Another year, another pointless list of the media I’ve consumed that no-one really cares about, but that I’m foisting on you nevertheless. I started keeping these lists as of the beginning of 2019, and give a lengthier account of my motivations HERE. Suffice to say, I’m really rather anal. Without any further ado, then, here are my lists, with a little blurb at the end of each to spraff about some of the entries and crown my favourites.

Books

I absolutely adored Girl, Woman, Other. Unsentimental, unpreachy, utterly convincing. It’s astounding how well Bernardine Evaristo embodies such a wide cross-section of female characters, of all different ages, classes and ethnicities, managing to pull together their (seemingly) disparate stories – powerful enough as vignettes in their own right – and interlock them into a strong and hopeful coda. A real eye-opener.

If we’re talking powerful, what a punch Beloved packed. Toni Morrison tells a visceral, haunting story that makes you sick to your stomach then sick to your soul; a tale of brutality and escape and birth and death and sacrifice and stolen humanity, the horror of it all wrapped in language so incongruously eloquent and beautiful that it serves to amplify the agony and accentuate the senselessness. It always astounds me that people dismiss slavery as if it weresome biblical indiscretion, when its horror is achingly recent. If some Scots still carry the faint scars of Culloden, then I think African Americans are entitled to their pain, given that the path from slavery to the civil rights movement to last year’s BLM has given the wound plenty of chances to re-open and bleed afresh.

The Fault in Our Stars … what an unexpected delight. It’s funny, raw, honest, real, and tragic, and laced through with almost molten layers of humanity. Five stars out of five. No faults there. Very few books have made me cry, and this was one of them, and then some.

Now, on to sci-fi, a genre of which I’m exceedingly fond. Monday Begins on Saturday is a strikingly novel work of the imagination, but it was rather too dense for my liking. Better were the simpler stories and stripped down prose to be found in Finney’s seminal sci-fi classic The Body Snatchers – a real paranoia-filled page turner – and Asimov’s The Caves of Steel – some real thoughtful, engaging, golden age sci-fi.

The funnies? The Radleys is a blast. It’s a sometimes funny, sometimes poignant tale about discontented suburban vampires reckoning with their pasts, that has a lot to say about teenage kicks, mid-life crises and the ticking time-bomb of truth that sits at the hearts of even the most seemingly mundane of middle-class families. Hitman Anders and the Meaning of it All is a brilliant, laugh-out-loud farce, peopled with fascinating and frustrating characters. If you like swipes at organised religion and the gullibility of the masses served with copious amounts of booze and underworld hitmen in rural Sweden, then this is the book for you.

The best book I read this year, though, was Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m in awe of her prose. Every page is a delight. At least once every few phrases or passages I found myself muttering internally that it was time to quit writing, because I’d never be able to conjure such rich images or evoke such real and strong feelings as Margaret Atwood. Plus, the chilling world she conjures, and the small degrees by which we’re separated from worlds like it, seems all too frighteningly plausible in 2020/1. The book is as much a work of peerless literary genius as it is a stark warning.

Graphic Novels 

There’s an embarrassment of riches out there in comic-land and I’m still very much playing catch up with compendiums from years gone by. What I can say is that I picked up some volumes of Preacher and I bloody love it, more so than it’s TV adaptation. Ditto, so far, with The Boys, although the TV version of Homelander still reigns supreme.

The seedy, grubby, gory, all-out bonkers future world depicted in Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan, in which half-mad gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem plies his trade with the help of rivers of raging bile  and a steady supply of narcotics is a non-stop thrill-ride of invention, heart, hilarity, caustic commentary on contemporary ills, and some truly disgusting shit. It’s like 2000AD meets George Orwell on methamphetamine.

The best graphic novel I read in 2020, though, was Southern Bastards. I didn’t want it to end. It’s what Elmore Leonard would’ve produced if he’d written graphic novels. It cleaves just close enough to cliche to make you think you know what it’s all about, and what’s coming next, but it’s resolutely its own, very modern, beast. Compelling; compulsive; cinematic; dark and deliciously morally grey; it’s both an earnest love-letter to and a big fuck you to the deep south of America. Read it.

