This is my fourth year doing a round-up of my favorite media. This year, I decided to pick one winner in each category, but acknowledge a top five, which made it easier to give shout-outs to all my runners-up. So here are my favorite things from 2024! If there's a trend, I think it's that I've applauded originality, often giving the win to works that are the least like what I've seen before.
The Best Things I Read
Fiction - The Carpet Makers
My favorite book from last year was a German scifi novel that was written thirty years ago, and first published in English, twenty. The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach is one of the strangest and most skillful books about a space empire I've ever read. Eschbach structures his novel as a series of short stories that progressively follow every step the strange tradition of weaving carpets from human hair for the glory of the emperor. We don't follow any recurring characters, or like, the path of one carpet as it travels from the artist to the marketplace to the stars, but instead we approach obliquely, looking at the ordinary lives that are impacted by what turns out to be a senselessly cruel process. I've never seen a book structured like this before, but I think it's a great narrative format, and I'd love to see it applied to a real world social process sometime.
My honorable mentions are all more recent. Premee Mohammad's The Butcher of the Forest is a dark fantasy novella about a doomed trip into a fairytale forest that's feverishly compact and brutally imagined.
Ruthanna Emrys's A Half-Built Garden is like a classic aliens come to Earth first-contact story, but one that builds on current ideas about climate change, community organizing, computer networks, gender, and language, rather than simply reiterating a pastiche of the future as it was imagined in the 1950s.
A Memory Called Empire is a space opera, and Arkady Martine goes deep in building the language and culture of Teixcalaan, and marries it to a thrilling plot about the fate of one small world trying to avoid being conquered by the empire.
And Juneau Black's Shady Hollow is a cozy murder mystery, set in an isolated rural town in the northern forests, populated by all the familiar characters you'd expect, but everyone is a talking animal.
Graphic Novels - The Real Dada Mother Goose
My favorite graphic work was actually a children's picture book, The Real Dada Mother Goose by Jon Scieszka and Julia Rothman. Scieszka and Rothman took six classic nursery rhymes and made six variations on each of them. Each variation is a like a little game. They each take the original text and then apply some procedure for changing it, although they're not just robotic. Each procedure still relies on human creativity for applying it. Some are relatively simple substitutions - the last word of each line replaced with its dictionary definition, key words put into Morse code or American Sign Language or simplified Egyptian hieroglyphics. Others are more transformative, and many rely on collage and remixes of the illustrations just as much as the text. The whole book is both a demonstration of creativity and an invitation to young creators. It's also a reminder how often "new" things are the result of playing with and transforming something that already exists. I found it really inspirational.
My other favorite graphic novels are a bit more traditional. Guillem March's Karmen is a dialogue between a young woman who's just attempted suicide and the spirit meant to guide her to the afterlife. It's genuinely mature, about the regret adults feel for past mistakes, about the possibility of continuing to grow and change even after it feels like your life is over.
Tillie Walden's On a Sunbeam tells a young woman's story at two points in her life - working her first job after graduation, and in flashback, her time falling in love with another student at her strict boarding school. The whole thing is set in the future, in space, and the spaceships all look like giant koi fish.
Shuna's Journey, by Hayao Miyazaki, of Studio Ghibli fame, is a science fantasy retelling of a Tibetan folktale, illustrated in watercolors, more like a picture book than like a traditional manga. This is actually Miyazaki's earliest comic, and you can see the first seeds of ideas that will blossom in some of his later and better known works.
Matt Fraction and Steve Lieber's Who Killed Jimmy Olsen? is an absolute romp through the tropes and hijinks of Silver Age comics, as Jimmy Olsen attempts to solve his own attempted murder, and also deal with about a dozen other wacky problems at the same time.
The Best Things I Heard
Rock - Kids Wanna Dance
"Bet You Don't" by the Albinos has a fuzzy, oversaturated sound that reminds me of both the 1960s and the early 2000s garage rock revival, and I like the defiance in the lyrics.
"He is Not" by GGGOLDDD is also defiant. It's about continuing your life without someone important to you, and the mixed success you sometimes experience trying to regain your independence. I read it as being about a breakup, but it could also be about a partner's death.
"Peace be the Day" by Hannah Mohan is another breakup song, I think, but it's more immediate to the moment itself, rather than the long tail aftermath. It reminds me of the relief of getting out of a bad situation.
"Synchronize" by Milky Chance might be the most apocalyptic of my picks from last year. It's about the immediacy and intensity of a new romance, where it feels like they're the only other person in the world, and it doesn't matter how many bad things are happening around you, because you found each other.
Pop - Forever in Sunset
"Docket" by Blondshell, featuring Bully is a sweet song about not really feeling it in a new relationship. The lyrics aren't overtly queer, but two women singing together about not being interested in any of the guys who pursue them feels a bit lez to me.
