You may have FIVE THINGS. I’m a busy man. 

Ian Penman: Erik Satie Three Piece Suite

I read more this year than any year since grad school, but very little that was new. But this short book by one of the greatest living critics was clearly unmissable. Penman is best known as one of the defining pop critics of the post-punk era, a writer so casually erudite that he inspired a whole generation of early bloggers and lost the NME half of its subscribers. For the most part he is not a classical music writer, and that occasionally becomes obvious in this book on the fin de siècle French composer Erik Satie. But if he sometimes imbues very basic tenets of music theory with undue mystical significance, it is worth it for the sensation of direct access to a mind at play. 

Satie is the heart of the book, but Penman allows many other figures to drift into his orbit: some of whom are related to Satie only through the happenstance of Penman’s moods, listening impulses, and trips to the thrift shop: Bill Evans and Spike Milligan appear as related to Satie as John Cage and Jean Cocteau. What they all share with Satie is a talent for ambiguity and a lightness of flavour. Penman’s book is a celebration of bubbles, of smoke, of a light fog at sunrise. Let the ordinary critics praise the ocean. 

Philip Pullman: The Rose Field

In the last few months of this year, I somehow kept coming across peans to the imagination and odes to different ways of knowing. It is a theme that seemed to seek me out, as opposed to the reverse. It’s there in the questions posed by the puzzle game The Witness. It’s in Kurt Vonnegut’s ramshackle swan song Timequake. It is (not the imagination, but alternate ways of knowing) the explicit subject of A Holistic Lemma Science of Mind by Shinichi Nakazawa, the tangles of which I’m making my way through with a book club. I see it in my own way in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” 

That last poem is explicitly referenced in what will almost certainly be the final book in a story that has followed me through my life: the story of Lyra in Philip Pullman’s two trilogies His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust. The former trilogy is famous for its antipathy towards organized religion, but its critique was never the facile “how could you possibly believe in a man in the sky” sort. The Book of Dust almost feels like an attempt to clarify this: if not to make a clean break with the likes of Richard Dawkins, then at least to introduce a little nuance. The Rose Field is a celebration of storytelling and imagination as vital and indispensable ways of understanding the world. And it is, as it would have to be, a great story. 

It Was Just An Accident

I’ve yet to see most of the year’s most exciting movies. Hamnet, Resurrection, No Other Choice, Is This Thing On, and Marty Supreme are all on deck at my local cinema in January. Sentimental Value, Die My Love and The Mastermind passed me by in cinemas altogether. Not having seen any of those, it hasn’t seemed like a great year for movies. Maybe it will, eventually. But It Was Just An Accident is the sort of movie that makes the little Martin Scorsese in your head go “this is what cinema is for.” 

Given that it’s about the trauma of having been tortured, I wasn’t expecting it to be so funny. But for the bulk of the running time, Jafar Panahi lets the story play out as something resembling a farce. It is about a group of hapless people who make a very extreme decision and have to deal with the ridiculous fallout. The fact that even in this section of the film, the emotional stakes never feel inauthentic is a small miracle, and the way that the farce transitions seamlessly into a tonally very different ending is a masterstroke. It’s the one truly excellent movie I’ve seen this year. 

Blue Prince

Right now, I’m about halfway through my second-favourite game of 2025, which is Type Help, a browser-based text game that poses a mystery and requires you to figure out who was where at what time in order to surface new scenes. It’s a wonderful thing, and any other year it might top the list. But this was the year of Blue Prince, a year when my partner and I were hyperfixated on this game for two full weeks, barely able to think about or concentrate on anything else. 

Blue Prince is at first blush a puzzle game. It requires you to synthesize bits of information scattered in disparate locations to learn the combinations of safes, etc. But other games like that don’t tend to inspire the kind of compulsive play that Blue Prince did. What did the trick was the fact that it is a very rare hybrid: a roguelike with a hard out. It’s a game that you work towards finishing, not winning repeatedly. You want to solve all those puzzles. And once you do, you’re done. But the act of getting there is couched in the “one more run” garb of Balatro or Slay the Spire, where you gradually learn the game’s contents such that you gradually improve at playing it. 

This is probably confusing to read if you haven’t been acquainted with the basic premise of Blue Prince. But it’s honestly too hard a game to describe and I don’t have that kind of time. Suffice it to say, I am an utter sicko for it. 

Eruditorum Press

Elizabeth Sandifer’s esoteric group blog has been my favourite corner of the internet for more than a decade now. She is best known for TARDIS Eruditorum, an episode-by-episode critical history of Doctor Who. But having broken up with Doctor Who at some point during the wretched Chris Chibnall era, I found this year’s highlights in a pair of long essays on Alan Turing and Neil Gaiman. 

The Gaiman essay is Sandifer in miniature: an incredibly comprehensive reading of Gaiman’s most influential work in the light of the recent allegations against him. It also forms part of Sandifer’s long-running history of British comics, The Last War in Albion, which posits that much of recent history can be read as the result of spells cast by literal magicians in the form of comics. As such, her reading of Gaiman is framed by the assertion that he owes his success to magic borrowed from Alan Moore, which Moore in turn borrowed from William Burroughs, who in turn borrowed it from the Church of Scientology: the very institution from which Gaiman sought to escape. Whatever it’s worth to you, it is a wholly unique way of doing criticism. 

Bonus: Game Seven of the World Series

The loss was unbearable, of course, and worsened by the fact that victory was so vanishingly near. Sleep came uneasily. A dismal quiet fell across the land. And it was sometime over the following week of ceaselessly consoling colleagues and overhearing anguished public baseball conversations that I realized, I like this. 

I… I like this. 

I enjoy the exquisite anticlimax of it. I find the misery faintly delicious. 

I naturally wish that the Blue Jays had won, because I’m Canadian and the president of the United States keeps suggesting that we should stop being a country, and because no matter how cursed the public transit continues to be I cannot help but feel a modicum of civic pride in the city where I (used to, and still almost) live. 

But the desolation in the stalls of Rogers Centre as the Dodgers celebrated on the field will haunt me for years, like an Elliot Smith song or the last shot of an Ozu movie. In this crushing defeat, there is a tamarind-bitter taste of the sublime. 

I have spent most of my life believing that sports are essentially tribal and emotionally uncomplicated. Never once in my first 35 years did I successfully enjoy watching one.

I should have tried baseball.