2019 Year-In-Review: Books I Read

Coming out of 2019, we’re looking at 48 books read and logged, though that includes 9 graphic novels and 2 rpg sourcebooks. So really 37 prose books, pretty much in-line with the last couple of years. I’ve noticed I have a tendency to finish books in waves; I’ll burn through a whole bunch in a wave, then run out of ones I’m really excited about and then slog through one novel for two months.

By type: 23 Kindle books, 3 other ebooks, 22 physical books.

As is common for my tastes, I read a lot of sci-fi, a decent amount of fantasy, and a variety of non-fiction (including biographies, biology, psychology and “speculative science”). The authors list was a bit more spread out that previous years, as the winner was my three Neil Gaiman books; then two Seanan MacGuires, two Peter Clines, two Wesley Chus, and only one John Scalzi book.

Recommended standouts of the year included Wesley Chu’s Time Salvager (though I wasn’t as enthused by the sequel), Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, Peter Clines’s The Fold and Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War.

In the land of graphic novels: Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona is a delight; I very much enjoyed Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy: A Modern Retelling of Little Women; and The Sandman: Overture is a nice coda if you’ve read the original series. Molly Knox Ostertag’s The Hidden Witch series is also an excellent example of a lot of the YA queer-friendly indie graphic novels coming out recently.

2019 Year-In-Review: Video Games I Played

I officially logged 35 games this year, though that’s increasingly a bullshit number. It includes 8 games that I bought for “real” money but didn’t finish; it excludes 3 cheap games I didn’t finish but played several hours of; it excludes the 6 games I replayed; and it excludes anything I could finish in three hours or less (which is a higher bar than previous years). 122 other games were tried, tested and/or culled. I cleared off another dozen Fanatical and Humble bundles of PC games.

The genre breakdown this year was mostly rpgs of various flavors—classic rpgs, action rpgs, simulation rpgs; plus a few platformers and Zelda-likes. The shorter point-and-click/hidden-object puzzle games got downgraded to the “too short” list starting this year. I only logged 3 puzzle/casual games, though I played some uncountable number of hours of Gems of War (going through multiple guilds, multiple game upgrades, and multiple rounds of, “Well, I’ll probably stop once I’ve finish upgrading these things” but not stopping).

I played 30+ hours of six games, every one of which was solid and recommended: The Alliance Alive (3DS); Dragon Quest Heroes II, Dragon Quest Builders, Dragon Quest Builders 2 (PS4); Marenian Tavern Story (Android); and yet another Stardew Valley replay, this time with the v1.3 enhancements and a bundle randomizer mod.

I also got around 20 hours each out of Prime World: Defenders, Last Dream, Ys: Memories of Celceta, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, NieR: Automata and my replay of Golden Sun. My PS4 really earned its keep this year and I made good use of my new emulator handheld; Steam provided a few winners and a lot of dross; my tablet was mostly a Gems of War machine (I’ve exhausted most of the KEMCO games that interest me). The fact that I got my Wii for cheap mitigates the general disappointment it has been.

Jethrien and I spent less timing gaming together this past year; we finished a bunch of sidequests in Lego Lord of the Rings and did the first few chapters of Warriors Orochi 4 (which was disappointing). ARR played a lot of Minecraft on his tablet, and when he got into Pokemon over the summer, I set him up with Pokemon FireRed on a GBA emulator and he played 50+ hours of it to beat the whole thing. He’s also started Pokemon Emerald on GBA emulator and Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu on the Switch. (ARR is also generally happy to hang out and watch me play Dragon Quest games and to steal my tablet for easy battles of Gems of War; but he isn’t the best with controllers yet.)

I was hoping to actually engage my collection of longer games that I paid real money for this year, and I think I made real headway on that. It would be nice to clear a few older rpgs off my list in the coming year, but I suspect I’m going to spend a lot of time on Switch games now that I own one. And that ARR’s tastes will increasingly drive my gaming time.

By genre, the games that I would say, “This is genuinely good, you should try it if you like the genre,” are:
• RPG/Simulation: Dragon Quest Builders and Dragon Quest Builders II (PS4)
• JRPG: The Alliance Alive (3DS), Last Dream (PC)
• Action RPG: Ys: Memories of Celceta (PC)
• Metroidvania: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (PS4)
• Beat-Em-Up: Dragon Quest Heroes II (PS4)
• Visual Novel: Ladykiller in a Bind (PC)
• Puzzle: Baba Is You (PC)

2019 Year-In-Review: TV I Watched

Much of what I watched this year was, again, on Netflix. I also watched a few Hulu shows and saw a whopping six movies in a theater. (...four were superhero movies, one was a Star War.)

Things that stood out included:

Cartoons: I watched three seasons of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, two seasons of Disenchantment, and two seasons of The Dragon Prince. I finished out Voltron: Legendary Defender and Star vs. The Forces of Evil. I caught up on Steven Universe and watched The Movie. And the Netflix Love, Death & Robots collection was fun.

Superheroes: I watched a season each of: DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Supergirl, The Flash, Black Lightning, and Marvel’s Jessica Jones. I also watched the first seasons of The Umbrella Academy and Doom Patrol, both which kinda qualify.

Comedy: I rewatched the first two seasons of The Good Place, watched the third season and caught up to current with the fourth. I watched another season of Brooklyn 99. I watched all three seasons of One Day At A Time and the first seasons of Russian Doll and Dollface.

Medieval Fantasy: Jethrien and I watched the last two seasons of Game of Thrones. Then I watched both seasons of Galavant, which are much more fun.

I watched virtually no sci-fi tv this year and relatively little “serious” media. There’s been a lot of “I want to be entertained because the world sucks.” I suspect in 2020 I’ll continue watching all of the superhero shows and whichever comedy shows and cartoons get additional seasons. Beyond that, it’ll likely depend where my moods take me and if I end up with a Disney+ subscription before the year is out.

(ARR spent much of his TV time this year on Youtube videos of people playing Minecraft and on Pokemon cartoons. He watched less TV than in previous years because of his improved ability to read and his greater interest in long-form video games.)