The year in content: 2025

Music, books, and movies

Author

Juan Tellez

Published

January 1, 2026

Intro

Here’s all the content I consumed in 2025. 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 2025
Artist Album
Cory Hanson I Love People
The Beach Boys Smiley Smile
Billy Strayhorn The Peaceful Side of Jazz
John Cale Vintage Violence
The Velvet Underground The Velvet Underground
  • I did not add VU this year: one of those unfortunate quirks of streaming services where you end up with ten versions of the same album, and then you have to delete them all and re-add the original so you can listen start to end. VU is one of my top five albums.
  • The peaceful side of jazz. A surprise jazz discovery this year. Mellow, I love all the ambient texture / sounds. Reminds me of Akira Kosemura’s Polaroid Piano.
  • I read the Lou Reed biography this year, which means I listened to Cory Hanson’s tender tribute song “Lou Reed” a ton: “You were a prince and a fighter / and you were a tai chi master”

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 the year
Artist Album Genre
Cass McCombs Interior Live Oak Alternative
Big Thief Double Infinity Alternative
Ariel Pink With You Every Night Rock

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

  • Double Infinity is not my favorite Big Thief, but we saw them live this year and I listened to “Los Angeles” a ton.
  • The new Ariel Pink album. Late add for me this year but I’ve already listened a ton. IMO he should have stuck to music instead of the edge-lord politics.

Books

Books I read this year

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

  • The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance by Bruce Fink
    My Rating: ★★
    Date Read: December 05, 2025
  • Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein
    My Rating: ★★★
    Date Read: November 26, 2025
  • Zen at War by Brian Daizen Victoria
    My Rating: ★★
    Date Read: November 21, 2025
  • The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen
    My Rating: ★★
    Date Read: November 18, 2025
  • Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
    My Rating: ★★★★
    Date Read: November 09, 2025
  • The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins
    My Rating: ★★★★
    Date Read: October 30, 2025
  • A History of Modern Uganda by Richard J. Reid
    My Rating: ★
    Date Read: October 15, 2025
  • The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp
    My Rating: ★★★
    Date Read: October 07, 2025
  • The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi
    My Rating: ★★★
    Date Read: September 30, 2025
  • War in the Age of Trump by Patrick Cockburn
    My Rating: ★★★
    Date Read: September 28, 2025
  • Museveni’s Uganda: Paradoxes of Power in a Hybrid Regime (Challange and Change in African Politics) by Aili Tripp
    My Rating: ★★★★
    Date Read: September 24, 2025
  • The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple
    My Rating: ★
    Date Read: September 12, 2025
  • I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux
    My Rating: ★★★★
    Date Read: September 09, 2025
  • A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda by Derek R. Peterson
    My Rating: ★★★
    Date Read: September 08, 2025
  • Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan (American Music Series) by Alex Pappademas
    My Rating: ★★★★
    Date Read: September 07, 2025
  • Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
    My Rating: ★
    Date Read: September 07, 2025
  • When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz
    My Rating: ★★★★★
    Date Read: September 01, 2025
  • Lou Reed: The King of New York by Will Hermes
    My Rating: ★★★★
    Date Read: August 25, 2025
  • How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen: A Survival Guide to Life with Children Ages 2-7 by Joanna Faber
    My Rating: ★★★★★
    Date Read: August 24, 2025
  • Your Two-Year-Old: Terrible or Tender by Louise Bates Ames
    My Rating: ★★★
    Date Read: August 14, 2025
  • My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
    My Rating: ★★★★★
    Date Read: July 30, 2025
  • Right-Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin
    My Rating: ★★
    Date Read: May 05, 2025
  • La guerra del fin del mundo by Mario Vargas Llosa
    My Rating: ★
    Date Read: April 17, 2025
  • Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate by Jean-Paul Sartre
    My Rating: ★★
    Date Read: March 26, 2025
  • Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World by Jane Ohlmeyer
    My Rating: ★
    Date Read: March 21, 2025
  • How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region by Joe Studwell
    My Rating: ★★★★
    Date Read: March 12, 2025
  • Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
    My Rating: ★★
    Date Read: February 26, 2025
  • The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia by Teo Ballve
    My Rating: ★★★★
    Date Read: February 06, 2025
  • La dimensión desconocida by Nona Fernández
    My Rating: ★★★★★
    Date Read: January 21, 2025
  • Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations by Michael Walzer
    My Rating: ★★★★
    Date Read: January 09, 2025

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:

  • Favorite nonfiction: When the clock broke. The wacky and wonderful world of American politics in the early 1990s. Great writing, great stories. The roots of MAGA are here.
  • Favorite fiction: La dimensión desconocida. Countless books and movies about the “dirty wars” of Latin America and yet Nona Fernández finds something new to say. The horror of the “war” was that it was happening in plain sight, in ordinary buildings, and everyone knew.

