Hello, friends. It's Kevin. Thank you for visiting.

Last year, by far, the favorite newsletter I sent was my annual wrap up of my favorite things. I even got a fan letter from an 10 year old. So I had big plans to at least write a mid-year version in June and maybe more regular, Kevin-advocates-with-outstretched-arms editions of this periodical.

And then Chris and I had a new post-VINYL NATION documentary to finish. Then Break the Frame: Conversations With Women Filmmakers, my new book, came out in May. Then I went on book tour.

And here we are at the end of my boring excuses.

As of this moment (Evening, late-December, 14 ounces of iced coffee and cardamon to the wind) I have read new 46 books, watched new 116 movies and discovered 567 new songs. By “new” I simply mean “I was not familiar with this before” not “became available this calendar year.”

I write down everything I watch, read, listen to and believe archiving is a statement of value. I do this in equal parts to remember and share.

Everything I share below will be easily available— nothing out-of-print, illegally brokered or only on a streaming platform run by a municipal government agency in Djibouti. The things I like to share most sound familiar but you probably missed, the almost-known rather than the ridiculous obscure = better formula.

I am assuming you don’t need me to jump up and down about Taylor Swift or The Minecraft Movie or whatever James Patterson is up to any more than you need me to cheerlead about say, air, earth and water.

Shell we then?

FAVORITE BOOKS I HAVE READ IN 2025:

Note: The stupid idea I had last year to try and read 50 books in a calendar year has not been repeated.

Instead I told myself that, outside of what I must read for my job, I’m just going to follow my heart and read what will take me somewhere, gliders seizing the wind.

I’ve read 46 books this year without GAF how many I read. That felt great.

Here are some of my favorites (I use The Storygraph as my Keeping Track of Books tool).

New Yorker staff writer Casey Cep’s first book tries to answer the question “Why didn’t Harper Lee ever write another book after To Kill a Mockingbird?”

With the blessing of Lee’s notoriously private family, her dogged, elegant investigation answers and does not answer the question because she can’t. Can’t because Harper Lee went to her grave without telling anyone and does because Lee tried to make her second book a true crime tale of an infamous 1977 murder in her home state of Alabama.

Harper Lee, who was instrumental to her childhood friend Truman Capote’s pioneering true crime book In Cold Blood was rightly convinced she had a similar project in her. That she never finished it is the theme of Furious Hours: Our discomfort with not knowing is both awful and an awful fact of life.

In between, Furious Hours is one of those books where you learn something amazing every 3 pages. Cep is such a brilliant writer and probing researcher that she’ll pause in the story and say something like “A word about insurance fraud” and then deliver 4 paragraphs where afterword you will run out into the street and begin exactly telling birds and hedges about insurance fraud.

Read if these things are your vibe (RITTAYV):

True crime, Small town murders, To Kill a Mockingbird, History of the American South.

Most people have heard of Walter Mosley as either the creator of the Easy Rawlins mystery series (and the 1995 movie Devil in a Blue Dress starring Denzel Washington as Rawlins) or as a favorite writer of President Bill Clinton. Less known (Not saying much. Mosley has over 50 books to his credit and did not start writing professionally until his mid 30s) are his 3 Socrates Fortlow novels about an ex-convict from Indiana trying to rebuild his life from a street level apartment and odd jobs in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned is the first in the series and is a beautiful, tough little book about the difficulty of doing the right thing when you only seen to be offered bad choices. It doesn’t go any of the directions you think it will and feels a very different experience than a expansive, sunlit film adaptation starring Laurence Fishburne.

RITTAYV:

Redemption, Los Angeles, Books that hit quick, are over and stick with you.Books that seem predictable but ain’t.

I did not plan for both nonfiction recommendations this year to contain the word “Furious” in their titles just as I did not plan for a biography of the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton marriage (which I knew nothing about and never cared to) to be a can’t-put-down-read-while-brushing-teeth kinda book. Because Furious Love not just a very well told tale of celebrity gossip (by co-authors Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger) but essentially the big bang (circa 1961) of the modern celebrity buzz.

Dick/Liz was the first reality show, a worldwide sensation that followed the two to the far corners of the globe until it ultimately (well, along with Burton’s alcoholism) destroyed the marriage.

I’ve said before my favorite books are those that make you care about a subject you didn’t care about at all. This is one of my favorite examples.

RITTAYV:

Classical Hollywood, Celebrity, Doomed romance, Fame, Scandal (the concept. Not the band)

Because Fat Girl, the debut novel by my dear friend Lauren Marie Fleming, is a seriously good hang, the kind of book where you keep inventing dumb excuses (“I would love to but I need to stay home and renew my zoo membership.”) to spend time with it because the characters are so charismatic and the story is so much fun.

Diana Smith’s a filmmaker who was once on a rocket to the moon until personal tragedy cut in. Then a chance meeting with a famous action movie star might equal another chance to direct the movie she had planned to as a young artist.

Diana’s got principles, talented friends she wants to hire and she’s trying to make her career happen while being in business (and maybe falling for, Kevin says with a flirty raised eyebrow) this hugely famous actor who has a personal brand and all that nonsense to think about.

Because Fat Girl is one of those rare novels that gives about twice as much as you think you’re getting. It’s a queer romance that doesn’t assume all its characters look like the nieces of Ally McBeal (thank friggin everything for that!) It is also as much about how there is no feeling in the world better than making things with your friends, no bigger high than working, tirelessly and exhaustedly, next to people you respect, admire and knowing, that this is where honorable beauty and greatness comes from.

