Best of 2020 in Media
Jan. 19th, 2021 03:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
juushikaEvery year, sometimes super duper late, I write this list. Here's the best media I consumed, but which was probably not released (or even new to me!), in 2020. There sure are a lot of books.
I read ~243 books in 2020. That's an intentional step down from last year's 374, but higher than expected; my prior average was ~150 a year. Reviewing my yearly reading was when "2020 was seven years long" really hit me—there are books from the beginning of the year that I remember with the fond distance from 2015. It's also no surprise that my reading was a mess, with a lot of comfort/easy reads, rereads, and shoddy demographic tracking (sometimes unintentional; sometimes intentionally allowing generous overlap between demographics). I read fanfic (unusual for me) which I tracked in vast, approximate batches; I'm continuing to read manga through the library, which has made for an uptick in authors of color and male authors; Edward Gorey bind-ups inflated my metrics.
Of my 2020 reading, 48% were by women, 58% by men, and 5% by non-cis authors. 28% were authors of color, 10% were Jewish, and 40% fall in my catch-all bucket for other marginalized identities like disabled and queer. 23% of works were translated. 16% were rereads. Excepting the preponderance of male authors, this is nearly identical to previous years—so my reading probably wasn't as skewed as it felt. Only 1% (4 books!) were DNF'd, which I perennially encourage myself to increase.
My best-of list continues to run long, but that's a good thing.
The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, Ursula K. Le Guin
Crossing the last Hainish book off of my TBR would have been more bittersweet had this not been so good. The series has incredible breadth, but never enough—and this answers that, peering into the cracks in civilizations in a way that insists on increasingly dynamic, diverse worlds. Ratings are meaningless, but this was my my first five-star of the year and one of the only short story collections to ever warrant that rating.
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
I'm an easy sell on exploring infinite spaces conceptually; what amazed me here is how solid it is in execution without feeling overworked—it's a delicate, balanced, beautiful little book. Again ratings mean nothing, but this is my last 5-star review of the year, and what a high note to end on.
Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison
I love when a longtime entry on my TBR is worth the wait. The literal feminist elements have grown dated, but the underlying approach absolutely fulfills this intent: high-concept alien worldbuilding (fun!) with a fundamentally social, interpersonal, communicative, sexual lens (engaging, satisfying!).
Elemental Logic series, Laurie J. Marks
I came to these when I needed to distracted by a totally different world that still interrogated what it means to inhabit, be response for, and change a world. They had a significant positive impact on a shitty year.
Edward Gorey
Bind-ups make Gorey's work so accessible and encourage a deep-dive into his experimentation, running themes, and the conversation between his books. He's like "what if potato chips were also a satisfying, complete meal"—tiny, addictive, even repetitive, but substantial.
The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, Chris Van Allsburg
Some childhood favorites live up to their memory, and this is literally about spinning a single illustration into an entire imagined narrative—which is childhood memory in a nutshell.
The Steerswoman series, Rosemary Kirstein
This was on my list in 2016 (and maybe one day I will actually give it a proper review), but let it be known that it is even better upon reread: the reveals are so well plotted; the beauty of revelation is more keenly felt for anticipating it. I don't know that I've ever had such a successful reread, which is no small achievement.
Goth & Goth (manga), Otsuichi
The novel was on my list in 2015 when I first read it. Rereading both it and the manga together only makes me wish I'd also rewatched the film—this is one of my favorite stories and I love how it alters/reinforces in iteration.
Vita Nostra, Marina and Sergey Dyachenko
Inversions of the magical school trope & I have since hit it off, but this is where I first encountered it and it continues to be my gold standard—not because it's a perfect book, but because what it does with this trope is so thorny that it entangles even the reader in its broken logic and magical transformation.
Blame!, Nihei Tsutomu
The film adaptation was on my list in 2017; the manga is a different beast entire. A nod to the mention of NaissanceE and Control, below, which pushed me to read this. In what turned out to be a year of conceptualizing the inconceivable infinite, this was one of the least plotty but most memorable.
Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu
I love the new insights prompted by a reread, but I also love when a reread lives up to every memory—and this is as rich, sensual, unsettling, and gratifying as I remember it to be. What better possible takeaways could there be from this particular book?
A Phantom Lover, Vernon Lee
Queer women writing women in horror makes for exceptional character sketches—unprettied; compelling. I can't wait to read more Lee; I feel like I'm saving her as a future gift for myself.
When I Arrived at the Castle, Emily Carroll
This makes me wish all of Carroll's work were standalone and written first for the page (some of her comics are more successful in their original scrolling digital format) because it's nearly flawless—a visceral, intimate fairytale-horror.
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Angela Carter
This is that perfect storm of repeated failed reviews: what more could I say about this famous thing? and how can I describe such a fierce pleasure? I love this now more than ever—such excesses! such productive thematic contradiction between stories!
