Stuff I Consumed: 2025
Taking a look at all that I consumed in 2025, this time including some music recommendations!
We’re back for the continuing series of things I consumed. I did an excellent job of tracking in 2025, with the help of Things 3 and emojis. Traditionally I made a giant spreadsheet of all that I consumed but with the help of Chat GPT, it’s been easier to track via Things, sort via Sheets, and then clean up and analyze with Chat GPT.
Books
Overall I read thirty-six books this year, thirteen of which I gave a star to. That’s about a 35% hit rate, which actually is pretty great! For a deeper dive into my 2025 reading, I’ll send you over to the quarterly book reviews I’ve been doing, which detail exactly what I read.
For 2026, I’m giving up Goodreads and moving over to Storygraph. I know, you’re thrilled by this news. Flummoxed? Either way, I’m over there now, thanks!
Best Reads 2025
- Babel, R.F. Kuang
- Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino
- Central Places, Delia Cai
- Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Emergent Tokyo, Jorge Almazán
- I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman
- Jade City, Fonda Lee
- My Ántonia, Willa Cather
- Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
- Raising Raffi, Keith Gessen
- Shattering the Glass, Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford
- Stay True, Hua Hsu
- Strange Houses, Uketsu
I read in a recent newsletter that someone was going to only watch twelve movies for this upcoming year. Their stated goal was to cut down on movie watching and just dig into the good stuff. That sounds great but how do you know what the good stuff will be? (Also, this same person is quitting TV as a medium entirely.)
In 2025, I put in my usual amount of movies, which tends to end up around eighty. This year was seventy-six to be exact, according to Chat GPT. And of those seventy-six movies, how many did I star and whole heartedly recommend?
Six, just six! Here’s the list: Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, The New Yorker at 100, Persuasion, Sister Midnight, State of Play, The Pale Blue Eye. Of those, only the two documentaries were even released in 2025, with State of Play being a 2002 film and The Pale Blue Eye and Persuasion from 2022. This really calls into question how I’m using my time doesn’t it?
If I cut out movies altogether, I could save 150 hours of my life and really only miss out on say, fifteen hours of great cinema? That’s not how movies work though I guess, as they also fulfill the slots of background watch, Friday evening get togethers, something to talk about with friends, Rewatchables homework, pre-bed just put something on, etc.
Still, that is a lot of movie watching for very little hit rate. Just eight percent according to Chat GPT. Actually I just realized 2024 was even worse, with only four movies out of sixty-plus that I would recommend to all. I guess I need to head into movies thinking that there’s a 92-95% chance that it’ll be just okay?
I also went to the theater fifteen times this year and emerged with only one true great movie experience, which was Sister Midnight. (Eighteen if you count theater rewatches of Sense and Sensibility, Twilight, and Wicked.)
Theater Movies- Captain America: Brave New World
- Companion
- F1 The Movie
- Fantastic Four First Steps
- How to Train Your Dragon
- Mickey 17
- One Battle After Another
- Predator Badlands
- Sinners
- Sister Midnight
- Snow White
- Superman
- The Phoenician Scheme
- Thunderbolts
- Zootopia 2
Granted, some movies were definitely still worth the watch and you gotta see them just to nominally keep up with the culture. Sinners, KPop Demon Hunter, One Battle After Another. Of the three, KDH was obviously amazing and actually that should be starred for sure. But I disliked Sinners quite a bit and while the actual experience of One Battle left me underwhelmed, I have been wanting to rewatch it for some of the scenes. So that’s something.
Warning, rant upcoming: Through some recent rewatches, I have to give Good Will Hunting a failing “does it hold up” grade. I mean, it’s actually quite bad if you distance yourself from the nostalgia. And I also watched The Big Lebowski for the first time ever. I think I just didn’t like the people who liked the Big Lebowski when it first came out—and subsequent culture takeover among a certain set—so had always avoided it. I watched it finally and sort of got it but am also unlikely to ever watch it again.
