Tag: writing

#REVIEW: Tom’s Crossing, by Mark Z. Danielewski

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

Buckle in, as this is going to be a bit meandering, but you’ve no doubt read my book reviews before and know to expect some degree of that, and frankly “a bit meandering” is a fair description of large parts of Tom’s Crossing anyway.

We’ll start with this: I bought this book out of spite. I don’t know anything about Mark Z. Danielewski as a person; as far as I know he has no social media presence, or at least I’ve never encountered anything from him, and I’ve never read an interview or anything like that. My only previous knowledge of his existence was from his book House of Leaves, a book I have never read and I kind of hate. The reasons I hate House of Leaves are probably not something I need to go into too deeply for this post, but I will give some brief notes:

  1. That the word “House” is supposed to be in blue; note that that is the case where the book is mentioned on the cover of Crossing up there.
  2. That the book frequently has blocks of sideways text;
  3. That the book’s fandom is excessively incel-coded and are very much the type of people who will recommend House of Leaves to you no matter what kind of book recommendation you have asked for. Dark fantasy? Have you read House of Leaves? Potboiler romance? Try out House of Leaves. 1940s etiquette manual? Let me tell you about House of Leaves.

These three things combine to make this book a big nope for me even if I might like it otherwise. I particularly refuse to read it because reading it might, somehow, make one of its fans happy, and I don’t want to do that.

A second thing: I like big books and I cannot lie. I currently have three other 1000-plus page books on my TBR, and at 1,232 pages I am pretty certain that Tom’s Crossing is the longest book I have ever read— Brandon Sanderson’s Wind of Truth has more pages, but the text on Crossing is smaller and denser and I’m pretty sure the wordcount is significantly higher. I saw this book in Barnes & Noble, thought “Oh, shit, Mark Danielewski wrote a new book,” then made the mistake of picking it up and noting the length and all the sudden I owned it. It is possible that I bought this book out of some bizarre need to stick it to House of Leaves, which is an inanimate object and does not have feelings.

This, an excerpt from page 34, is what you should expect from the prose in Tom’s Crossing. Yes, I read this on my Kindle; I bought the hardcover and then checked the book out from the library, because I’m not holding that huge fucking thing in my hands for twelve hundred pages.

Note a few things:

  1. There is not a single gerund in the book that ends with -ing. The g is dropped on every single one, including gerunds that are nouns; this book is very concerned with horses, and the word “geldin” really got on my nerves for some reason.
  2. Excessively long sentences. There are only nine sentences on this page, and sentences that take up entire pages or the majority of one are far from uncommon.
  3. That the narrator is the most highly-educated hick in the history of Utah. The dialect leads you to expect a certain kind of prose and then the book hits you with at least gettin a taste of a place where the bonds of birth and fortune have loosened their hold.

I rather expected to hate this book, to be honest, and I was hoping to hit something objectionable enough within the first couple hundred pages that I could put it down. By page 34 I was griping about it on a Discord I’m a member of. Around page 75 the language clicked.

This is one of the best fucking books I have ever read, and guys, I am so salty about that.

I am normally a Story Guy. I am a Setting Guy. I am rarely a Character Guy and even more rarely am I a Prose Guy. The story for Tom’s Crossing is serviceable but simple— it’s a Western, and it involves fulfilling a final promise to a dead friend by freeing two horses that are destined for slaughter. The main character is a teenager named Kalin, and his friend Tom tags along with him for most of the journey despite being dead. Tom’s sister Landry also comes along; she is not dead, at least most of the time. (Nearly every character in the book spends some time being dead, for the record.). Along the way the two get framed for a murder by the wealthiest family in town, the Porches mentioned in the above excerpt.

