More in-depth thoughts on each of these books can be found in my 2024 #books thread. Here I’ve just starred the books that are highly recommended, and will put some general comments after the list:

1. Theodor Adorno - In Search of Wagner
2. Michael Azerrad - Our Band Could Be Your Life (*)
3. Percival Everett - Erasure (*)
4. Susan Sontag - The Volcano Lover
5. Elizabeth Mavor - A Green Equinox (*)
6. Italo Svevo - A Life
7. Chris Kraus - After Kathy Acker
8. Thomas Bernhard - Concrete
9. Sei Shonagon - The Pillow Book
10. Gillian Freeman - The Undergrowth of Literature
11. Lorraine Wilson - The Last to Drown
12. Jonas Eika - After the Sun
13. Asako Yuzuki - Butter
14. John Wyndham - The Chrysalids (*)
15. John Luther Novak (Christopher Priest) - David Cronenberg's eXistenZ
16. Jessi Jezewska Stevens - The Visitors
17. Robert Gluck - Margery Kempe (***)
18. Nikhil Singh - Club Ded
19. Thomas Bernhard - Correction (*)
20. Boris Groys ed. - Russian Cosmism anthology (reread)
21. Joris-Karl Huysmans - Against Nature
22. Anne Carlisle - Liquid Sky
23. Pier Paolo Pasolini - Theorem
24. Linda Rosenkrantz - Talk
25. Alan Dean Foster - Dark Star (*)
26. Irina Odoevtseva - Isolde
27. Samuel Delany - Dhalgren (*)
28. Domenico Starnone - Ties (*)
29. Sven Holm - Termush
30. Robert Walser - The Robber (*)
31. Adam Zmith - Solemates
32. Tanith Lee - Heart-Beast

I read a lot of fiction this year because I was mostly working on and thinking about novels… The nonfiction side of my TBR stack is beginning to pile up so maybe I’ll try to be more balanced in the next year, though I am still loving (and reading, and thinking about) The Novel. Another weird trend, starting with Stephen digging up the eXistenZ novelization for my birthday, was looking up and reading novelizations of sci-fi movies I love.

There were a few disappointments this year; Chris Kraus trying to write nonfiction she had a personal stake in felt not quite as sharp as her novels that I adore. There were also some high-concept novels that grabbed my attention with the themes and concepts they were working with but ultimately left me a bit cold in terms of their style or how they handled these things (Butter, The Visitors). The Volcano Lover unfortunately convinced me that Susan Sontag is too much of an essayist to be a good novelist. However the worst was definitely Isolde, which led to people not asking, but asserting, that there must be something wrong with the translation or something when I posted excerpts online. Maybe so! But the base material of the plot and characterization was also… not great lol.

However there were also (as evidenced by the many stars) a ton of books I loved. Robert Gluck’s Margery Kempe is the standout in that category, both sensorily rich and thought provoking while creatively reappropriating christian mysticism to write about your bad boyfriend as Jesus Christ. Tied for second place in a three way split has to be Erasure, A Green Equinox and Correction which are all great entries in the “alienated weirdo protag” canon that really got me thinking about structure, voice, and the tricks you can do with simple linear prose. Our Band Could Be Your Life was the one major work of nonfiction I enjoyed, though it draws on an almost novel-like store of personality and plot twists provided by many of my favorite late 80s/early 90s bands. Dark Star was the most unlikely-seeming and most enjoyable of the sci-fi film adaptation novels I picked up this year. Picking up Robert Walser, Samuel Delany, John Wyndham and Domenico Starnone for the first time this year was also a treat, and I can’t wait to dig into more of their work.

I hesitate to say what exactly my reading plans will look like for 2025, though. I’m ending the year 700 pages into the enormous The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, and it is probably impossible to gauge what I’ll be in the mood for when I’m done with it.

Pissed Jeans… My surgery was bumped back so I was tragically still in recovery for their Glasgow gig. I really wish I could have gone because their new album is great and probably my favorite of the year. I too have seen some of the greatest minds stuck begging for money online.