"Everywhere, Everything" by Noah Kahan, with Gracie Abrams is much more devoted love song, and continues what I'm just now realizing is a trend from last year of songs about desperate times. Kahan and Abrams are determined to cling together, no matter what.
By contrast, "Steven Proctor, Bus Conductor" by the Neutrals is a throwback and a bop. The music sounds like the 60s again, and the storytelling lyrics remind me of early Belle & Sebastian. Plus the claymation and papercraft music video is just charming.
The fact that I only recently heard "Tongue Tied" by Grouplove probably says more about my media awareness than I mean for it to, but gosh, what a fun song.
The Best Things I Watched
Movies - Hundreds of Beavers
The best way I can describe my favorite film of the year, Hundreds of Beavers, is to say it's like a feature-length Looney Tunes cartoon. It's a classic story about a hunter getting repeatedly outwitted by his intended prey, even filmed in black and white as though it's really out of the 1930s. But where an animated short would show the hunter losing and losing and then end, in the film, Jean Kayak loses and loses and loses and learns enough to finally win. Every part of the fictional wilderness here operates according to cartoon logic and animated physics, and over the course of the movie, our wannabe fur trapper observes them all and figures out how to Rube Goldberg them together into functioning traps. And, it's important I mention, all the animals in the film are portrayed by human actors wearing animal mascot costumes. The was the funniest movie I watched all year, and the way that it revived and remixed plots and film techniques from the early days of cinema made it a wild ride from start to finish.
Blue Jean is unfortunately very timely right now, despite being set in England in the 1980s. Lesbian gym teacher Jean lives an anxious split life - she's closeted at work, but spends most of her free time hanging out at the local lesbian bar with her girlfriend and other couples. When a new student at the school shows up at the bar, and gets accused of being gay by the other girls, Jean panics, afraid that people in her working life will find out her truth, and that she'll lose her job. Watching this one is a reminder that other people have lived during difficult times, and that there's a value in being brave, a value in confronting others' prejudice rather than trying to hide from it.
I Saw the TV Glow is a horror movie that's meant to be especially scary to closeted trans people. When I watched it, I felt something more like relief. The film is structured like a spooky campfire story, reminded me a lot of watching The Adventures of Pete & Pete when I was a kid. As an adult, Owen thinks back on his favorite tv show, The Pink Opaque, which he could only ever watch by have sleepovers at his friend Maddie's house, or having her tape the episodes for him. Then Maddie shows back up, and she seems to remember things a bit differently, and to suggest there was more to the show and their fandom than Owen is allowing himself to recall. If you're not trans, I don't know if you'd find it frightening at all, but there's still something a little wistful, maybe even sad, about realizing you don't really know your old friends anymore, don't really enjoy the things you used to when you were younger. It's a realization that goes on to affect your memories of them, prevents you from recalling them with the same fondness you used to. It's a loss in the present that reaches backward to steal something from your past too.
Last and First Men is a pretty faithful, very weird adaptation of Olaf Stapeldon's book about the future history of humanity. In the book, modern humanity are only the "first men," and there will be fourteen more successor species of humans that follow after us. What does it mean to be human, when only 1% of our existence will be spent in our current form, when only 10% of our history will take place on Earth Tilda Swinton reads a script that's a condensed version of Stapeldon's text. The imagery is all in black and white; it's footage of war memorials in Eastern Europe. They look otherworldly, alien. There's an excellent, moody background score as well. I don't know if Stapeldon invented the idea that future humans will spend a lot of their time using psychic powers to observe their own history, to observe us, that we today will have a kind of secular afterlife as we are remembered again in the far future, but both the book and the movie are about a message from the end coming back to us here, at the beginning.
Raw is a French horror movie about a vegetarian who's forced to eat some meat as part of the freshman hazing at her veterinary college. Eating it awakens a new appetite in her; you can probably guess which one. For the first half of the film, the horror comes from her coming to realize the nature of her new hunger, as she tries various ways to feed it, hoping that that something else will satisfy it so that she won't need to go further. Halfway through is a scene that could have been the finale of a slower-burning film, but from there, the tension just keeps ratcheting up, as she can no longer deny what her body wants, but still doesn't want to give herself over to become a total monster. It's creepy, bloody, and very satisfying.
Television - Mrs Davis
When I started The Penguin, I worried it might turn out to be a lesser-quality gangster show that happened to star Batman villains instead of other criminals, or else a lesser superhero show with no actual hero. But the strong performances by Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti quickly reassured me, as did the plot, which combines more traditional plots of ambitious mobsters trying to move up the ranks within their crime families with some big, showy, chaotic, set-piece bits of supervillainy.