The setting? Sort of Utah, although it’s not our Utah, and the now of the book is also sort of the future, I’d estimate around 2045 or so, although the story being told is set in late October of 1988. Why is it not our Utah? Well, there’s some simple stuff, like there being a town in our Utah named Provo but none named Orvop, which is where the book is set, and then there’s weirder stuff like renaming Joseph Smith to Joseph Mith, which I thought was a typo for a while until it kept happening. Many of the book’s characters are Mormons, as you might expect from a book set in Utah, but the word “Mormon” is never used, although there is some criticism of The Church toward the end of the book. (Danielewski is not a Mormon, but apparently spent a good chunk of his youth in Utah.)

Also, when things that feel like specific references to Mormonism come up, they’re often changed too, beyond just the Joseph Mith stuff. The angel Moroni is renamed, and there are occasional scriptural references to books that don’t seem to exist. I actually went and found my copy of the Book of Mormon to check a few of the references; they aren’t in there, I swear.

Also, it appears that everyone in the world is fully conversant with all of the events in the book, even the ones that they would have had to have been present for; the book frequently cuts away to provide comments from random other people like the Reed Beacham mentioned above. Adding to the weirdness, nearly every time one of these random people is brought up, the book mentions how they died.

I also have the feeling that if I knew the Iliad and the Odyssey better I’d have picked up on some stuff. It’s been a while since I read either. This isn’t some kind of clever conjecture on my part; there is at one point a several-page conversation between three people about which characters in the book line up most precisely with characters from the Iliad. The book interprets itself. It’s nuts.

It’s the prose, y’all. I could bathe in this book’s language. About once every page or two Danielewski will hit you with a sentence or a phrase that will literally stop you in your tracks with its beauty. It’s 1200 pages long and I read it in eight days, during most of which I was also tearing apart my house.

I suspect I’m not quite smart enough to fully appreciate what’s going on in this book, to be honest. There’s a reason I make fun of Litratcher so often around here; I dislike pretentiousness in general, and while I’m very much not a The Curtains Were Blue guy, I also like my narratives nice and straightforward. I am not, as I frequently admit, the world’s most careful reader, and in fact the speed I read at frequently hurts me on more complex books. But, God, once this one had me, it had me, and I’m so glad I didn’t cave to my baser instincts and put it down after the first 40 pages just so that I could say I’d tried.

The worst thing? I think I might have to read House of Leaves now. And there is literally no higher praise that I can imagine giving to a book than that it made me decide to read House of Leaves.

700

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

A quick spot of extra blogwanking before I make it the second day in a row with two posts: yesterday topped out at 22,638 pageviews and 13,898 visitors, meaning that it was my highest-traffic day by about ten thousand views, which is insane. As of 6:08 PM today, we’re at a comparatively sedate 5,043 pageviews, still probably a top-20 day if not better than that.

Also, today marks seven hundred days in a row of posting to this site. I’m not going to pretend every post has been stellar, but I haven’t missed a day in nearly two years.

Who wants to touch me?

In which I don’t see any way out

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

This is the 666th day of posting in a row, for those of you who are into nonsense.

Every time I pick up my phone or turn on my computer, the world has gotten measurably worse since the last time I looked. I wish that was an exaggeration. It’s not. Remember when we invaded a foreign country, killed a bunch of people, arrested and kidnapped their leader and brought him back to America for a trial? That was eight days ago. It’s out of the news.

Oh, and it may turn out that it was a coup engineered by Venezuela’s Vice-President, who manipulated the pedophile rapist felon currently running our country into doing what she wanted. He apparently posted today that he was the “acting president” of Venezuela; they can have him. Frankly at this point I’d welcome an invasion. Just make sure you do it when he’s in Florida; DC has Black people in it and they don’t deserve his bullshit. He’s already destroyed half of the White House so if England or Canada or Cuba knocks the rest of it down again I really don’t give a fuck at this point.

The idea that there is nothing that I can do is slowly driving me mad. I mean, I can pretend. I could go downtown and stand in the cold with a bunch of people and yell some slogans; no one is listening. There were protests downtown today and yesterday. They didn’t even make the local news. I could call my Senators and my House representative; they’re all Republicans and I assure you not one of them gives a fuck. All that would do is get me put on a list, and let’s be honest, I’m probably already on a couple of them anyway. I could take the week off and go to Minneapolis and do … something. No fucking idea what.