Mannequin Pussy was the first gig I got to go to after my surgery, and they were great. I always end up crying at their shows… I love the feelings their music taps into and brings out so much. Compared to the last time I saw them in Glasgow, the venue was bigger but just as packed! Really different from their tour for Patience/Perfect, but also really good. The new album is I Got Heaven.

Seeing Ty Segall again, for the album Three Bells, was also a lot of fun especially since it's such a different album and live setup from the last time I saw him, for the Emotional Mugger tour in 2016. The Three Bells tour is kind of a jam band tour, but it works because Ty Segall is such a super nerd who has basically listened to and tried to play everything in guitar history, imo.

Core. festival was great fun, an all-day noise bacchanal with great vibes broken up by horking down a chicken shop sandwich halfway through. The highlight was of course seeing mclusky live, but I also was wowed by local band Kute. I’m so pumped to see what their programme is next year.

I went to go see Melt Banana a bit on a whim… turns out I was lucky there were tickets left by the time I made up my mind! It ended up being a packed and utterly euphoric gig, up there with Lightning Bolt when I saw them. Like Core. festival, the vibes were amazing, and the music noisy as hell. Their new album is awesome too.

Shannon and the Clams was my last gig of the year, and I was really happy to be able to take Stephen to see them. Their new album is wonderful and probably my second favorite of the year, and it was a great show with a really lovely and enthusiastic crowd!

Bands I didn’t get to see this year but got really into include Big Clown, who released an awesome live EP. The final Shellac album ended up being (sadly) an appropriate capstone for Steve Albini’s insane career, in music or producing or even just posting, it’s hard to think of someone as prolifically great while also maintaining a respectable ethos in a practical way the whole time. I probably put on To All Trains the most to work to this year, and wish it was longer every time. Spirit of the Beehive’s new one, YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING, is also great, and I may get to see them in Glasgow soon!

I made a letterboxd list of these! Some brief thoughts on ones I’d like to highlight… Arrebato/Rapture is one of the most unique and memorable horror films I’ve ever seen… probably my top rec, though Ghost Dog and Smiley Face have also been very influential on me. La Chimera is the only one on the list that came out this year… As in books and games I usually prefer to come to things at my own pace rather than when they’re current, but I’m glad I went to go see a screening of this one, it’s so unique. Chameleon Street was another one that sucked me in from the jump and I never knew where it was going to go. Magic Crystal and TerrorVision are tied for most fun and ridiculous nonsense. On-Gaku will make you want to go to a gig immediately. The One I Love and Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes are both films where the initial gimmick spins out in totally unexpected ways before the end. Demonlover really locked in my current feeling of "eternal 2003". Finally Something In The Dirt was a great watch to me because it was the first movie that I felt really conveyed “the millennial situation” ie, that you’re precariously employed, stuck in a shitty rental, and your only friend is getting sucked down an evangelical cult pipeline.

There were two Domino Club jams this year! For the first, Bodies in Motion, I made a janky erotic qwoplike about how jousting is conducted in a post-horse utopian future called HORSES ARE NOW OBSOLETE! The jam ended up being mostly concurrent with my moved surgery and recovery period, so I relied a lot on Stephen to show me how to do things in Multimedia Fusion and also tweak what I did so it like… actually worked. But it was also fun to make something so silly and horny in a post-anaesthesia haze.

For the second jam, Tongues, I did a more ambitious interactive fiction piece. From the jump of the theme being decided I knew the sort of thing I wanted to do (with spam emails and romance scams and language) and wrote an outline during our trip to Arran that I filled out during the actual jam period. Like Vault 819, [EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION] is around 9k words long, and after dithering on the presentation a while I finally figured out a way I could make it work with Jupiter Engine (thanks again candle) and hacked it together. I feel really proud of it in terms of stretching myself conceptually and stylistically towards the type of sci-fi and interactive fiction I want to make in the future. :)

I had 4 resolutions this year: to get my ear pierced, to get The Surgery, to finish a draft of Novel 2, and to pick up rollerblading, which I really loved when I was a kid. The first one I polished off in the first week of January… unlike the crusty, miserable holes I got in middle school from a mall Claire’s and eventually let close, this piercing was practically painless and healed so well that it made me consider getting more in the future. I like having a little spiky hoop through my ear but also have an eyeball stud, skull, and dangly spike.