Pennterra, Judith Moffett
Like Memoirs of a Spacewoman, this was another longterm TBR resident that met all those years of expectation. My notes read "alien/human sex book" and boy howdy is it that—a complex, uneasy, but fundamentally joyful and compassionate exploration of entirely alien, very thorough sex.
Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century, Hal Higdon
Consider this the thematic cousin to Graham's So Brilliantly Clever, on this list in 2015: this crime also fascinates me; this treatment is thorough, sympathetic, and never exculpatory. It handles the queer elements with particular grace.
NaissanceE
I played this back in February, called it as my game of year then, and I was right. This is my every fear of heights, falling, scale, and insignificance embodied in a breathing human form and a massive inimical space. I've never had such a visceral reaction to a game. I've linked to it before, but I found this through Jacob Geller's video, which is great and speaks to elements that worked for me. The game is free! Play it!
Control
I watched my partner play this, and watching spared me from most of its flaws re: actual gameplay. But what it achieves beyond those flaws is entirely up my alley and contributed to a good year for media about inhospitable architecture and existential dread. I love best Jesse's response to the unknown: that she seeks it doesn't render it any less dangerous, but she still seeks it—the unknown is her home and companion.
Anodyne 2: Return to Dust
Playstation-era graphics are highly underexploited as nostalgia bait; I love the 3D aesthetic. I streamed this for Teja and read all the dialogue aloud, which made me/us linger over the game more than we would have otherwise. I did more grief processing in playing this game than I have in the entire time since my dad died. Dust is sin, dust makes us mortal—and all that means is that dust is life.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
I don't put this under honorable mentions to discredit it—it came out at just the right time and reshaped my quarantine. But I stopped playing it over summer because I needed to transition away from that coping method and because I don't enjoy the cycle of preemptive investment created by seasonal patches. I hope this will be on my best of list next year, when I can return to the completed game.
Ooblets
I was really anticipating this and played it in early access—indeed it's everything I hoped for: wholesome, excessively quirky, stupidly cute. But I'm not keeping up with patches for the same reason as AC:NH; I'll return when it's finished.
Human Fall Flat
I played a lot of co-op games this year. This was unlike the rest: puzzles instead of gunplay or gamified progression, so we spent less time with it, but also cooperative, creative, with hilariously squishy funsics—it was some of the purest fun I had all year.
Luigi's Mansion series
The joy of playing a Nintendo franchise is watching the gameplay improve and the environments grow ever more lovingly detailed; the joy of this series in specific is unmitigated spoop. The combination is a Halloween delight that immersed me in my favorite season.
Hannibal
This was on my list in 2015 and has secretly been there in every intervening year because I kept rewatching it while building forward in the series and working up the courage to finish season 3—because I love this show so much that more is overwhelming and the idea of it ending is even worse. Ironically s3 was the perfect answer to that anxiety, reflecting obsessively over the series in the same way I do and then ending so, so well.
The Untamed
I was a reluctant sell on this, both for its viral popularity and for its cold open, which works in retrospect is a cheesy, confusing introduction. But it got me so good. The long, slow, tragic, intimate burn of it pays back that initial investment hundredfold, and I'm delighted that their solution to adapting under censorship was to create a plethora of queer subtext even where it doesn't exist in the source material.
Jacob Geller
I sure do love a video essay, but Geller's precise fascination with existential horror and his penchant for "wait, hold on, I promise they're related" interconnections between stories and subjects is so much my style that in a very alternate universe this could be my channel—meanwhile in this universe, I have the videos without the massive effort of making them.
Big-concept SF B-movies
I'm talking Cube's survival game or Coherence's parallel worlds with a twist ending. These were my answer to quarantine: their tension mirrors real life but the engaging-to-ridiculous high concept premises distract from it entirely. The very best of these was Predestination, which is so queer, surprisingly clever, and a strong adaptation of a promising but dated work.
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
"This is so good," I said with a sense of confused wonder after every episode (after the first handful). My standards were set for Voltron: Legendary Defender: watchable, sometimes good, but a little dumb and/or constrained by format. What I got is something that feels intentional from the onset, with consistent, slow, delicate character growth and a joyful lived diversity.
A Portrait of a Lady on Fire
The female gaze as a reciprocal dynamic, the careful details, the perfect balance of its ending--this left me clarified and sobbing.
Here's my Spotify Wrapup for 2020. In autumn I made a long, messy playlist of the spooky/edgy/Southern Gothic trash I listen to every autumn; in autumn I also made music a big part of my daily activities, so this is the bulk of my top 100.
The other highlight was Cereal Dreamers: Spooky Stories, a collaborative (made to order? royalty free?) collection of spoopy background music that I find incredibly charming.