Weird, to think that living in a red state is actually protecting me to some extent right now. I’ve heard tell of the occasional ICE vehicle spotted around town but nothing has made the news, and I’ve heard nothing at my school about any immigration raids or anything similar. None of my students have abruptly stopped coming to school. Somebody posted on Reddit the other day in a local board asking what we thought we would do if ICE started going door-to-door in our neighborhood. I had to answer that I didn’t know, which absolutely terrifies me. I’m old and fantastically out of shape and I have a son and a wife to worry about. Even if I could convince myself that vigilantism of some sort was the answer I am literally not physically capable of it. Sure, if someone comes knocking on my door I can refuse to tell them anything about my neighbors. They’re actually doing that in MN right now. Literal highway checkpoints, too. I can’t do a damn thing about any of it.

The idea of going out in a blaze of glory gets a lot less glorious once you realize what it would most likely consist of is a couple of ineffectual wild swings and a heart attack. My wife and I have talked about getting a gun or two for the house; we mutually decided against the idea at the time (for the record, just as a reminder, I hate guns. This has not changed) and now I’m wondering if we should revisit it. But, seriously, for what? What ultimately made us decide against the thing in the first place is that there are four people in this house and all four of us are on psych meds and we both know that any gun in the house is much more of a danger to the four of us than it would ever be to any theoretical intruder. Is the idea that I might at least take one of the fuckers with me when they show up worth it? This isn’t the movies. There’s no Red Dawn scenario here. I’m as likely to successfully defend my family with one of the swords that are already in the house as I am with a fucking gun.

What else am I supposed to do if somebody shows up, call the police? The police haven’t chosen the people over ICE even a single time yet. They aren’t going to. They’re not here to protect us and they never have been.

I don’t have a pithy way to end this. It’s all more swearing and fantasies about violence from here on out.

And tomorrow, it will be worse.

Two books with the same problem

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

Pretty covers though, right? At least they have that going for them.

There have been a couple of wins so far in January as far as my reading goes, but on the whole I feel like the misses have well outweighed the hits. And I’m writing this particular piece not to shit on these two books but because the way they didn’t work for me felt very similar: in both cases, I feel like the author never bothered to clearly define some kind of fundamental aspects about how the world of the books worked.

The Bookshop Below, as you might guess, is about a magical bookshop. The book is set in the real world, more or less, but there are these bookstores scattered around — it’s not clear exactly how many there are, but they feel a bit too important for the number of them to be limited to the few we hear about in the book. At any rate, the stores are sort of sentient, and so are the books in them, and they only allow the people they want to find and enter them, and a lot of the time when people buy books from the bookstore they’ll trade a personal memento or a tooth or a lock of hair or, in what feels like a bit of an escalation, a firstborn child for the book they walk out with. The main character is a high-end book thief who ends up owning one of these bookstores, and the story goes from there.

I am not someone who demands that magic be rigorously defined in the books I read. Brandon Sanderson is kind of the king of the meticulously crafted magic system, where he can end his books with charts and diagrams of the twelve different schools of magic that exist and how they interact and blah blah blah. Tolkien, on the other hand? Gandalf and Saruman and Radagast are wizards, and shut up is how their powers work. It’s difficult, reading LOTR, to say the words “Gandalf can’t do that.” His powers and his magic don’t work like that. Now, there is tons of lore out there and histories of Middle-Earth and all that, but at no point does Tolkien sit the reader down and explain how shit worked.

The thing, though? Tolkien knew how shit worked, he just didn’t explain it. You cannot make a reasonable argument that JRR Tolkien pantsed his way through LOTR even given the tonal shift between The Hobbit and the rest of the books. The man knew what he was doing, he just didn’t think you needed to know.