TV Shows

Old (watched in 2020 but older shows that didn’t debut in 2020)

It’s all about Cobra Kai, right? A show that on paper looked like a sure-fire dud, but defied expectations to become one of the best and most popular new shows of recent years. Who would have thought that the Karate Kid had so much mileage in it, and that Johnny Lawrence – a walking 1980s time capsule – would become a hero for our times? Elsewhere, I gorged on, and loved, The Boys, kicking myself for not having watched it sooner. Likewise Schitt’s Creek, which quickly became one of my favourite comedies and possibly one of my favourite shows, full-stop, of all time. I also disappeared down the Making a Murderer rabbit-hole a few years later than everyone else. I’ve since watched the second season, too, and while I believe that the police and the prosecution team are hiding something, and there are gaps a mile-wide in the evidence and the timeline, I’m not sure I believe that Avery is innocent. That trailer park of his is like The Hills Have Eyes. Is it possible he did it, covered his tracks and then the police moved the ‘evidence’ into place, planting a few bits and bobs along the way, to secure conviction?

New TV Shows 2020

I’m not going to say too much about 2020’s new shows, because I’m going to be covering these in more depth in the next week or so. Make up your own mind for now.

Movies (all movies, not just those new in 2020)

A lot of disappointments for me this year. Zombieland 2 was more like a hollow amateur cover album than a continuation of the fun, kinetic spirit of the original. Star Wars continues to tank on the big screen, at least in the opinion of this former goggle-eyed kid of the 80s (thank Christ for The Mandalorian). Borat 2 had some funny moments, and a good pay-off, but felt, overall, a bit inconsequential, which is something I never thought I’d say about a Sacha Baron Cohen project. Thank God, then, for Train to Busan, a movie I missed the first time around, and which was every bit as good as I’d been led to expect. Just when you think the zombie genre has had its day, along comes this nightmarish motherfucker to reawaken parts of your adrenal gland you’d long thought were shut off. Netflix’s His House was really good, a highly effective, well-acted horror with powerful messages about love, loss and identity along the way. Jo Jo Rabbit, of course, was fantastic, but you probably already know that. Hitler has never been so much fun; although the trailer belies the tragedy and pathos that form the spine of the film – as well as being funny, it’s also deep and richly moving. For feel-good laughs and a strong performance from Shia LaBeouf that reminds you he’s so much more than the dude from Indiana Jones 4 and Transformers, I entreat you to seek out The Peanut Butter Falcon, even if it does have an implausibly saccharine ending (maybe I’m just an old cynic).

I watched a lot of old(er) movies with my young kids, including a raft of Charlie Chaplin flicks I’d never seen before. Modern Times is the one that made them laugh the hardest, especially the scenes in the factory at the beginning. It’s nice that some things really are timeless. We also watched Rabbit Proof Fence early in the year, and even today, without prompt, my eldest son, Jack, asked me how many miles the girls walked in the movie. It’s obviously stuck with him, just as it’s stuck with me. It’s a beautiful movie that provides a happy, hopeful ending that wasn’t really matched by the reality that followed its events. Even still, inspirational stuff, and bravura performances from the mostly young cast.

Movies watched before/again

I watched most of the above with my kids. I can’t tell you the joy it brought me to see them start spouting catchphrases like ‘Great Scott!’, ‘He slimed me’, ‘Wax on, wax off’, ‘Party on, dudes’ and ‘Necessary? Is it necessary for me to drink my own URINE?’ Okay, I probably shouldn’t have let them watch Dodgeball, but there you go.

Groundhog Day is one of my favourite movies of all time. Again, it felt nice to see my eldest son so enraptured by it, and so receptive to its message of always trying to better yourself as a person.