Books
I read ~243 books in 2020. That's an intentional step down from last year's 374, but higher than expected; my prior average was ~150 a year. Reviewing my yearly reading was when "2020 was seven years long" really hit me—there are books from the beginning of the year that I remember with the fond distance from 2015. It's also no surprise that my reading was a mess, with a lot of comfort/easy reads, rereads, and shoddy demographic tracking (sometimes unintentional; sometimes intentionally allowing generous overlap between demographics). I read fanfic (unusual for me) which I tracked in vast, approximate batches; I'm continuing to read manga through the library, which has made for an uptick in authors of color and male authors; Edward Gorey bind-ups inflated my metrics.
Of my 2020 reading, 48% were by women, 58% by men, and 5% by non-cis authors. 28% were authors of color, 10% were Jewish, and 40% fall in my catch-all bucket for other marginalized identities like disabled and queer. 23% of works were translated. 16% were rereads. Excepting the preponderance of male authors, this is nearly identical to previous years—so my reading probably wasn't as skewed as it felt. Only 1% (4 books!) were DNF'd, which I perennially encourage myself to increase.
My best-of list continues to run long, but that's a good thing.
The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, Ursula K. Le Guin
Crossing the last Hainish book off of my TBR would have been more bittersweet had this not been so good. The series has incredible breadth, but never enough—and this answers that, peering into the cracks in civilizations in a way that insists on increasingly dynamic, diverse worlds. Ratings are meaningless, but this was my my first five-star of the year and one of the only short story collections to ever warrant that rating.
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
I'm an easy sell on exploring infinite spaces conceptually; what amazed me here is how solid it is in execution without feeling overworked—it's a delicate, balanced, beautiful little book. Again ratings mean nothing, but this is my last 5-star review of the year, and what a high note to end on.
Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison
I love when a longtime entry on my TBR is worth the wait. The literal feminist elements have grown dated, but the underlying approach absolutely fulfills this intent: high-concept alien worldbuilding (fun!) with a fundamentally social, interpersonal, communicative, sexual lens (engaging, satisfying!).
Elemental Logic series, Laurie J. Marks
I came to these when I needed to distracted by a totally different world that still interrogated what it means to inhabit, be response for, and change a world. They had a significant positive impact on a shitty year.
Edward Gorey
Bind-ups make Gorey's work so accessible and encourage a deep-dive into his experimentation, running themes, and the conversation between his books. He's like "what if potato chips were also a satisfying, complete meal"—tiny, addictive, even repetitive, but substantial.
The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, Chris Van Allsburg
Some childhood favorites live up to their memory, and this is literally about spinning a single illustration into an entire imagined narrative—which is childhood memory in a nutshell.
Honorable Mentions in Books
The Steerswoman series, Rosemary Kirstein
This was on my list in 2016 (and maybe one day I will actually give it a proper review), but let it be known that it is even better upon reread: the reveals are so well plotted; the beauty of revelation is more keenly felt for anticipating it. I don't know that I've ever had such a successful reread, which is no small achievement.
Goth & Goth (manga), Otsuichi
The novel was on my list in 2015 when I first read it. Rereading both it and the manga together only makes me wish I'd also rewatched the film—this is one of my favorite stories and I love how it alters/reinforces in iteration.
Vita Nostra, Marina and Sergey Dyachenko
Inversions of the magical school trope & I have since hit it off, but this is where I first encountered it and it continues to be my gold standard—not because it's a perfect book, but because what it does with this trope is so thorny that it entangles even the reader in its broken logic and magical transformation.
Blame!, Nihei Tsutomu
The film adaptation was on my list in 2017; the manga is a different beast entire. A nod to the mention of NaissanceE and Control, below, which pushed me to read this. In what turned out to be a year of conceptualizing the inconceivable infinite, this was one of the least plotty but most memorable.
Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu
I love the new insights prompted by a reread, but I also love when a reread lives up to every memory—and this is as rich, sensual, unsettling, and gratifying as I remember it to be. What better possible takeaways could there be from this particular book?
A Phantom Lover, Vernon Lee
Queer women writing women in horror makes for exceptional character sketches—unprettied; compelling. I can't wait to read more Lee; I feel like I'm saving her as a future gift for myself.
When I Arrived at the Castle, Emily Carroll
This makes me wish all of Carroll's work were standalone and written first for the page (some of her comics are more successful in their original scrolling digital format) because it's nearly flawless—a visceral, intimate fairytale-horror.
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Angela Carter
This is that perfect storm of repeated failed reviews: what more could I say about this famous thing? and how can I describe such a fierce pleasure? I love this now more than ever—such excesses! such productive thematic contradiction between stories!