And the problem with The Bookshop Below is that I finished the book unconvinced that the author had really sat down and worked out exactly what was going on in her own book. And maybe this is me punishing the book for not being the book I wanted; I’ve certainly had moments like that before, but the books in this story are doing things like flooding the bookstore because they’re unhappy, and I feel like if you’re going to have a setup like that, maybe you devote a little more attention to your worldbuilding. There’s also this whole big thing where the magic of the bookstores and the books is powered by The River, which connects all the stores, and which at least some of the payments for the books are given to, but it’s not at all clear what the deal with The River is either, and I really felt like the book kind of ended up collapsing under its own weight by the end.

I read Alma Katsu’s Fiend today– it’s less than 300 pages in a pretty big font, so this was not a huge achievement– and it was deeply disappointing. The issue with Fiend is that all the characters are part of the same family, and the family runs this massive multinational corporation that has made all of them massively rich. There is a lot of talk about what is going to happen when the patriarch of the family (who is weirdly referred to by his first name throughout the book, including by his own children) dies, and who is going to inherit the company, and also who will become head of their “clan”, and I guess those two people don’t have to be the same person, blah blah blah. It’s treated as a given that the company is extraordinarily dirty, and there’s lots of talk about whether this son or that daughter is tough enough to run the company, or whether they should try to change how things have always been done; you’ve seen The Godfather, you get the idea.

I don’t think Alma Katsu had any idea at all what the Berisha Corporation actually does. The synopsis calls it an “import-export” company, but that’s immensely vague, and it’s not clear at any point what the company is actually for. There is talk of sweatshops and exploitation and there’s a Whistleblower at one point, but the whole thing is very these people are bad, and this company is bad, just trust me, and … it doesn’t take much for me to accept that a multinational corporation is evil! I’m all in on the “capitalism bad” train! But give me something here. Even the scenes where these people are at work makes it really clear that the author never bothered to think through what anyone’s actual job was, and interestingly this book also seems to exist in a world without email. People have cell phones and there’s a stray mention or two of AI so it’s not like it’s set in the past; it’s just a big weird blind spot.

Blech. The world’s descent into hell is accelerating on a daily basis so far in 2026; I’d appreciate it if I could at least have something good to read.

Oh, why not

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews5 Comments

I started a book the other day, a big doorstoppy, mouse-killer of a book, one I’d been really looking forward to reading, and I made it six percent of the way through the book before deciding I could not tolerate another second of it and put it down.

Then I looked at the reviews online, because I’m dumb like that, and they’re rapturous. And I’m gaslighting myself because, come on, this is objectively not a good book. There are errors of word choice and tense and the dialogue is abominable and the main character is way way way too into ogling high school girls for someone about to exit college. Today I thought about writing a review of the book, because I can’t believe people think this book is as good as they’re saying it is and I need the world to stop gaslighting me. So I went through on my Kindle, reread the first 6%, and annotated it.

Yes, I’m exactly that petty.

The problem is there were over sixty annotations– which, on one hand, I said the book was awful, but on the other hand, properly fisking this mess has become a lot of work, especially since when you export Kindle notes all it gives you is the note; it doesn’t include the bit you highlighted for the note. And, sure, I can do a bunch of screenshots, or copy and paste, and I probably don’t have to include all sixty of the notes, but that felt like a lot of work.

So what I’m going to do instead is just paste in my notes, obscuring the author’s name when necessary (although you’ll recognize the book, if you’ve read it) and y’all can tell me if you think this is worth the extra work. I will make this sacrifice for my people if you want me to. Obviously some of these are going to be obscure since you don’t see what I’m referring to, but … well, there are gonna be some patterns.

Anyway, enjoy:

Note – One > Page 3 · Location 1045
Much like the House of Lannister.

Note – One > Page 3 · Location 1046
Dumb

Note – One > Page 3 · Location 1050
Eew.

Note – One > Page 4 · Location 1063
Definitely start by sexualizing the first teenage girl in the book.

Note – One > Page 4 · Location 1064
She’s literally just glancing at her own shirt.

Note – One > Page 4 · Location 1071
Is this a thing sisters do? Grope each other?

Note – One > Page 5 · Location 1085
Note, for now, that AUTHOR is willing to spell out “dyke.”

