Blogocentric Formulations

This year, I spent a lot of time clearing out my Kindle of all the impulse buys and discount books that I've picked up over the year. That basically meant a lot of mediocre stuff, a lot of which I didn't finish. There were a few high points, though, including Last Call at the Nighshade Lounge which was a fun urban fantasy adventure with a unique magic system, and Peter Sagal's Incomplete Book of Running which I found particularly endearing and more heartfelt than I anticipated.

Over the past five years, I've averaged reading about 100 books a year (108, to be exact), but this year I think I'm going to scale it back and focus on being more intentional with my reading. I'm not sure what my reading goal will be in terms of actual number of books because I have a lot of titles lined up that are longer and more complex than what I've typically been reading over the past five years, which means I may not be able to plow through them at quite so quick a pace. That said, I do have a fair amount of Kindle "fluff" left (around 60 titles), so I guess we'll just have to see where the reading muse takes me.

Ironically, two of my favorite new podcasts didn't even make my end of year "favorite" () or "also really enjoyed" () list because I got tired of both of them pretty quickly. But By The Book (the hosts live out the advice of self-help books to the letter and then report back) and Dirt Cheap (dramatic reading and comedic analysis of bad pulp fiction from decades past) are great ideas for podcasts that were fun to follow along with for a time. Similar to the iconic My Dad Wrote A Porno podcast, they are clever ideas that just ended up getting a little old for me after several episodes. Pod Save America remains probably my favorite podcast which kept me sane during this crazy election year, and as always, the Ezra Klein Show and The Weeds were incredible resources for deep dives on a variety of topics.

Like with books, next year I'm going to scale back on my podcasts. There are several on the list this year that I'm starting to tire of, particularly all the self-publishing stuff. I think I'm hitting a critical mass where I don't feel like I'm learning as much as am just kind of going through the motions listening, so that's probably a good time to re-evaluate the time I spend listening to them.

I didn't read many comics this year, although I think I'm also forgetting to include all the various ones that I skimmed through during the writing credit arbitration on the upcoming Black Widow feature film. My goal for 2021 is actually to read more comics because I really enjoy them and I've been missing reading them over the past few years.

I'm not putting any favorites or highly recommended on the script section of my reading list because a lot of the writers on this list are my friends and/or colleagues and I don't want to play favorites with my friends and business associates.