town to basically tear itself apart. All the ugliness and guilt the supposedly nice citizens are hiding makes them throw away what they profess to believe in so easily. The latter just built things up so well, paralleling the Predator taking on greater and greater challenges while at the same time Naru is slowly building herself up into that great challenge, using the skills she already has.
On the negative side, well, even James Coburn couldn't make me enjoy Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (combined with the general dud that was Killer Elite, not a great year for me and Peckinpah movies.) Arrowhead had potential, but it was a '50 Western, so it was never going to be what I wanted. But I think I knew what the two worst films were going to be back in the summer, and sure enough, it's The End and Fear Blood & Gold. I mean, Throw Momma from the Train wasn't really funny outside a couple of moments of physical comedy, but it was funnier than The End, which went to exhausting lengths to assure us Burt Reynolds' character was a self-centered coward, then doubled down on that through the rest of its run time.
And Fear Blood & Gold? Just nonsensical. If Santiago wants to escape from Oscar, why doesn't he run when he successfully spikes his beans? Why does Oscar, having been drugged once by Santiago, accept a hallucinogenic drug from his later? Why does Oscar shoot with his revolver turned sideways like he's some '90s gangbanger? Why does the film need the odd old man? Who captured Oscar and Santiago at the beginning of the film, and why did they never appear again? Just a total disaster, and not even bad enough to put me to sleep.
VIDEO GAMES
I beat a lot of games this year, although maybe that's the wrong word, given how so many of them were structured around dialogue, with only a limited amount for you to actually do. Did I really "beat" Dear Esther or Firewatch, or did I just reach the end of them? Maybe "finished" is a better word.
Anyway, worst game is really easy. It's 890B, which was a frustrating, pointless piece of crap with stiff dialogue, no character development, with almost all the run time burnt on puzzles I could play on a graphing calculator back in the '90s. The game apparently has good and bad endings, but it there's just a single Achievement for beating the game, regardless of which you get. Because they know nobody is going to play this trash twice without being reimbursed for it. A buck-and-a-half, and still a waste of money. I mean, I figured out after 30 minutes that Hello Neighbor was not for me, but I can see how someone else might enjoy that game. Not 890B. 0 out of 5, send the game designers to the gulag and leave them there.
Best games is trickier, because, with all these short, fairly limited games I played, it's a case of which thing a game focused on that I preferred. Abzu was a beautiful game, and mostly very relaxing to play, but not exactly challenging or the sort of thing where I felt really invested in the story. On the other hand, I enjoyed aspects of the story and the character development in The Fall, but it was such a murky-looking game and I really hate aiming using the right joystick.
So, if I just pick two, I guess it'll the The Stanley Parable: DeLuxe Edition, and The Sinking City. Stanley Parable simply because it was hilarious. It's probably the thing I laughed hardest at all year, outside of conversations Alex and I had at various points during our trip in October. As for Sinking City, while I'm not a huge fan of sanity meters, and definitely didn't love the wobbly screen effects that accompanied a wavering sanity, there was still a lot to enjoy in the game. Searching for evidence, being given the option what to do with that evidence once you had it. The visual look of the characters and setting. They kept crafting simple and straightforward, so it was useful without having so many options I got paralyzed by choice and couldn't figure out what to do.
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