Television
I quit a lot of TV series this year, a lot! I’ll go through those down below… Of the thirteen TV series I watched, there’s only four I can stand behind: Celtics City
Poker Face S2, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, and Sweetpea. That’s a thirty percent hit rate. However, considering how many shows I had to dig through to even finish thirteen of them, that seems like very few winners. But similar to movies, sometimes you just gotta put something on!
A word about The Offer, which is a fictionalized behind the scenes about the making of The Godfather, starring Miles Teller. While it was by no means great, it was our co-watch of the year since it launched us not only into rewatching the Godfather series, but also gave us so many funny moments—Bob Evans!— and catchphrases through watching it. If you have any interest in The Godfather, diving into The Offer is worth it, trust me.
Biggest disappoint? Arcane S2, which went from great to terrible so fast I found myself barely engaged with any of it near the end. All the Viktor and Jayce stuff just dumped hard. Also I really wanted to like The Eternaut—and I liked it—but it never reached great or even very good levels. If it wasn’t foreign and starring Roberto Darin, I would’ve quite way earlier. Oh also Squid Game S3 was bad, not that we didn’t see that coming. But really, what a terrible terrible ending to a season two that started off semi-intriguing.
Guess that’s all folks!
Games
There isn’t much to report here, frankly. I quit Marvel Snap halfway through the year, only dabbled in League of Legends here or there, and managed to stay away from getting sucked into any serious video games for the entire year. I did buy a few games though, notably Marvel Cosmic Invasion, Tiny Bookshop, and Blue Prince, but didn’t actually play any of them for that long—my friend still owes me a successful run of Blue Prince!
For 2026, I’m rolling over my plans to just play Root and Dune Imperium as my go-to (digital) board games. I also decided to specialize in animal themed board games from now on. Toward that end, I bought Wingspan, Ark Nova, Everdell, Welcome to Everdell, Armello, Evolution, and Evolution Oceans at the end of December to play on my iPad next year. If it’s got cute animals in it, I wanna play it!
As for board games, the winner and really only contender was Wavelength, which is a family friendly party game that I’ve only played twice but can already see its promise. It’s quite good and I can’t wait to bring it with me for all situations.
I’ve also been on the lookout for books-related quick games—for brief social ice breakers at book events—and we’ve tried out stuff like Tidy the Library, which was pretty fun. The other one I’m field testing is a variation of our long loved Song Game, where you just name a book theme and take turns naming titles that fit. An example might be: “has characters trapped on a boat.” Answers: The Life of Pi, The Old Man and the Sea, etc. Sounds fun right?
Music
I’m adding a new consume to the list: music or dance stuff. Unfortunately this was a year that lacked a singular music obsession. With New Jeans broken up—it’ll never be the same without Danielle—and XG fading a bit in my mind, I have been looking for a 2025 musician or band to get really into. That never appeared but I do have four names for you to look into: Weston Estate, EJEAN, Tiny Habits, a!ka.
I recently put out a list of 88 Things I Liked in 2025 and here is my blurb about Weston Estate: "The musical find of the year! Weston Estate is an indie R&B band from North Carolina, influenced by Frank Ocean, Jaden Smith, and Glass Animals. Four fifths of the members are Indian American, and the whole group are friends from middle and high school. I say it again: they are Indian American! And they sound like…well, just to listen to them. Like what the hell is going on!? They are the musical equivalent of Jeremy Lin-ing it, but that’s also a huge eye/ear-opening thing. Give them a spin!"
The Quit List 🚫
I ran out of gas on this post. Suffice to say, the quit list was long and inglorious this year. I’ll just link the whole thing here and leave any commentary aside: Quit List 2025
Oh wait, I gotta weigh in here on Pluribus. Tried it, hated it, someone just assimilate Carol please…
Also, one decision we made at the beginning of 2025, to stop watching Oscar nominated and hyped movies until two years afterwards, has paid off handsomely already. If only I could put this into affect for everything, the Two Years Later Rule.