The show I probably watched the most seasons of was Portrait Artist of the Year, which is a competition reality show where all the contestants are real, skilled artists. Each episode, three celebrities come on the show to be models. Several artists make portraits of each - mostly oil painters, but other mediums appear as well. The celebrities each pick their favorite to keep, and the judges pick a short list and a winner to send ahead to compete in the season finale. What I like most are all the shots of the portraits in progress. You get to see footage of artists working in real time, plus time lapse of the whole process from initial sketch to finished product. I found it incredibly inspirational. There's also a companion series devoted to landscape art, but I found the human subjects more interesting.
Set in a tiny, fictional European state, The Regime is an inside look inside an "illiberal democracy" (functionally a dictatorship) as the nation is wracked by its leader's obsessions and insecurities. Kate Winslet is fantastic as the charismatic, vain, anxious, insecure, egomaniacal leader of a county that is overtaxed by its oligarchs and oppressed by its military. She's at the mercy of her own out-of-control emotions, and everyone else, everyone else, is at the mercy of her. The episode structure works really well here, because in one episode the palace is being desiccated while she worries about damp and mildew, the new next it's full of steam from boiled potatoes because she's convinced of the vigorous health of the medieval peasant, the next it's an icebox because she's having menopausal hot flashes. A number of other characters think they can control Winslet, and for awhile she's enamored by the earnest fascism of a handsome war criminal, but the whole system is set up to give her the final say, regardless of how destructive her ideas are or how many people might hate them.
We are Lady Parts is far more hopeful. You can kind of tell that I picked up a month of Peacock to watch the Olympics, and I'm glad I was able to fit this one in during that time. We follow a punk band made up of young Muslim women living in London as their career just starts to take off. The women have different perspectives on Islam, different approaches to their clothing, different social classes, etc. But being in the band together helps them bond and to better understand each others' perspectives. And I liked that as they begin to be successful, they also ask if they actually want the traditional "rock star" trajectory, and if not, what their arts career could look like instead.
Animation - Scavengers Reign
I think I've mentioned before that I have a fondness for revenge stories, so it's no surprise I liked Blue Eye Samurai. In Meiji-era Japan, Mizu, an outcast and orphan, plans to kill the only four White men in the country, one of whom must be her father. The fight scenes are both brutal and especially well-choreographed, the cost of revenge is on vivid display, the voice cast is a veritable Who's Who of famous Asian American actors, and the plot has thoughtful commentary on women's opportunities under patriarchy. The episode about the siege of the brothel is a standout.
Dan Da Dan is an absolutely wild romp across competing visions of the supernatural. Cool girl Momo and nerdy Ken discover that ghosts are real, and aliens, and psychic powers, and they're all somehow related to each other. The pair's burgeoning friendship is complicated by their very different social circles and personalities, the repeated interruption by spaceships and demons, and by the embarrassment and discomfort of puberty. It's a show where the choice between getting killed by a monster and letting the girl you like see you undressed feels like an impossible decision because they're both equally undesirable. There's a chase scene set to a remix of the William Tell Overture that's like an homage to every classic cartoon ever that exemplifies what I love about this show.
Delicious in Dungeon starts us out in what seems to be a fairly generic, D&D-inspired fantasy world. After the death of one of their friends, a party of adventurers head back into the megadungeon to retrieve her body so she can be resurrected. They don't have time or money to resupply, so they plan to cook and eat dead monsters to sustain themselves. They meet a dwarven adventurer who's been living in the dungeon doing the same thing, and away we go! The monsters are naturalistic, often in quite creative ways, and the cooking scenes look just like you'd see from an tv chef. The thing is, I could've happily watched at least a dozen episodes that really were that simple, but very quickly, the world of the show starts to expand. We learn more about the ecosystem and history of the dungeon, the cast broadens to include more and more fellow adventurers, and what started out seeming like it might be episodic and formulaic grows into a larger story, like when a stream suddenly opens out into a delta and then connects to the ocean.
Frieren: Beyond Journey's End also starts with a classic fantasy scenario, this time more like Lord of the Rings, and then asks questions of it in a way that feels almost science fictional. After the heroes defeat the dark overlord, what do they do next? If elves really live for millennia, what is it like when an elf is friends with a human? What does human culture even look like to an elf? What is magic for? Is it meant to be used for fighting? And if not, then what other purpose should it serve instead? The depiction of time in this show is fascinating, because we kind of adopt Frieren the elf's pace, where historical events are still in living memory, and ordinary human lives seem to pass by too quickly. I appreciated the depiction of demons in the show, as part of a recent trend showing us enemies who are not redeemed, because they neither want nor reserve redemption, and would only betray you if you tried to offer it to them.