Note – One > Page 5 · Location 1092
The hoodie is going to turn into a zip-up later.

Note – One > Page 6 · Location 1096
No one talks like this. Also, there’s no universe where Steven Biko can be mistaken for Eddie Murphy.

Note – One > Page 6 · Location 1098
Again, no one talks like this.

Note – One > Page 6 · Location 1099
As opposed to the other guard.

Note – One > Page 6 · Location 1104
Makes no sense for her to be upset.

Note – Two > Page 7 · Location 1114
“gangly” means “long-limbed”; no reason to use both words.

Note – Two > Page 8 · Location 1125
No one talks like this.

Note – Two > Page 8 · Location 1139
No one talks like this.

Note – Two > Page 9 · Location 1152
No one talks like this.

Note – Two > Page 9 · Location 1157
No one talks like this.

Note – Two > Page 10 · Location 1168
Biko is on the *back* of the hoodie, which is now a sweatshirt.

Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1181
Definitely something you yell at your daughter in jail. 

Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1184
Just weirdly phrased.

Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1190
Try and imagine this scenario for a second. Like, physically do it with your body. This is not a possible thing.

Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1191
In the previous paragraph, she fell backwards over a chair and … landed on her nose? How?

Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1194
No one talks like this.

Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1195
Weird word choice.

Note – Two > Page 12 · Location 1200
No reason for the word “own” here.

Note – Two > Page 12 · Location 1203
No one talks like this.

Note – Two > Page 12 · Location 1205
It’s a hoodie again.

Note – Three > Page 13 · Location 1215
Weird.

Note – Three > Page 13 · Location 1218
No one talks like this.

Note – Three > Page 14 · Location 1229
Awkward phrasing.

Note – Three > Page 15 · Location 1246
Colin could use a pronoun.

Note – Three > Page 15 · Location 1257
No one talks like this.

Note – Four > Page 16 · Location 1268
These girls will never be mentioned again.

Note – Four > Page 17 · Location 1276
No one talks like this.

Note – Four > Page 18 · Location 1296
And now it’s a zipup. It’s been a regular hoodie and a sweatshirt and now it’s a zipup.

Note – Four > Page 18 · Location 1302
… is her skin moldy?

Note – Four > Page 18 · Location 1304
Why? Who randomly starts eating a sandwich in front of people? Why didn’t he eat before he went to get the hoodie, which he thought was just in a car? 

Note – Four > Page 19 · Location 1311
This is the weirdest goddamn way to threaten somebody. Burned? Is it a plastic spoon?

Note – Four > Page 19 · Location 1317
Her face is in her pillow but the “shiv” is below her eye? How did they get these photos smuggled out of the prison?

Note – Four > Page 20 · Location 1343
No one talks like this.

Note – Four > Page 21 · Location 1361
I feel like burning sixty grand worth of PCP in a woodstove would at least create a noticeable smell, maybe one cops might notice, but I dunno.

Note – Four > Page 22 · Location 1370
It’s 1989. Pre-Internet. These idiots do not have contacts to sell rare manuscripts. No.

Note – Four > Page 22 · Location 1377
No one talks like this.

Note – Four > Page 23 · Location 1384
No one talks like this.

Note – Four > Page 23 · Location 1386
Glad that everyone has time to appreciate the “satisfying” sound of broken glass during this extortion attempt.

Note – Four > Page 23 · Location 1390
Unnecessary.

Note – Five > Page 24 · Location 1400
Twenty-foot doors are very large doors.

Note – Five > Page 25 · Location 1422
Again, to who?

Note – Five > Page 27 · Location 1452
All of this was in the newspaper article? Including the dialogue, with censored profanities? Has AUTHOR ever read a newspaper article?

Note – Six > Page 29 · Location 1475
God.

Note – Six > Page 29 · Location 1478
Wrong verb tense.

Note – Six > Page 29 · Location 1482
Gee, you think?

Note – Six > Page 29 · Location 1483
No one talks like this.

