Best Things of 2020
My adolescent enthusiasm for awards shows and year-end movie lists has devolved, inexorably, to whatever 2020 is/was. Some things brought me joy - many just passed the time.
Rather than a detailed breakdown, here are some recommendations, the best things I watched/read/listened to in this awful year. Note that, other than movies (where the spirit and bureaucracy of the EMOs still lives on inside me, even if I could barely muster the energy to fire up the new Claire Denis or Kelly Reichardt flick before a pandemic), these are all pieces of culture that I consumed in 2020, not necessarily released this year. I still have a stack of new-in-2020 movies that I want to see and promise I’ll definitely get to sometime after we re-watch all the way through Peep Show for the fourth time.
Fiction
- The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin
- Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo
- How Much of These Hills Is Gold, C Pam Zhang
- Kindred, Octavia Butler
- The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Likeness, Tana French
- The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson
- Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
Non-Fiction
- Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, Charlton D. McIlwain
- Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Legacy Russell
- How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell
- The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most, Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell
- Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Ruha Benjamin
- What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley, Adrian Daub
Movies
TV Series
- Pen15, Season 2, Hulu
- What We Do in the Shadows, Season 2, FX/Hulu
- The Wire, Season 1, HBO
- Year of the Rabbit, Season 1, Channel 4/IFC
Limited Series
- The Good Lord Bird, Showtime
- The New Pope, HBO
- Watchmen, HBO
Podcasts
- Stay F. Homekins
- Still Processing
- You Must Remember This (Make Me Over and Polly Platt, the Invisible Woman series)