For a variety of reasons, I am pretty late in doing all of this, but for the sake of completeness I thought I’d still put up a brief wrap-up of my media diet in 2025.
First, reading. I read 71 books in 2025, which is about average. I read slightly more non-fiction than fiction, which is unusual. Only 9 of the 71 were translated, which might actually be a result of reading more non-fiction— a lot of those books were about Native American history and US federal policy, and, unsurprisingly, most of that is written in English by American authors. I also read only one book of poetry and no essays, which is also unusual. The complete list of books is here.
My movie watching was also, I think, fairly in line with the last few years. I watched 120 feature films and 6 shorts. 34 of these were in a language other than English, and 28 were animated. The one thing that seemed surprising is that I watched only 13 documentaries. Most (109) were films I was watching for the first time. A complete list of the films is here.
One thing I am pleased about in 2025 is that I listened to a lot more music. Partly out of news exhaustion, I listened to a lot fewer podcasts, which started to feel more and more like part of the noise. I don’t know if this was a particularly good year for music, or just that I was paying more attention, but I have a pretty long list of favorites. One very nice surprise was that there were two new Aesop Rock albums this year; I don’t think either is quite as good as his previous release, but both are still excellent. I haven’t identified any particular patterns in these releases, though they skew electronic and instrumental.
These are in no particular order. There are also three releases from the year that, for whatever reason, are not on Bandcamp: Moor Mother’s orchestral reworking of her 2019 album Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes; Hildur Guðnadottir’s Where to From, and Rosalìa’s LUX (which is on literally every best-of-the-year list I’ve seen). All three of those are also on Spotify and other streaming services.
I also tried to keep a running list of individual songs from the year, though I wasn’t especially consistent about that. There’s quite a bit of overlap with the album list above, but also a fair amount of variation.
I did also listen to a lot of older music as well. For a broader overview, I find LastFM’s wrap-up more useful than Spotify’s, mainly because it includes things I own rather than streamed. You can see that here.
And that’s it. Obviously I could say more about lots of these things, but if I wait to do that I will never post this. Hope everybody’s 2026 is off to a good start.