After some consultations and delays, I got The Surgery in March. Recovery has been a bit of a trial for someone like myself, who struggles with the vulnerability of not being at 100% and also always abstractly feels like they “should be doing something” (lol), but I’m so happy with the results, I can honestly say it was life changing. I put together a zine about it almost immediately afterwards and despite some minor complications/setbacks on complete wound healing, I have to say my feelings about it are basically the same. It’s wonderful!

Novel 2 juuust slid under the wire and is out to some of my beloved first-readers yay <3. I’m feeling alright about it… while it needs some tweaking I think the fundamentals (voice, structure, theme) are solid. It’s a little more thematically specific (about the impact of AI fauxtimation, precaritization, and work in general on how we treat our personal relationships mainly) and structurally ambitious (five different character POV sections) than my last novel, so I’m feeling pretty excited about it. But I don’t want to make any resolutions about getting it published in the new year. Revision may take as unexpectedly long as getting it written took, and it’s also in a really awkward spot (45k words in length, and also with a significant amount of sexual content) for sci-fi. I imagine it’ll be a hard sell, but maybe if I can pitch it as a porn parody of Orbital it’ll seem marketable???? I’m also shying away from making any resolutions wrt Novel 3 because I’m only just in the daydreaming/research phase for it, and something as constricting as “full draft within 365 days” can kill that enjoyment.

Picking up rollerblading is the one resolution I’m somewhat unsatisfied with. While I got myself the gear and went out a few times to practice in the little side-street our flat is on, Glasgow had a really damp and unpleasant summer (yes, even for Glasgow), and my surgery recovery also had its ups and downs then, so I didn’t have the opportunity to get confident enough on them while the weather was good. Still, three out of four isn’t bad…

Picking up rollerblading will carry over as a resolution from 2024, since I feel like, while I practiced a few times, I didn't really accomplish it to my satisfaction. Though it may be that Glasgow’s weather/infrastructure is not ideal for it in general. If it doesn’t pan out again this year, I’d at least like to find some sort of moderate exercise that I enjoy and can stick with, which has always been an issue for me. I love walking and already walk everywhere, but anything more involved than that I either dislike or have trouble sticking with over time or through life changes.

I would also like to check off something that’s been nagging me over the past year in 2025– I’d like to refurbish my main website. I already plan to formally archive the Low-Tech Webring page and replace its presence on the main page of my site with a button bar that will mostly reflect the same sites/ethos as the webring. Every time a webring gets slightly bigger, communication and updating becomes exponentially more work (or at least it feels like it, to me lol) which is why I’m making this change. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in particular with webrings of course, just that the planning and level of communication became, at a certain point, higher than an anti-social individual like myself could handle.

I also want to add RSS compatibility and a backdated RSS feed of all my pieces and updates, as well as just generally reformulating the site to suit my needs. It has a huge archive of my critical work, but that’s not really my focus anymore. I’d love for it to showcase my publishing and interactive fiction work better as well as incorporate the more casual/creative elements of ie this blog and my social media profiles.

This is kind of an odd resolution but I’d also like to collab for at least one of the Domino Club events in the coming year. I always think of doing it, but either chicken out or self-sabotage by not coming up with a plan until it feels too late to ask. I worry that I’m too much of a control freak and would be hard to work with, but at the same time I also assume that writing is similar to being the “ideas guy” on a project… the art and actually figuring out how the thing will look/work is the “real work.” I still have this doubt even though I’ve heard so many times that other members of Domino Club find the writing hard and simply enjoy doing the art or interface part more. The collabs are great, and I envy the angle and skills of many other Domino Club members. So this year it’s time to overcome the doubts and procrastination and make it happen!

Finally, so we keep it to four, since four was also a good number for last year, I’d like to improve my visual art skills a bit as well. It’s something I always admire in other people, and I can think of a lot of both silly and more productive uses for improving it! Stephen has been doing some ink brush painting, inspired by Lynda Barry, and I tried a bit of doodling with the leftover ink he had a few times… I’d really like to develop that and pursue it on its own, so I can maybe have some stuff to show off here as well :)