Top 20 of 2023

 This used to be a Top 19 post, but then I started gaming and I wanted to include my top game that I finished in the year, so instead of taking one off of the books to make it an even ten, I just added one. 

So, let's get started with the easy ones: Top Artist and Top Game. Top Artist is decided by whoever Spotify tells me I listened the most to, and ladies and gentlemen, we went straight back to seventh grade with this one, because my top artist was The All-American Rejects. AAR was my favorite band back in middle school. Good times.

Top Game--I didn't finish many games this year. I'm not a huge gamer. But, I did finish a few, and out of the ones that I did finish, my favorite was definitely Hiveswap: Act 2. Once a Homestuck, always a Homestuck, I guess. I just really liked seeing all the trolls and also had a physical reaction of mild terror when we got to the purples. 

Now, movies. Top 7 movies/TV shows. The only rule with these is that it can't be a rewatch--same with the books. 

7. Ghost Ship --I realize that this is a shitty movie, but like, it's so fun. I love abandoned things and I love shitty nuMetal soundtracks and so it was just enrapturing. I love Ghost Ship. 

6. Bill & Ted Face the Music --Not anywhere near as good as the original two by any means, but still fun, and I love Keanu Reeves with all of my heart, and so it would be like, a tragedy if I didn't have at least one Keanu movie on my top seven of the year list. 

5. Leatherface --I will mostly watch and enjoy any TCM movie you throw at me, except for the 2022 one, which I did watch but did not enjoy because it sucked. But Leatherface was super fun. It was like, TCM3D-VERSE, which is not the best, but it's still fun! It's still so fun! God! Love a big guy with a chainsaw!

4. V/H/S --I do really want to watch the rest of the V/H/S movies. This is the only one I've watched and it was so much fun. I don't know that there was a weak segment. My favorite was I support women's wrongs. 

3. Clerks II --This did mostly make me want to rewatch Clerks the original, and also reminded me that there was a Clerks III that did come out, but this was funny. I know that like, it's not everyone's humor, but I love a good Kevin Smith movie, and it's fun when I watch one that I haven't seen before. 

2. Cobra Kai, S2 --I have not watched season 3 yet. Or beyond. I'm really bad at watching TV. But the end of this season, even though I knew it was coming, made me bawl my eyes out. Like, straight-up sobbing. Man. 

1. The Black Phone --Also made me cry! A lot of movies make me cry. But I really liked this one. It was like, what Summer of '84 wanted to be but actually really good.

Books! Top 11 books of the year. Honestly, given the fact that I read 527 books this year, this didn't take as long as I thought as it would to pick. I guess it helped that I already definitely knew my top 4. Again, re-reads don't count.

11. The Raven King (Nora Sakavic) --I'd read the first book in this series before this year, but I did read the rest of it this year. And it's overdramatic and weird but really emotionally compelling. Picking between this one and King's Men really just had to do with which one had more Jean Moreau in it. 

10. Goodnight Punpun 7 (Inio Asano) --This might be kind of cheating because most of this volume was a re-read. But the first time (and the second, and the third...) I read Punpun was an online fan-translation, and it didn't have the last full half of this book. And I realize that the implications for the main character in his end are kinda bleak, but Seki seems happy, so that's all I really care about. 

9. In the Dark (Richard Laymon) --I read a lot of Laymon this year. Laymon's a gross little man who wrote gross little books, but this one was super fun. Like, more fun than his other ones. I loved how useless the love interest was. And his name was so dumb. And I loved how greedy the main character got. Also if I'm remembering right this was the one with the like, cannibalistic trapped women in the house? Was this that book??? I think it was. But god, Brace was so useless. And his name was Brace. That did it for me, I think. 

8. Qualityland (Marc Uwe-Kling) --This book was honestly the funniest book I've read in a while. Dystopian, Amazon has taken over, just funny. It's a translated work from German. I won it from Goodreads like, three years ago. 

7. The Illusion (KA Applegate) --Yeah, this is. This is an Animorphs book. But I read a lot of Animorphs this year, and this one just like, really shocks me on a visceral level. This is a children's book that is a solid 60% extended torture sequence. Tobias. :( 

6. Orbiting Jupiter (Gary D Schimdt) --Not as good as Okay for Now, but probably the second best of his books that I've read. Really heartbreaking. This man can write a sad boy with an abusive father, that's for sure. 

5. Paris in the Terror (Stanley Loomis) --I'm a French Revolution freak, more specifically the terror, as I think has been discussed oh-so-many times. This book was overdramatic and weirdly focused in on Charlotte Corday, but it was still really fun, really enrapturing as someone who knows a lot about the French Revolution, 

4. A Place of Greater Safety (Hilary Mantel) --Speaking of the Terror. This one was even more fun because it also was like, mostly concerned with Camille Desmoulins and I love Camille Desmoulins. I also read Wolf Hall by Mantel this year and I remember thinking, "Wow, I don't know what's going on but this is great. I bet the French Revolution one will be even better for me, personally, since I'll know what's going on." I was right. 

3. Devil House (John Darnielle) --This book hurt my heart and I don't really even know why. It's like, when you're reading a book, you know it's fictional, so revelations like happened at the end of this book should not be as confusing for your heart as they are, but they are. My first book by Darnielle and I'm excited to read more of his stuff. 

2. The Winners (Fredrik Backman) --oh fuck you fredrik. God. My heart hurts so fucking much. Every book in this trilogy made me bawl my eyes out but this was a solid seventy pages of straight crying in the bathtub. 

1. Glamorama (Bret Easton Ellis) --Full disclosure, this might be 2 or 3 if the Zoolander memes hadn't blown up in the last month or so, because Zoolander makes me think of Glamorama and then I think about how fucking stupid Victor is and I just get happy. I loved Glamorama. It takes a bit to get into, but once you're past the seventy page mark you just, you're just along for the ride and I love it. God. Glamorama. Victor. Dumbest motherfucker in the universe. So fun. 

So that's that! I don't know if I'll be able to match my reading next year to this year. I don't think so. My "goal" is 473 but I don't know that that'll really come to fruition. I feel like it won't. But I'll try. I've still got 2047 books in the book wall to take care of.