Glacial Errata, No. 50

[A few weeks ago, I posted a link to Rahawa Haile’s story on Monster Jam; it was paywalled, but Coyote Media has gone paywall free for the month of December. You should really give them your money anyway! But in the meantime, you can read it here for free.

Anyway, I dislike doing “year end” lists. I think fundamentally my taste lets a lot of people down. I probably won’t do this every year. But here’s some stuff that I personally, for better or worse, absolutely loved.]

Favorite Film: Sinners

I still love almost everything about this movie. I love that the first half is one of my favorite genres of film, “Getting the gang back together to put on a show” (see also: Ocean’s 11). I love the central sequence which just should not work at all and yet somehow does. I love how deeply it conveys a love of cinema.

Runners-up: The Long Walk and The Running Man

I’ve been thinking about Stephen King’s first four “Richard Bachman” books (excluding Thinner, which is just a King novel in disguise) all share a theme: the game is rigged, there’s no escape, you’re going to die, and die extremely soon, so how are you going to live these last few moments? To my mind, Rage and Roadwork need to be ignored and buried (the former definitely has been), but it doesn’t seem a coincidence to me that the other two both were adapted in this Year of Our Lord 2025—one deeply existential and harrowing, the other goofily comic. They would make for an intense double feature.

Favorite Album: Witness, Mary Kouyoumdjian & Kronos Quartet

An achingly beautiful set of music. It begins with a reworked Armenian folk song, and folds in voices from survivors of the Lebanese Civil War and the Armenian Genocide. This one reaches deep.

Runner-Up: Diamond Jubilee, Cindy Lee

I think this album technically came out last year but it’s amazing. Just overflowing with musical and technical ideas, sutured together by a bottomless yearning and longing. It’s not streaming; you gotta buy the album on Bandcamp, but man is it worth it.

Favorite Nonfiction Book: Question 7, by Richard Flanagan

Once again, a book that just took amazing chances, made extraordinary leaps, and somehow stuck the landing every time. That H. G. Wells and Rebecca West, indirectly, were responsible for the atomic bomb, was just a thing I did not know. And there’s a host of other revelations like that, woven through Flanagan’s extremely blunt and honest interrogations of his own emotions and personal history. This was originally published in 2023, but I only read it this year.

Runner-Up: The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels, Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmerman

I’ve read so many books about the politics of death and dying, on burial and the care of the dead, and I can’t remember the last time I read one with so much care and compassion towards the unmourned dead. I thought I knew how good this book was going to be when I started reading it. I was wrong in the best way.

Best Novel: North Sun, or: The Voyage of the Ship Whaleship Esther, by Ethan Rutherford

A fantastic yarn, with a prose style unlike Melville’s while also being the closest vibe to Moby-Dick that I’ve ever come across. Apologies to my friend Jen who was meeting me for a drink and showed up when I had only five pages left to go and so I made her hang on because I was so engrossed in the book and desperately needed to finish it.

The theme that’s emerging in all these picks? I love art that takes giant, daring leaps, artists who are in love with their medium and its possibilities. These works all stuck the landing, but even when they don’t, I love them. I want 2026 to be filled with more of this: more courage, more risk-taking, more ecstasy.

Runner-Up: Yoko Ogawa, The Diving Pool

Not sure when this first came out, but man is it upsetting. I don’t love everything by Ogawa, but Revenge is one of my favorite books of horror, and The Diving Pool captures so much of that same unsettling darkness.

Favorite “Best Of” List

Manjula Martin’s “The Only Year-End List that Matters.” She’s not wrong.