Things What I Liked This Year, 2025

I liked a lot of cool stuff this year! I liked books, movies, music, games! The end! Huzzah. We did it. I’m going to go eat an apple now.

*stares*

*waits*

Ugh, fine. Fine. You probably want me to, like, conjure names of things, which honestly is very hard for me, really for two reasons:

a) my brain is essentially a sinkhole in the middle of the street, and there’s just no telling when a car full of semi-useful information is going to drive right into it

b) it’s also sort of silly to mark not time this way but enjoyment of media time in this way; for example, I read a lot of books for blurbing purposes that didn’t come out this year but are cool future books, so do those count? What about a movie that came out in 2024 that I saw in 2025? why does this matter?

Also, should these be limited by number? Only ten books? Top twenty? Why does that matter? It can’t matter! The number ten is not a superior number and if I read fourteen books I liked, fuck ten, I’mma tell you about fourteen.

Whatever, fuck it, here we go.

Books

We start with books because books are the best. I write them. You read them. There are a lot of them by a lot of genuinely wonderful authors. They’re truly a universal good.

Here, in no particular order, is a series of books I liked from and in 2025, and no, I’m not providing mini-reviews, I got shit to do. Just know that I liked these a whole lot and you will like them too.

Apple: A Delicious History by Sally Coulthard

Hot Wax, M.L. Rio

King Sorrow, Joe Hill

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, Clay McLeod Chapman

House of Idyll, Delilah S. Dawson

Spread Me, Sarah Gailey

When The Wolf Comes Home, Nat Cassidy

Crafting for Sinners, Jenny Kiefer

Good Boy, Neil McRobert

Watching Evil Dead, Josh Malerman

Why I Love Horror, ed by Becky Spratford

The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer

Another, Paul Tremblay

We Are Always Tender With Our Dead, Eric Larocca

What Stalks the Deep, T Kingfisher

Humans: A Monstrous History, Surekha Davies

Not One of Us, Dan Chaon

The Birding Dictionary, Rosemary Mosco

The Night That Finds Us All, John Hornor Jacobs

God’s Junk Drawer, Peter Clines

There are surely, surely some I’ve missed. Again: brain is sinkhole.

Oh, and I popped these all into a Bookshop.org list here.

Also, since I am a jerk who needs to eat food to live, and whose health insurance costs are metastasizing in 2026, hey, Staircase in the Woods made it to the year’s best books list on Vulture for 2025, and if you’re so inclined to grab it or any of my books before the year is out, I’ll love you forever. Or at least until I perish from an easily-preventable disease and am eaten by all of my quantum cats.

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Music

Got to see a couple shows this year — a truly sublime NIN and a bad-ass Tom Morello + The Neighborhood Kids. And I listened to a lot of music. I have no more profound commentary than that. Music is good. Yay music.

Here’s what I liked:

Tron: Ares sndtrk: NIN

No Hard Feelings: The Beaches

Soak: Black Honey

The Hives Forever, Forever The Hives: The Hives

Coydog: Carter Veil

Girls: Princess Nokia

Good for the Soul: GANS

Hard-Headed Woman: Margo Price

All That Is Over: Sprints

Moisturizer: Wet Leg

Memory of a Day: Phantogram

Swallow the Knife: Sir Chloe

I’m Only Fucking Myself: Lola Young

The Clearing, Wolf Alice

Here’s an Apple Music list of the songs I listened to a lot, though (though some of these are odd that they’re in there, given I can only remember listening to them once or twice, but who knows).

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Movies

Hey, movies are great! I mean it’s too bad they aren’t going to exist anymore in a year or two, functionally-speaking, and that movie theaters received a death blow this year and ultimately everything is terrible, but in the meantime, I liked a buncha movies this year, so here they be, in no particular order:

Sinners, One Battle After Another, Frankenstein, Black Bag, The Monkey, Bring Her Back, The Naked Gun, Predator: Badlands, Together, Heart Eyes, 28 Years Later, Companion, Friendship

Weapons gets a special shout-out as a movie I 80% loved and 20% hated, which still makes it great, and arguably makes it interesting

Still need to see Blue Moon and Wake Up Dead Man

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TV

Best shows in 2025 —

Pluribus, Peacemaker, Andor, Severance, Task, The Chair Company, The Lowdown, Murderbot, Alien: Earth, White Lotus, The Residence

Dang, it was a pretty good year for TV.

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Games

I feel like this list should be longer, but I dunno!

The Blue Prince, Ghost of Yotei, Ball x Pit, Baby Steps

And I think that’ll do me for 2025.

Feel free to drop into the comments and tell me what you loved!

Or feel free to tell me what I’m missing.

Or just fight me! FIGHT ME YOU FOOLS

great bye