Kevin's Favorite Things of 2024
Hello, friends. It's Kevin. Thank you for visiting.
Thank you for still being here after my neglect.
I’ve found people like this annual compilation activity I do for, I gather, the same reasons I like to get it from others. It reminds us of where we were in the course of a year, which feels often like an un-trackable unit of time, and what lit up other people we like. It’s often not what excited us and that’s the idea; to get a contact high from their passion, which starts from, probably, a different source than yours.
I’m a little better at doing this than I used to be, because now I write down everything I watch, read, listen to and eat like how Thomas Jefferson grew garlic. My yield is far less but rightly sized for a San Francisco flat instead of a hillside estate like Monticello.
I hope you enjoy.
I hope what I loved this year becomes useful to you.
FAVORITE BOOKS I READ IN 2024:
Note: I had an idea to try and read 50 books this calendar year. This turned out to be a stupid idea as I spent way too much of this past year’s time and mind on length of books and speed of finishing them rather than on what they were trying to tell me.
I ended up reading 52 books and feeling anxious reading enough and the act of reading itself. I will not be reaching for a number again.
Here are some of my favorites.
Canadian journalist/intellectual hero Naomi Klein’s ninth book Doppleganger (2023 350 pages) is, at first, about how frequently she was confused with former feminist intellectual/current right wing nutball Naomi Wolf and morphs brilliantly into a book about doubling and how the creation of doubles/evil twins/doppelgangers are often the alarm bells for instability and the coming of fascism.
It is not a light book but it will blow your mind. Like did-one-book-really-just-address-literally-everything-in-about-350-page-kinda blow your mind. I am still processing it, joyously, and going over the several dozen pages of notes I took. And hooting and hollering about it, obviously.
Doppelganger was a New York Times Bestseller and the winner Women’s Prize for Nonfiction.
Chef Michael Twitty’s first book The Cooking Gene (2017, 464 pages) a personal history of Southern cooking and how it shaped who we are as Americans is a wonder like the sun in spring, clear, radiant, renewed and brilliant. My wife read it first and told me I would never see food the same way again. It did all that and so much more.
Chef Michael Twitty—southern, black, gay and Jewish—explains in wise, dense bundles (this is a book you will not read quickly because you underline and look up something every third sentence) why the American palette came from all corners of globe, particularly via the nations and cooking of west Africa (Southern Hospitality is likely a descendant of the Senegalese concept of Taraanga) and how multiplicity and diversity is the most truly “American” thing about us. It’s an idea our national discourse sorely needs right now
The Cooking Gene was an NPR and Smithsonian Magazine Book of the Year and a 2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year
This short novel (2009. 195 pages) about a doomed romance in black 1950s San Francisco is like holding an opal between your hands. You look at it with such glory and reference at what a perfectly beautiful thing it is. You’re porbably a little afraid to drop it. Or move.
This book came along a few years before author Andrew Sean Greer would win the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Less.I would have felt just fine giving it to him for this one.
You might have seen the recent TV series based on journalist Lisa Taddeo’s (Shailene Woodley plays the author) breathtakingly beautiful 2019 book about three unrelated profiles about sex and the lives of three American women that are nonetheless deeply connected on the most human and blood born level.
Doesn’t matter. Read it. I couldn’t put it friggin down. The book followed me around like a spy. Or I followed it like a scorned lover. Whatever. I cannot get over how great it is. I would read it all over just to assure it hadn’t cast a permanent spell over me.
Three Women was an NYT bestseller and a Nonfiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.
FAVORITE MOVIES I SAW IN 2024:
I too saw Challengers and thought everyone in it was very damp and sexy and the movie was about 40 minutes too long and Wimbledon is a better movie about damp and sexy people playing tennis. Most of the high flying sequels that dominated box office this year were to movies I didn’t care for the first time around with the exception of Inside Out 2 which is great fun but not innovative or even something new like its first version. On that, I am still waiting for Pixar to commit to a story that is not 78% chase scene.
Because I wrote a book a long time ago about 80s teen movies, I did get asked a lot if I saw the Brats documentary which I did eventually. The subject has my heart, it always will, but the movie is fundamentally about a problem only the director Andrew McCarthy seemed to have and the audience knows this after about 17 minutes in. So whether you will like it or not really comes down to how much patience you have for a documentary where the director says “where’s the key?” for 90 minutes and you can tell its in his right hand after about 20 minutes.
If documentaries, especially those about pop culture, are your thing, you really want to see Butterfly in the Sky, about the kids tv show Reading Rainbow but really about faith in learning and education and It’s Only Life After All about the Indigo Girls but really about creative partnership, a movie for anyone who makes things with someone else even if you haven’t been listen to the band for 40 years like your narrator.
Both are available on Netflix.
Since 2022, my wife and I have purchased a pass to Sundance at Home which allows you to watch many of the esteemed festivals movies without getting your butt to Park City, Utah in January. This past year we saw Thelma (Hulu) which is a hilarious action movie comedy where the action hero is a 92 year old. Kneecap (Netflix) is a great Irish band movie about a hiphop trio that rhymes in the native Irish language and can rightfully be called The Commitments (Amazon Prime) for the 21st century. Didi (Peacock) is an A+ coming-of-age movie about being an immigrant kid in the Bay Area at the beginning of this millennium which avoids every pitfall that story could have. Myspace jokes are minimal, thank the great good lord.
You definitely want to see The Old Oak (Apple, Amazon and Fandango for purchase) the movie its 87 year old director Ken Loach says is his last. Ken Loach has been making movies for about 60 years and they are mostly a) fantastic b) often shot with non actors or performers from other realms (comedians, musicians) and c) almost always about how terrible the world is to the poor and disadvantaged. They are fantastic and you can reasonably do about one every six months without wanting to take a straight leap off a slanted roof.
Why see The Old Oak, about the last pub in a dying English industrial town and a sudden influx of Syrian immigrants? Because it’s actually hopeful. It’s about how even though the world is often awful, people are often good. It’s a good note for Mr. Loach to finish on. And it will make you, at least for two hours, feel like not giving up.
Oh and subscribe to The Criterion Channel and Kanopy for a continuous rain of good movies.
I figured you knew that already.
VIDEO GAMES I PLAYED AND LIKED IN 2024:
I gifted myself a Nintendo Switch this year (just in time for the revised Switch 2 to land, it would seem) as reward for finishing my new book and immediately fell in love with Zelda Breath of the Wild which is like getting to live inside a Hayao Miyazakai movie for as long as you please.
If you’re more of a play five minutes on my laptop while taking a work break sort of person, allow me to recommend Haven Park (which you can play on the Steam Platform on your laptop) a quietly beautiful little game about the last days of summer, memory, loss and rebuilding. And a summer camp run by birds.
SNACKS I ENJOYED EATING IN 2024:
The Bay Area’s Coracao Chocolate is a favorite in our household where we always have about 97 varieties of chocolate on hand. Coracao is vegan but neither of us are. I’ve just found a single square of the Superberry Bars (which are like Chunky Bars with raspberry and acai jam inside) the perfect end to pretty much any meal. A box has 4 such squares and prices at $7.50.
Quest Chips taste just like plain old tortilla chips but with like 20g of protein and no stupid junk like cottonseed oil. Chili Lime are my favorite flavor but the variety is rich and top flight.
Available at Costco and other cavernous retailers.
FINAL NOTES:
My annual 50-song playlist of music I discovered the previous year will be out in the next week. Until then, the 2023 Edition of The Smokler 50 for your enjoyment.
Big announcement coming up about my new book, to be published in May.
See you soon,
Kevin
Written on while standing up.
Logo by Dave Linabury.