The year in content: 2023

Music, books, and movies

Author

Juan Tellez

Intro

Here’s all the content I consumed in 2023. The music data comes from Apple Music, the books from Goodreads, and the movies from Letterboxd.

The code I used to clean up the Apple Music data is slightly adapted from Andrew Heiss, which is slightly adapted from somewhere else.

Show code 
read_itunes_library <- function(path) {
  raw <- xml2::read_xml(path)
  
  res <- xml2::as_list(raw)
  res <- purrr::pluck(res, "plist", "dict", "dict")
  res <- res[names(res) != "key"]
  
  res <- 
    tibble::enframe(res) %>%
    dplyr::rowwise() %>%
    dplyr::mutate(value = list(tibble::enframe(value))) %>%
    dplyr::ungroup() %>%
    dplyr::mutate(id = dplyr::row_number()) %>%
    dplyr::select(-name) %>%
    tidyr::unnest(value) %>%
    dplyr::mutate(
      entry_id = (dplyr::row_number() + (dplyr::row_number() %% 2)) / 2
    ) %>%
    dplyr::rowwise() %>%
    dplyr::mutate(
      value = dplyr::if_else(length(value) == 0L, list(list(NA)), list(value)),
      value = unlist(value)
    ) %>%
    dplyr::ungroup() %>%
    tidyr::pivot_wider(
      id_cols = c(id, entry_id), 
      names_from = name, 
      values_from = value, 
      values_fn = list
    ) %>%
    tidyr::pivot_longer(
      cols = 4:ncol(.), 
      names_to = "type", 
      values_drop_na = TRUE
    ) %>%
    dplyr::select(-type) %>%
    tidyr::pivot_wider(id_cols = id, names_from = key, values_from = value) %>%
    janitor::clean_names() %>%
    dplyr::select(
      id, track_title = name, artist, album_artist, album, 
      genre, total_time, date_added, skip_count, play_count, year
    ) %>%
    dplyr::rowwise() %>%
    dplyr::mutate(dplyr::across(
      everything(), 
      ~dplyr::if_else(is.null(.x), list(NA), list(.x))
    )) %>%
    dplyr::mutate(dplyr::across(everything(), unlist)) %>%
    dplyr::mutate(
      date_added = strsplit(date_added, "T"),
      date_added = date_added[1],
      date_added = lubridate::ymd(date_added),
      skip_count = as.numeric(skip_count),
      play_count = as.numeric(play_count),
      total_time = as.numeric(total_time),
      year = as.numeric(year)
    ) %>%
    dplyr::ungroup() %>%
    dplyr::arrange(dplyr::desc(play_count))
  
  res
}

Music

New albums in my library

First, the albums I added to my Apple Music library this year. These are the records I discovered this year, whether they came out this year or earlier. Below are the top five by play count1.

1 One limitation is that, all else equal, albums with more songs will have higher play counts.

Top albums added to my Apple Music library in 2023
Artist Album
Allah-Las Allah-Las
Dorothy Ashby Hip Harp (Japan) [feat. Frank Wess]
The Band The Band (Remastered)
The Beach Boys Sunflower
Cactus Lee Texas Yard Sale
  • The Allah-Las. Carefully made surfer rock. It’s me trying to make living in California more palatable.
  • Also the year I discovered Dorothy Ashby’s Hip Harp. Afro-harping is great, but takes work. Hip Harp is breezy, effortless, very cool.
  • 2023 I began getting Beach Boys-pilled, and so we have Sunflower. Hard to pick a favorite track, maybe Cool, Cool Water.

Favorite records of the year

These are the records that came out this year and that I added to my library this year.

Favorite albums of 2023
Artist Album Genre
Gabriel da Rosa É o que a casa oferece Worldwide
never young beach ARIGATO Blues-Rock

For my favorites that came out this year, I’ll pick:

  • É o que a casa oferece. Sorta Brazilian jazz, and you can tell this guy has good taste.
  • ARIGATO. We went to Japan this year. This is excellent pop music. My family loved it.

