While I’m definitely going to continue with this rundown of all my favorite things read, watched, played and listened to in the past year, a definite trend I have to shout out: the movies are back, baby! And not just at AMC Theatres - I mean I rediscovered my personal love of (and attention span for) feature films in a way I haven’t embraced since, if we’re being honest, even before the pandemic. (I’m fairly certain I crossed over 30 new releases and over 100 new-to-me watches for the first time since at least 2017)

So while my tippy-top best movies of the year so far are presented here in non-judgmental alphabetical order, the EMOs are going to return with a true vengeance early in 2023, and I also want to write up some of my thoughts from year one of a Mubi subscription, whose one-movie-added-per-day and clear time limits set up some stakes and boundaries around cinephilia in the great morass of streaming that I found extremely rewarding. More to come over at The Best Films of Our Lives if that’s of interest.

Away we go,

Fiction

• Bellwether, Connie Willis
• Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead
• Himself, Jess Kidd
• Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
• Lote, Shola von Reinhold
• My Life as a Fake, Peter Carey
• Silverview, John Le Carré
• Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Peter Høeg
• The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

Non-Fiction

• Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, Dana Stevens
• Living Pictures, Polina Barskova (trans. Catherine Ciepela)
• Mike Nichols: A Life, Mark Harris

Movies

• Benediction
• Decision to Leave
• Nope
• RRR
• Stars at Noon
• Tár

TV Series

• Barry, Season 3 (HBO)
• Cheer, Season 2 (Netflix)
• Detroiters, Seasons 1-2 (Comedy Central)
• Girls5Eva, Season 2 (Peacock)
• Reservation Dogs, Season 2 (Hulu)
• Rutherford Falls, Season 2 (Peacock)
• Search Party, Season 5 (HBO Max)
• Severance, Season 1 (Apple TV+)
• Slow Horses, Seasons 1-2 (Apple TV+)

Limited Series

• Angels in America (HBO)
• The Staircase (HBO Max)

Podcasts

• How to Survive with Danielle & Kristine
• Spontaneanation
• Three Bean Salad

Games

• Knotwords
• Night in the Woods
• Return of the Obra Dinn
• Spiritfarer
• Wargroove

(catching up in my first year of Switch ownership I also can say that yes, Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, Animal Crossing and Metroid Dread are very good; but both you and Nintendo don’t really need me to plug those)