Since Spotify and YouTube have started puttting out their “Wrapped” summaries of what we’ve been listening to and watching all year, I’ll use them as the impetus to discuss other media I’ve found interesting this year.

Books, Ebooks, & Audiobooks

Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford, was an amazing listen as an audiobook.  Andy Ingalls narrates a murder mystery set in an alternative 1920s America where Native Americans thrived instead of nearly being wiped out by genocide.  The same author previously wrote Golden Hill, another work of historical fiction set in pre-Revolutionary War New York City that I will definitely check out soon.

Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi, is a sci-fi story with black protagonists that plays with one of my favorite story elements—time travel.

Guardians of the Whills, by Greg Rucka, gives the reader some backstory for Baze Malbus and Chirrut Imwe, who we see in Rogue One.  I’d long ago fallen out of the habit of reading Star Wars novels (Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy is probably the last set I read) but Andor finishing up in May this year nudged me to check this out.  It wasn’t a long book, but it did a nice job of fleshing out the characters, their friendship, and their motivations.

Leviathan Falls, by James S.A. Corey, is the final novel in The Expanse series.  It was a fitting end to a great series.

Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver, deserved the Pulitzer Prize it won for fiction.  Published in 2022, this modern reimagining of David Copperfield may be truer than anything J.D. Vance ever wrote in Hillbilly Elegy.  Here are a couple of choice highlights from my reading of the ebook:

“The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpost of hopeless futures.  Goddamn.”

“Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn’t been totaled or repossessed."

Noor, by Nnedi Okorafor, was a very engaging sci-fi novel set in Nigeria that brings in ideas about biotech, climate change, and the nature of humanity.  

Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir, is being turned into a movie just like The Martian.  The latest story goes much further afield than Mars, and is also a rescue mission—only with much bigger stakes.  Not a short book at nearly 500 pages, but I was sucked in by the story and the protagonist so it took me about 7 hours to finish over the course of a few days.

 

YouTube

I spent a lot more time on YouTube this year than I expected.  I blame the YouTube Premium trial for exposing me to a product so much better than the ad-supported version I may never be able to quit.  My primary use case is watching church services (one from a church in Atlanta, another in Virginia).  According to YouTube’s recap I also watched a lot of electric car reviews.  Due largely to my obsession with Andor, I also watched a lot of videos from the GenerationTech channel.

Perhaps the most useful thing I started watching just this month (and expect to be watching and coding along with well into 2026) is an old series by Immo Landwerth where he builds a compiler from scratch.

 

Spotify

According to this year’s Spotify Wrapped, my listening age is a laughably young 36.  I have no idea how they calculate these ages.  I figured all the soundtracks and classical music I listen to would have skewed things more toward my actual age (51).  I did listen to GNX and Let God Sort Em Out quite a bit though, so maybe they’re the culprits.  In truth, since my Spotify account is the one we use with Sonos, the music we play for our twins every night to fall asleep to is probably the main thing pushing that age downward.

Because I commute from Maryland to northern Virginia for work a few days a week, I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts.  The main one I listen to is The Daily, from The New York Times.  Lately I've been listening more to Apple News Today (audio).  My primary podcast app is Overcast, where I listen to shows like Fresh Air, Embedded, Hanselminutes, Reveal, and Throughline.  Overcast doesn’t have a “Wrapped” feature, but Harold Martin on Reddit built a couple of projects to explore your listening habits and create a personal episodes page that I might need to explore.