Note – Six > Page 30 · Location 1487
No one talks like this.

Note – Six > Page 30 · Location 1492
Gwen’s a hobbit, apparently.

Note – Six > Page 30 · Location 1493
Terrible writing.

Note – Six > Page 30 · Location 1498
I like that no one answers this question.

Note – Six > Page 30 · Location 1502
This is the second time Arthur, a college student, has ogled a teenager.

Note – Six > Page 31 · Location 1507
When does he get close enough to her to read the clue over her shoulder? And who the fuck talks like this? For either of them?

Note – Six > Page 31 · Location 1510
AUTHOR is obsessed with windows.

Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1523
She is not nine years old. This is a grown person acting like this.

Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1528
No one talks like this.

Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1529
This is what you say BEFORE you open the cabinet and start rummaging through shit.

Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1535
NO ONE TALKS LIKE THIS.

Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1538
Donna is a complete asshole.

Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1538
And this is where I stopped reading.

Family time!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, ParentingLeave a comment

So what does family time look like when everyone in the house is an introvert?

The boy and I working on Lego sets while my wife works on a puzzle, all of us in the same room, but with minimal conversation happening, because we’re all concentrating.

I’ve been working on the Notre Dame set a few bags at a time for the last several days, but I picked up this AT-AT today and decided to take a break and get this done in one sitting. The Notre Dame set is beautiful, but it’s also crazily repetitive and I didn’t have the strength tonight to make 32 more windows or 10 more flying buttresses. I noticed the instruction manual had a link to the new Lego Builder app, and holy hell, I’m never touching one of the manuals again other than to look through them for the little flavor details they like to sprinkle through them. The app surrounds any new pieces for any particular step with a little glowing aura, making it way harder to miss them than in the manuals, and you can rotate and enlarge the model on the screen.

That’s a Goddamn game-changer right there. Lego manuals are impressively well put together 95% of the time, but sometimes there’s just no way to display a step with one single perfect angle, and letting me zoom and rotate at will was just amazing. Plus they gave me stats at the end, and y’all know how much I like stats. Turns out if you were to stack all of the pieces in that AT-AT on top of one another (I assume the long way, and not actually attaching them to each other?) it would be 6 meters high! I also managed to put together 7 pieces per minute in the hour and fifteen minutes it took me to put the set together. I don’t know what the hell I could possibly do with that information, but I love that I have it.

2025 in Blogwanking, or: WTF, China?

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Geek4 Comments

Let’s start with the good news: traffic was up by two-thirds this year, and depending on how the next two days go this was either the second-best or the third-best year in the history of the site:

We’re still not reaching the heights of 2015, and “In which I tell you how your religion works,” the reason for that huge spike, still sits atop all of my other posts at 113,306 views. Most of the rest are from the Creepy Children’s Programming series and, of course, The Fucking Snowpiercer Post.

Here’s the problem: a large proportion of those views are probably Chinese bots. Why does China care so much about my stupid little website? I have no clue. Why did it start this year? Also no clue. But given that none of my site is in Chinese and I’ve never really discussed anything of particular interest to Chinese citizens, I have a hard time making this geographical distribution make sense:

Worth pointing out: even if you subtract all those Chinese hits out, I’m still up from last year, the fourth year in a row of increased site traffic. It’s just not nearly as impressive. 🙂

Here’s the lifetime geographical distribution, which is about as full as it’s ever going to get, I think:

That white island at the top of the map is Svalbard, which belongs to Norway, and beyond that, we’re looking at North Korea and, frankly, a handful of places that either barely or flat-out don’t have governments: Western Sahara, the Central African Republic, Guinea and Eritrea. Any other missing spots are literally too small for me to be able to pick out of the map.

Here’s how much Chinese traffic I had this year: WordPress just started showing us city data in 2025, and eight of the top twenty cities are in China, including Beijing at #1– I got 2 1/2 times more traffic from Beijing than I did from the city I live in. London, Sydney and Toronto are the first three cities outside of China or the US to show up on the list. We’ll see how much this jumps around next year.

