We’re three weeks into the new year, but it’s not too late to post a list of lists! Here are my favorite books, TV shows, movies and podcasts of 2024.

Unless otherwise stated, they are in no particular order, and are almost certainly not the “best” in any objective sense. They’re just the ones I enjoyed the most, based on my limited consumption habits (especially in the TV and movie categories).

Best Books of 2024

1. Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant

2. Paddle Your Own Canoe by Nick Offerman

3. Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick

4. Fire Weather by John Vaillant

5. Tripping on Utopia by Benjamin Breen

6. Ours Was the Shining Future by David Leonhardt

7. Who Owns This Sentence? by David Bellos, Alexandre Montagu

8. Brave New Words by Salman Khan

9. Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg

10. The Fourth Turning Is Here by Neil Howe

11. Blitzed by Norman Ohler

12. Why is Sex Fun? by Jared Diamond

13. One Day by Gene Weingarten

14. Fancy Bear Goes Phishing by Scott J. Shapiro

15. 60 Songs That Explain the '90s by Rob Harvilla

16. End Credits by Patty Lin

17. Fatal Conveniences by Darin Olien

18. The Last Action Heroes by Nick de Semlyen

19. Generations by Jean M. Twenge

20. Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen

All the Audiobooks

For a deeper dive, check out this complete list of all the audiobooks I've read since 2017, with links to descriptions provided by the indispensable Libby app. If I could only have two apps on my phone, they would be WhatsApp and Libby, no question.

Bear in mind, the complete list also includes all the books I downloaded and started but didn't finish, either because they were painfully boring or the narrator's voice was unbearably grating. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

Voices Matter

Unfortunately, it happens more often with fiction than non... A few years ago, I went through a phase of re-reading some old classics by Stephen King, but found that half the time the narrator's voice absolutely ruined the experience for me.

Stephen King may be the curmudgeonly elder statesman of horror now, but that doesn't mean a Wilford Brimley type narrator is the best match. Just sayin'.

Best Podcasts of 2024

1. Kill List

2. Breaking Points

3. The Telepathy Tapes

4. Search Engine

5. 60 Songs That Explain the '90s

6. The Joe Rogan Experience

7. You're Wrong About

8. The Tim Dillon Show

9. Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know

10. The Starzology Podcast (featuring yours truly and my good friend, Alison Price!)

Best Shows of 2024

1. The Penguin

2. Fallout

3. 3 Body Problem

4. The Bear

5. Only Murders in the Building

6. The Boys

7. Dark Matter

8. Agatha All Along

9. X-Men 97

10. Nobody Wants This

Best Movies of 2024*

Okay, I saw exactly three in the theater and one was a huge disappointment, but I'm getting used to that from the Alien franchise, sadly, considering the first two are among my favorite movies of all time.

Anyway, here are all the new movies I actually watched in 2024, in order of good to terrible. The last one I watched on the plane to Chicago, which is to say I was a little tipsy. It was still terrible.

1. Deadpool and Wolverine

2. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

3. The Fall Guy

4. Alien: Romulus

5. Totally Killer

6. Red One

7. Civil War

A Look Back to 1999

Last night we rewatched Three Kings from 1999, objectively one of the best years in the history of film.

The Desert Storm drama featuring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube seemed very politically edgy when it was released, almost a decade after the first Gulf War and a few years before the sequel nobody asked for. Unlike its three stars, the movie isn't aging well.

Now it almost seems like a propaganda film about how American greed and military incompetence triumph in the end, as our AWOL heroes rescue a village of hapless Iraqis and escort them safely across the Iranian border, giving them each a bar of looted Kuwaiti gold for their trouble. Yikes.

Takeaways

My big takeaway from creating these lists is that I need to make a point of seeing more movies this year!

The other takeaway is that I should really be keeping a list of the best things I consume as I go through 2025. That would be so much easier than scrambling a few weeks into next year to remember what I liked about the previous one.

A Note About AI Images

The collages illustrating these lists are far from perfect, but I can’t tell you how exhilarating it is for me to ask ChatGPT to create a collage for me to illustrate my blog, give it a few examples and have it spit out something close to amazing.

Sure, there are some misspellings and it balked at recreating what it termed trademarked or copyrighted content (although it had no problem with the Fallout logo!), but it will only get better from here.

Evolution of Style

Honestly, if you look back at my year-end Lists of Lists on my old blog (e.g., 2020, 2019, 2018, and so on), those posts used to take me several days to compile. Not just the writing, researching and remembering, but finding images to illustrate (caring not one bit about copyrighted material!).

By comparison, this post took me a couple of hours. A part of me feels nostalgic for a time when I had the manic compulsion to write such lengthy, wordy, exhaustively annotated posts about every little thing that happened over the previous year. But it was a painfully time consuming process and I don’t think my readers have that kind of time anymore either.

Thanks for reading, everyone!

If you haven’t already, please check out the interview I did with my good friend and podcast partner Alison at Alison Hazel Art and subscribe to her weekly newsletter.

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