Surprise read: Mason and Dixon. I’m a big Pynchon fan, but man what a slog this was. Did not expect it to be so impenetrable.

Worst book I read this year: La guerra del fin del mundo. High expectations for this one, about the true story of the “War of Canudos” in Brazil, but Llosa sets it in a romance-epic genre that was too “Gone with the Wind” for me.

Movies

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

My movie watching stats for the year
Statistic Value
Number of movies watched 76
Average rating 3.22
Highest rated movie Melancholia
Lowest rated movie Heretic
Cor(rating, release date) -0.34

Here’s when I watched:

And here’s the distribution of ratings, for fun:

Favorite movies

Watched a lot of good movies this year, tough to make choices.

The two best movies I saw this year:

  • High and Low. Wow! Did not expect this at all, not a Kurosawa fan generally. Plays with interpersonal and class-based tension, and the bad guy is Joker-fied before that was a thing.
  • Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times. Odd choice but I love Brian Wilson and was impressed by this simple doc, clearly made for fans, chock-full of little easter eggs. “Shortnin’ bread!”

The worst movie I saw this year was Heretic. The cringe, “new atheist” politics is tough to stomach but what really sunk it was the awkward transition to monster movie halfway through.

The best movie that came out this year: Eddington, funny and has something new to say about technology (also the pandemic that no one wants to remember). Can’t think of a movie that better portrays how screens mediate our lives and relationships.

Full list of movies

Movies I watched this year
Release year My rating
The Iron Claw 2023 3.5
Past Lives 2023 3.0
You Can Count on Me 2000 2.5
Love & Mercy 2014 2.0
SPERMWORLD 2024 3.0
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese 2019 3.0
Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary 2024 2.5
The Beach Boys 2024 2.5
Birds of Passage 2018 2.0
Good Bye, Lenin! 2003 2.5
Only Lovers Left Alive 2013 4.0
Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat 2024 4.5
Birth 2004 4.5
Dark City 1998 3.0
Conclave 2024 3.0
Anora 2024 3.5
The Apprentice 2024 4.0
Barry Lyndon 1975 4.5
Michael Clayton 2007 2.5
Emilia Pérez 2024 1.0
Inside Llewyn Davis 2013 4.5
No Other Land 2024 4.0
A Complete Unknown 2024 3.5
Companion 2025 2.0
Adolescence 2025 4.0
Scott Walker: 30 Century Man 2006 3.0
Something's Gotta Give 2003 3.0
Stress Positions 2024 3.5
Tokyo Sonata 2008 3.0
Casino 1995 4.0
Louis Theroux: The Settlers 2025 3.0
Heretic 2024 0.5
Nightbitch 2024 3.0
Melancholia 2011 5.0
Nymphomaniac: Vol. I 2013 3.0
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1966 4.0
Holy Hell 2016 2.0
Asteroid City 2023 2.5
The Savages 2007 3.0
Friendship 2024 4.0
Chaos: The Manson Murders 2025 2.0
Saint Maud 2019 1.0
Zodiac 2007 5.0
A Dangerous Method 2011 2.0
Titan: The OceanGate Submersible Disaster 2025 3.0
Night Moves 1975 3.0
Eddington 2025 4.5
Incendies 2010 2.5
Cloud 2024 3.0
Materialists 2025 3.0
High and Low 1963 4.5
Yi Yi 2000 3.0
You Hurt My Feelings 2023 2.5
Toy Story 1995 5.0
Splitsville 2025 1.5
The Last Seduction 1994 5.0
There Will Be Blood 2007 5.0
Inherent Vice 2014 4.0
Weapons 2025 3.0
Sleepaway Camp 1983 4.5
The Master 2012 3.5
Mr. Scorsese 2025 1.5
Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky 1991 2.5
Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn't Made for These Times 1995 5.0
One Battle After Another 2025 4.0
Sorry, Baby 2025 3.0
Sentimental Value 2025 3.5
The Worst Person in the World 2021 3.0
Louder Than Bombs 2015 3.5
The Royal Tenenbaums 2001 5.0
The Guest 2014 0.5
Riefenstahl 2024 3.5
When Harry Met Sally... 1989 3.5
Cameraperson 2016 3.0
Marty Supreme 2025 4.5
Sinners 2025 2.5