Books

Books I read this year

Here’s the books I finished reading this year and my rating:

  • Putin: His Life and Times by Philip Short
    My Rating: ★★★
    Date Read: November 21, 2023
  • Arabesques by Anton Shammas
    My Rating: ★★
    Date Read: November 10, 2023
  • Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War by Evan Wright
    My Rating: ★★★★★
    Date Read: October 13, 2023
  • Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima
    My Rating: ★★★★★
    Date Read: August 26, 2023
  • The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade by Benjamin T. Smith
    My Rating: ★★★★
    Date Read: August 14, 2023
  • Naomi by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
    My Rating: ★★★★
    Date Read: July 25, 2023
  • We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour
    My Rating: ★
    Date Read: July 01, 2023
  • Latecomer State Formation: Political Geography and Capacity Failure in Latin America by Sebastian Mazzuca
    My Rating: ★★★★
    Date Read: June 20, 2023
  • The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
    My Rating: ★★★★
    Date Read: June 05, 2023
  • Soldier of the Mist by Gene Wolfe
    My Rating: ★
    Date Read: May 23, 2023
  • Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War by Erik Edstrom
    My Rating: ★
    Date Read: May 08, 2023
  • War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare by Robert Taber
    My Rating: ★★★★
    Date Read: May 03, 2023
  • Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen
    My Rating: ★★★★
    Date Read: April 25, 2023
  • The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
    My Rating: ★★★★★
    Date Read: February 02, 2023

Descriptives

How do my ratings compare versus the averages reported by Goodreads?

How long am I spending on each book? Caveat: the dates added / read are approximations in some cases.

Favorite books

Favorite books I read this year:

  • Savage detectives. Bolaño is one of the best “pure writers” of the last 50 years. He also loves Mexico, and you can see that all over “detectives”.
  • Generation Kill. Caught off guard by how good this was. With many war memoirs, there is a bad tendency to superimpose contemporary views on past events. This book avoids doing that and gives a vivid look at one of the GWOT wars.
  • The Dope. So much has been written about the war on drugs, it’s hard to find a new angle. This book has lots of new things to say. Unfortunately, it is a bit too loose with the facts at times; read carefully.

Surprise read: Naomi. What a weird, perverted book. And from 1924!

Worst book: Un-American. Preachy with not much “stuff” to look at beyond an interesting chapter on the war academy.

Movies

You can see all the movies I watched in 2023 at the bottom. Here’s my stats for the year:

My movie watching stats for 2023
Statistic Value
Number of movies watched 49
Average rating 3.36
Highest rated movie Sunset Boulevard
Lowest rated movie The Whale
Cor(rating, release date) -0.39

Here’s when I watched:

And here’s the distribution of ratings:

Favorite movies

The two best movies I saw this year were Sunset Boulevard and The Last Picture Show. With Boulevard, I was imagining a paint by numbers noir, but it was much weirder and darker. And Picture Show does the “small town is actually rotting from within” bit way before anyone else, much better, and more devastating in the end.

The worst movie I saw this year was The Whale. Unbelievably bad, condescending.

The best movie that came out in 2023 was May December. I love Julianne Moore and I love Todd Haynes. This movie also does something super well that I love: take a well-worn story/trope/narrative (“the teacher slept with the student”) and makes you see it from a new angle, makes what’s become ordinary seem strange again.

Full list of movies

Movies I watched this year
Release year My rating
Generation Wealth 2018 2.0
Cliffhanger 1993 3.0
White Noise 2022 3.0
Aftersun 2022 4.0
TÁR 2022 4.5
M3GAN 2022 2.5
The Principal 1987 3.5
The Whale 2022 0.5
This Place Rules 2022 3.5
Point Break 1991 4.0
Waiting for Guffman 1996 4.0
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed 2022 1.5
Bound 1996 4.0
Buffalo '66 1998 4.0
The Graduate 1967 4.0
Sister, Sister 1987 3.0
BEEF 2023 3.0
Sunset Boulevard 1950 5.0
Bama Rush 2023 1.0
Body Double 1984 3.5
Dressed to Kill 1980 3.5
The Virgin Suicides 1999 4.0
Sisters 1972 3.5
The Apartment 1960 5.0
Cure 1997 5.0
Arnold 2023 1.0
Branded to Kill 1967 2.0
Gone Girl 2014 4.5
Angel's Egg 1985 1.0
The Last Picture Show 1971 5.0
Oppenheimer 2023 3.5
Mulholland Drive 2001 4.5
Collateral 2004 3.5
Beau Travail 1999 3.0
Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence 2023 2.5
Dogtooth 2009 4.0
Infinity Pool 2023 2.5
Halloween III: Season of the Witch 1982 4.0
Night of the Living Dead 1968 5.0
The Fog 1980 4.0
The Killing of a Sacred Deer 2017 4.0
Targets 1968 3.0
Killers of the Flower Moon 2023 4.5
Priscilla 2023 2.0
Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God 2023 3.0
May December 2023 4.0
Poor Things 2023 4.0
Pearl 2022 3.0
The Killer 2023 2.5