2023 Favorites: Music, Movies, and TV

 

The blogging year is coming to a close, and I thought it was time to go over some of my favorite things from 2023. This concerns media—books, short stories, music, movies, and TV shows—that I read, watched, or listened to this year. In this second part, I’m focusing on music, movies, and TV.

Music

There was so much good music that was released in 2023. My top albums and Eps released in 2023 were: Sweet Justice by Tkay Maizda, So Much (For) Stardust by Fall Out Boy, A Reckoning by Kimbra, Going…Going…GONE! by Hemlocke Springs, Tension by Kylie Minogue, and Feed the Beast by Kim Petras. I also enjoyed Holiday Sidewinder’s Forever or Whatever, Wednesday Campanella’s expansive backlist, The NYChillharmonic’s album 1, and Marina’s The Family Jewels. Along with songs by Halle (Angel), Caroline Polachek (Bunny Is A Rider, Dang, Caroline Shut Up, and Welcome To My Island), METTE (Van Gogh), Doechii (Pacer), Aurora (Your Blood) and Allie X (Black Eye and Girl With No Face).

Movies and TV

I didn’t watch as much this year as I thought I would. For movies, some of my favorites were: Barbie, The Haunted Mansion, and The Portable Door. As for TV, I’ve mostly been watching: Mystery Science Theater 3000, SurrealEstate season 2, Svengoolie, and a number of classic shows like Murder she Wrote.

And, with that, there is my list of 2023 favorites. If you want to check out the first part, you can use THIS LINK.

Happy reading!

2023 Favorites: Books & Short Stories

The blogging year is coming to a close, and I thought it was time to go over some of my favorite things from 2023. This concerns media—books, short stories, music, movies, and TV shows—that I read, watched, or listened to this year. In this part, I’m focusing on books and short stories.

Books

I read a good number of books in 2023 and, overall—besides a few hiccups—I’m pretty happy looking back.

My favorite young adult books and manga were: A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid, Holly Horror by Michelle Corpora Jabes, Bittersweet in the Hollow by Kate Pearsall, A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik, and Clock Stricker vol. 1 by Issaka Galadima and Frederick L. Jones. For general fiction, my favorites were: Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Ninth House & Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo, Starling House by Alix E. Harrow, The Fatal Folio by Elizabeth Penney, The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland, The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett, and Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo. My three middle grade reads were excellent: Field of Screams by Wendy Parris, Adia Kelbara and the Circle of Shamans by Isi Hendrix, and Totally Psychic by Brigid Martin. And last, but certainly not least, my favorite nonfiction books were: Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton, The Cult of We by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell, and The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan.

  Short Stories

My favorite short stories I wrote about toward the end of each month, for the blog’s Short Stories segment—with the exception of The Lover by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Review HERE). Plus I started reading an anthology this year called The Book of Witches. I'm no where near finished with it, but I still wanted to include stories from it. The ones I liked were: What I Remember of Oresha Moon Dragon Devshrata by P. Djèlí Clark, Met Swallow by Cassandra Khaw, and The Nine Jars of Nukulu by Tobi Ogundiran. I read other short stories this year as well, and that includes those that can be found on online magazines like Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Apex, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. I'm linking back to them here, for ease of finding them. And those stories were:

• Your Wings a Bridge Across the Stars by Michelle Denham (Apex Magazine; April 6, 2023)
• Did You Hear About The Neighbors? By Seth Wade (Strange Horizons; Issue: 24 April 2023)
• Yingying—Shadow by Ai Jiang (Uncanny Magazine; Issue Fifty-One)
• The Gratitude of Mice by Yume Kitasei (Strange Horizons; Issue: 6 March 2023)
• Our Exquisite Delights by Megan Chee (Lightspeed Magazine; Mar. 2023 (Issue 154))
• Silver Necklace, Golden Ring by Marie Brennan (Uncanny Magazine; Issue Fifty)
• Guidelines for Using the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library by Marie Brennan (Lightspeed Magazine; Issue 153)
• The Magazine of Horror by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki [Apex Magazine; August 15, 2023]
• The Discarded Ones by Linda Niehoff (Apex Magazine; August 8, 2023)
• Four Steps To Hunt A God by Athar Fikry (Strange Horizons; Issue: 12 June 2023)
• Mirror View by Rajeev Prasad (Clarkesworld; Issue 201—June 2023)
• All These Ghosts Are Playing to Win by Lindsey Godfrey Eccles (Uncanny Magazine; Issue Fifty-Two)
• A Lovers’ Tide in Which We Inevitably Break Each Other; Told in Inverse by K.S. Walker (Uncanny Magazine; Issue Ffty-Two)
• The Locked Coffin: A Judge Dee Mystery by Lavie Tidhar (Tor.com; October 25, 2023)
• What You Are and the Wolf by Jae Steinbacher (Lightspeed Magazine; October 2023; Issue 161)
• Simmered in Their Wealth Like the Richest of Sauces by Jo Miles (Lightspeed Magazine; September 2023; Issue 160)
• The Tale of Clancy the Scrivener by Ramsey Shehadeh (Tor.com; September 20, 2023)

That’s it for today. Up next: Yearly Favorites Part 2. Until then, thanks for stopping by and happy reading!

Music Monday: Christmas Edition

Rules:

• Music Monday is a weekly meme hosted by Lauren Stoolfire at Always Me that asks you to share one or two songs that you've recently enjoyed. For the rules, visit the page HERE 

Breana: It's a week away from the twenty-fifth so it's time for our annual Christmas Edition of Music Monday. My pick this week is Coco & Clair Clair's cover of Last Christmas.