Pennterra, Judith Moffett
Like Memoirs of a Spacewoman, this was another longterm TBR resident that met all those years of expectation. My notes read "alien/human sex book" and boy howdy is it that—a complex, uneasy, but fundamentally joyful and compassionate exploration of entirely alien, very thorough sex.
Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century, Hal Higdon
Consider this the thematic cousin to Graham's So Brilliantly Clever, on this list in 2015: this crime also fascinates me; this treatment is thorough, sympathetic, and never exculpatory. It handles the queer elements with particular grace.
Games
NaissanceE
I played this back in February, called it as my game of year then, and I was right. This is my every fear of heights, falling, scale, and insignificance embodied in a breathing human form and a massive inimical space. I've never had such a visceral reaction to a game. I've linked to it before, but I found this through Jacob Geller's video, which is great and speaks to elements that worked for me. The game is free! Play it!
Control
I watched my partner play this, and watching spared me from most of its flaws re: actual gameplay. But what it achieves beyond those flaws is entirely up my alley and contributed to a good year for media about inhospitable architecture and existential dread. I love best Jesse's response to the unknown: that she seeks it doesn't render it any less dangerous, but she still seeks it—the unknown is her home and companion.
Anodyne 2: Return to Dust
Playstation-era graphics are highly underexploited as nostalgia bait; I love the 3D aesthetic. I streamed this for Teja and read all the dialogue aloud, which made me/us linger over the game more than we would have otherwise. I did more grief processing in playing this game than I have in the entire time since my dad died. Dust is sin, dust makes us mortal—and all that means is that dust is life.
Honorable Mentions in Games
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
I don't put this under honorable mentions to discredit it—it came out at just the right time and reshaped my quarantine. But I stopped playing it over summer because I needed to transition away from that coping method and because I don't enjoy the cycle of preemptive investment created by seasonal patches. I hope this will be on my best of list next year, when I can return to the completed game.
Ooblets
I was really anticipating this and played it in early access—indeed it's everything I hoped for: wholesome, excessively quirky, stupidly cute. But I'm not keeping up with patches for the same reason as AC:NH; I'll return when it's finished.
Human Fall Flat
I played a lot of co-op games this year. This was unlike the rest: puzzles instead of gunplay or gamified progression, so we spent less time with it, but also cooperative, creative, with hilariously squishy funsics—it was some of the purest fun I had all year.
Luigi's Mansion series
The joy of playing a Nintendo franchise is watching the gameplay improve and the environments grow ever more lovingly detailed; the joy of this series in specific is unmitigated spoop. The combination is a Halloween delight that immersed me in my favorite season.
Visual Media
Hannibal
This was on my list in 2015 and has secretly been there in every intervening year because I kept rewatching it while building forward in the series and working up the courage to finish season 3—because I love this show so much that more is overwhelming and the idea of it ending is even worse. Ironically s3 was the perfect answer to that anxiety, reflecting obsessively over the series in the same way I do and then ending so, so well.
The Untamed
I was a reluctant sell on this, both for its viral popularity and for its cold open, which works in retrospect is a cheesy, confusing introduction. But it got me so good. The long, slow, tragic, intimate burn of it pays back that initial investment hundredfold, and I'm delighted that their solution to adapting under censorship was to create a plethora of queer subtext even where it doesn't exist in the source material.
Honorable Mentions in Visual Media
Jacob Geller
I sure do love a video essay, but Geller's precise fascination with existential horror and his penchant for "wait, hold on, I promise they're related" interconnections between stories and subjects is so much my style that in a very alternate universe this could be my channel—meanwhile in this universe, I have the videos without the massive effort of making them.
Big-concept SF B-movies
I'm talking Cube's survival game or Coherence's parallel worlds with a twist ending. These were my answer to quarantine: their tension mirrors real life but the engaging-to-ridiculous high concept premises distract from it entirely. The very best of these was Predestination, which is so queer, surprisingly clever, and a strong adaptation of a promising but dated work.
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
"This is so good," I said with a sense of confused wonder after every episode (after the first handful). My standards were set for Voltron: Legendary Defender: watchable, sometimes good, but a little dumb and/or constrained by format. What I got is something that feels intentional from the onset, with consistent, slow, delicate character growth and a joyful lived diversity.
A Portrait of a Lady on Fire
The female gaze as a reciprocal dynamic, the careful details, the perfect balance of its ending--this left me clarified and sobbing.
Music
Here's my Spotify Wrapup for 2020. In autumn I made a long, messy playlist of the spooky/edgy/Southern Gothic trash I listen to every autumn; in autumn I also made music a big part of my daily activities, so this is the bulk of my top 100.
The other highlight was Cereal Dreamers: Spooky Stories, a collaborative (made to order? royalty free?) collection of spoopy background music that I find incredibly charming.