This post will mark 653 days in a row of blogging.

Interaction continues to drop, sadly– well, likes are up slightly, but comments are down, and I feel like comments are more important– and my word count was a little bit down from last year. At just over 1.7 million words over the lifetime of the blog, I’m closing in on that two millionth word:

Obviously I’m not going anywhere; I don’t have anything in the way of specific plans for the future around here other than to keep writing, although I’m considering making the jump from WordPress’ Premium hosting, which I’ve been using for more or less the entire time the blog has been active, to their Business tier. I make enough money now that dropping $300 a year on the site doesn’t feel completely stupid, if only for increased access to stats (I love numbers, as you can see) and better control over how the site looks. We’ll see. January’s a three-paycheck month so I might as well blow some of it, right?

Anyway, if you’re seeing the traffic from China too, let me know– I know of one other WordPress person who has mentioned high Chinese traffic on a mostly-defunct blog, but only the one at the moment. It would make so much less sense if it was just me, y’know?

2025 in Music

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies2 Comments

I bought 59 albums in 2025, way off of last year’s pace, which was admittedly kind of insane. Here’s the list, and then I’ll talk specifically about a few of them. This isn’t a “best of” list by any means, just some albums I find interesting.

And yes, “bought” is the right word, as I generally don’t stream music. I played around with Spotify for a bit this year and then cancelled it when they started showing ads for ICE, and I currently have a Tidal account that I’m not really using.

Let’s start with the band of the year, an award that isn’t even meaningful enough to be rendered in capital letters and which I spent no time thinking about prior to writing this sentence:

In the absence of a new Pearl Jam album this year (and I got one last year, so I can’t complain) a new Counting Crows album is about the best thing I could have asked for– and I not only got that, I got a tour, which I had tickets to. I saw two concerts this year, both in the same venue in Indianapolis; Weird Al was the other one. The Crows have still absolutely got it. There are other bands from my era that are still making music and touring, but … not all of them should be, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

I’m only picking Problematic because the cover has his face on it, but Norman Sann was absolutely my big discovery in hiphop this year. Dude is phenomenally talented and he’s also a huge geek without really letting it take over his music– like, he’ll drop a reference to Baraka from Mortal Kombat into the middle of a verse, but Nerd Rap is a genre all to itself and this, I think, is not that. I picked up five full-length albums by this guy this year and I very much am impatiently anticipating more.

(Goes and looks, discovers a sixth album came out in September!)

So make that an even 60 for the year, then.

The Sinners soundtrack sparked a sudden and fairly intense interest in streaming Irish rage music, which has cooled a bit, but I’d never really listened to the Dropkick Murphys before this year and I should have started before now. For the People, their latest release, and The Warrior’s Code from 2005 got the most plays. I’ll pick up the rest of their catalog sooner or later but haven’t done it just yet.

I think this is the second time Olivia Rodrigo has shown up on one of these things. I still have issues with how the adults around her handled her first album, but she’s an adult now and she dropped a live album on us late in the year. Live pop isn’t completely my thing– I will never get completely used to the idea of singing over your own voice as a backup track– but there’s a ton of energy in this recording and Robert Smith randomly showing up for a couple of duets in front of a very young crowd who appears to have no idea who the hell he is is a nice touch.

Finally, I just picked up the deluxe edition of Mad Season’s Above last week, and it’s long enough that I haven’t even listened to the whole thing yet, but it’s a Goddamned crime that I had never heard of this album until recently. Do you know who Mad Season is? They released one album– this one– in 1995. They’re a supergroup: Layne Staley from Alice In Chains, Mike McCready from Pearl Jam, Barrett Martin from Screaming Trees on drums, and John Baker Saunders from The Walkabouts. The album is fifteen meaty tracks (the shortest is 4:11, and two are over seven minutes) and one of the very few concerts they did. I’m just now starting to listen to the concert. It’s a remarkable fucking project and I’m pissed that I didn’t completely internalize it in 1995 when I should have.

What did you listen to this year?