Adri: This week I'm listening to Santa Baby by Eartha Kitt.

Andrea: Hi all! This week I'm listening to Merry Christmas by Stephanie Mills and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas by Luther Vandross. Have a wonderful Christmas!

What holiday music are you listening to this week?

Short Stories I Read In November

It’s the fifteenth of December. So it’s time to talk about the short stories, miscellaneous posts, and podcast episodes I read or listened to in November.

On the Fox Roads by Nghi Vo (Tor.com; October 31, 2023)

I know Nghi Vo’s work best by The Singing Hills Cycle, a series of interconnected novellas that can be read in any order—as noted in the synopsis of the 2023 installment, Mammoths at the Gates. Since Vo is one of my favorite authors, I was very excited to check out her short story on Tor.com, On the Fox Roads. I loved this story a lot. It’s a historical cops and robbers kind of tale set in the Jazz Age—think Bonnie and Clyde—only there are subtle hints of magic from the mysterious and titular “Fox Roads.” But it’s also something of a character study, especially when I think about how the narrator was handled. Part of On the Fox Roads was their journey of discovering who they are and what they really want, within a journey that was dangerous and also extraordinary. I highly recommend this one!

From around the web…

• More than Human: Slan by A.E. van Vogt [Alan Brown; Tor.com, October 31, 2023]
• What Are We Writing About When We Write About Ghosts [Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson; Tor.com; October 31, 2023]
• To All the Book I’m Not Reading Yet [Molly Templeton; Tor.com; November 2, 2023]
• With Enough Reading Material, You Can Procrastinate Anything [Molly Templeton; November 9, 2023]
• Running Down that Hill: On Trail-Running and Writing [Costance Fey; Tor.com; November 14, 2023]
• Revealing I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons by Peter S. Beagle [Tor.com; November 21, 2023]
• Scalzi on Film: Speed Racer's Long Road [John Scalzi; Uncanny Magazine; Issue Fifty-Five]
• DIMENSIONS OF WONDER: George Saunders in a Haunted Mansion with Chocolate Mint [Eugenia Triantafyllou; Locus Magazine; November 28, 2023]

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Title: Starling House
Series: n/a
Author: Alix E. Harrow
Source/Format: Purchased; Hardcover (Barnes & Noble special edition)
More Details: Fantasy; Gothic; Horror
Publisher/Publication Date: Tor Books; October 3, 2023

Goodreads     Amazon     Barnes & Noble

Synopsis from Goodreads...

A grim and gothic new tale from author Alix E. Harrow about a small town haunted by secrets that can't stay buried and the sinister house that sits at the crossroads of it all.

Eden, Kentucky, is just another dying, bad-luck town, known only for the legend of E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author and illustrator who wrote The Underland--and disappeared. Before she vanished, Starling House appeared. But everyone agrees that it’s best to let the uncanny house―and its last lonely heir, Arthur Starling―go to rot. Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men, but an unexpected job offer might be a chance to get her brother out of Eden. Too quickly, though, Starling House starts to feel dangerously like something she’s never had: a home. As sinister forces converge on Starling House, Opal and Arthur are going to have to make a dire choice to dig up the buried secrets of the past and confront their own fears, or let Eden be taken over by literal nightmares. If Opal wants a home, she’ll have to fight for it.

The story begins with the line: “I dream sometimes about a house I’ve never seen.” pg.1 That was the only hook I needed to get interested in Starling House, Alix E. Harrow’s latest novel, released on October third. I rarely preorder books, but I walked away from the excerpt on Tor.com (Read Here) knowing that—like my experience with a snippet of Suzanna Clarke’s Piranesi—it was a book I needed to read. This gothic house story is pretty aligned to what I’ve been reading this year; think A Study in Drowning. And like Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood, the creepy, dark fairy tale at the center of this story (The Underland) is only one hint toward the mysteries—misfortunes, and magic—that seemly only befalls the small town of Eden, Kentucky.

I took my time with reading Starling House, because it was the kind of story that I like to linger with and make sure I’ve caught all of the subtext. And, oh boy, did this novel have so much detail to sink my teeth into.

This isn’t a dual timeline, but there was a story from the past that was just as relevant—if not the whole beginning—of…well everything. The juxtapositions were frequent, and it was something that was done quite well. One aspect that’s stressed throughout Opal story is how easy it is for people to fall through the cracks, and for others to look away from uncomfortable situations. For instance, you see that throughout the book how the truth was buried within the different tellings of the same story.

Retribution and revenge; right and wrong; duty and choice—the lines were easily blurred. No character was simple: they had serious depth when it came to their respective versions of moral complexity. Take Opal, the primary perspective. The synopsis on the dust jacket describes her as “orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic, and part-time cashier.” It’s a pretty good list to sum up the core aspects of her character. And deceit was a kind of armor for her. The story digs into into that by putting her in increasingly difficult—and strange—situations. It peels back these outward layers and forces her to be honest with herself, with others, and about working on her communication with even her younger brother, Jasper. Opal was a fascinating character to follow. Among my other favorites were Arthur, Bev, Jasper, the cat, and the titular Starling House.

As I’ve said before on Our Thoughts Precisely, I love a good house story, and Starling House is one of my favorites. The magical aspects can feel very slight, almost vague, with how tightly they’re woven around the everyday issues that plague Eden. But Starling House—the actual house—was slowly revealed as its own character. It was a dark, dreary place; a labyrinth of locked doors and decay. And I loved every scene spent in its hallways and rooms.

At the end of the day, Starling House is one of my favorite reads of 2023.