Year-End Favorites

A few new categories this year, compared to past times I've done this exercise. My goal was to choose five movies and five books, but I failed, so I cheated and split Movies into New and Old, and books into Novels and Novellas (the latter slightly loosely construed--but all the entries are much shorter than the novels). In the end I had a tough time trimming the Novels list down to five, so I chose to leave them all. They're very different books and I think all are well worth reading.

Choosing a single favorite across all categories is an impossible task, but I'll do it anyway--The Past is Red by Cat Valente, which I've been raving about since I read it as part of my Hugo read at the beginning of the summer. It's witty, bittersweet, imaginative, and has a clear voice. Plenty of books from the year have stuck with me, but I think this one might outlast them all.

Movies, New
The Tragedy of Macbeth
The Hand of God
Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
El Robo del Siglo
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Movies, Old
True Grit
O Brother, Where Art Thou
No Country for Old Men
Cyrano
Before Sunset

Novels
Last Exit, Max Gladstone
The Idiot, Elif Batuman
Deathless, Cat Valente
Imagine a City, Mark Vanhoenacker
The Spare Man, Mary Robinette Kowal
Singer Distance, Ethan Chatagnier
Tell Me an Ending, Jo Harkin

Novellas
Spear, Nicola Griffith
Trafalgar, Angelica Gorodischer (tr. Amalia Gladhart)
The Past is Red, Cat Valente
Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves, Andrew Krivak (poetry)
Rose/House, Arkady Martine

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