I wanted to hug this book when I was done reading it.

RITTAYV:

Love stories about real people instead of boring-ass sexuality and body size normativity, Hollywood, Making stuff with your friends, Books that promise this and give you this plus 8 other things.

Honorable Mentions:

We Tell Ourselves Stories (272 pp.) by Alissa Wilkinson is an thrilling book about Joan Didion and the movies that treats its subject like a person instead of a trading card. Once I was Cool (200 pp.)by Megan Stielstra is the Singles of essay collections (huge praise), The Professor and the Madman (272 pp.) by Simon Winchester is the most exciting thing I have ever read about the creation of a dictionary (also high praise), Inventing the Enemy by Umberto Eco (240 pp.) is learning all sorts of wild business at the knee of the world’s smartest and nicest person, The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet (208 pp.) will give you hope for the future.

FAVORITE MOVIES I’VE SEEN IN 2025

Note/Disclaimer/Whathaveyou. This fall, my wife and I learned, thanks to a tip from a childhood friend that DOC NYC, one of the country’s great all-documentary festivals, has an at-home viewing program.

We got to see 10 great documentaries (about cheese, rivers, pioneering female artists and growing up a climate refugee, to name but a few) before they hit the streets. If they hit the streets. see them immediately.

Now…

Of the years top box office movies, I managed to miss pretty much all of them, not out of indignation (I did not snub them like undesirable dates to the winter formal or something) but ignorance (I usually have such a long list of what I want to see that I rarely have room for the movie everyone’s talking about. It’s either on deck already or it isn’t).

The lone exception was Ryan Coogler’s SINNERS (streaming everywhere) which is as good as everyone says and not as scary as everyone also says. I don’t do horror movies and this one maybe two jumpy parts. It is about vampires but as a metaphor for racism and how unfair systems make victims of unfair systems fight amongst themselves.

The music is great (to wit). And the dialogue crackles like grease on a skillet

I hope it wins BEST PICTURE at the Oscars.

I also hope MATERIALISTS (HBO Max) wins Best Original Screenplay for writer/director Celine Song and I’d throw the Best Actress trophy to Dakota Johnson too.

Warning: If you have NOT seen Ms. Song’s breathtaking first film PAST LIVES (HBO MAX Hulu) about the very adult decisions we have to make when it comes to love, MATERIALISTS will seen way less interesting that it is. Don’t make that mistake. First things first and all that.

In the game of threes, PADDINGTON IN PERU (Netflix) is the worst of the 3 Paddington movies but still great because the Paddington franchise is as durable as THE AVENGERS (Don’t argue. I will give you a hard Paddington stare) and BRIDGET JONES: MAD ABOUT THE BOY (Peacock) is the best of that trio. PADDINGTON-PERU is about our fury friend’s attempt to find the family he lost as a cub in “darkest Peru” and MAD…BOY is about Bridget Jones raising her son and moving on after her husband Mark Darcy has died (It’s not a spoiler if it’s in the trailer.)

You should also see ELEANOR THE GREAT (Apple and Amazon Prime rental) a comedy starring June Squibb trying to make friends in VERY unconventional ways as a senior citizen (it’s directed by Scarlett Johansson but that’s really neither here nor there).

Unrelated: The best Robin Wright movie you’ve never heard of is called THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE (2009, Kanopy) where Wright plays a woman who has spent her live doing exactly what was expected of her until…no more!

Unrelated again: It only took about 15 attempts (I actually tried to see this movie in the theater when I was 20 and the power went out. That’s never happened to me at the movies before or since), but I saw the best Bill Paxton movie you’ve never heard of called ONE FALSE MOVE (1991, Prime Video Rental), where Paxton plays a small town sherrif investigating a Los Angeles drug buy gone bad when the criminals come home to roost.

If you think the Coen Brothers movies are often too clever by about 50%, this is the movie for you.

On the documentary front, you absolutely want to see the Pee-Wee Herman documentary which is beautiful but very sad (HBO Max), the Billy Joel (HBO Max) and Martin Scorsese documentaries (Apple TV) (both about legendary artists with very poor career skills and how they overcome their worst tendencies). I was shocked how fast these two very long movies race by).

The Eddie Murphy documentary is really enjoyable despite lying by omission to your face as it skates right on by pretty much every bad decision Eddie Murphy ever made.

Oh and subscribe to The Criterion Channel and Kanopy for a blizzard of good movies but I figured you knew that already.

HOBBIES I REALIZED I HAD IN 2025 AND CONTINUE TO ENJOY VERY MUCH

I collected stamps in the early 90s for about 6 minutes and then forgot about them until this year when I started filing American Commemorative Panels in an album and getting a serious kick out of it.

I remain committed to pens and notebooks, and finding an annual pen show that isn’t like Pen Mardi Gras.

I’ve also started keeping a desk and art supplies for sketching, pasting and cutting when not writing to wake up a sleeping part of my creative brain.

FINAL NOTES:

• My annual 50-song playlist of music I discovered the previous year will be out in February. Until then, the 2024 edition of The Smokler 50.

• I’m going to save what I’m up to professionally for the next one of these which I promise will not be next December. I offer up my good sense (of which there is little) and my sense of humor (of which there is much) as collateral.

See you soon,

Kevin

Written while in the deep grove.

Logo by Dave Linabury.