A quick end-of-year retrospective, with selected media I consumed (and enjoyed) throughout thee year. This is not limited to things that were published this year.

Books

  1. The Sundial, Shirley Jackson. I really enjoy Shirley Jackson. This might be her best work.
  2. Sei una bestia, Viskovitz, Alessandro Boffa. A peculiar collection of short stories, in which the protagonist is a different animal. Comedy gold.
  3. La peste, Albert Camus. Sure, an all too easy parallel with our pandemic. Are human so predictable?
  4. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee. I had never read this before - to be fair, this is not really a classic in Italy as it is in the US (I guess).
  5. The Man Who Fell to Earth, Walter Tevis
  6. The City and the Stars, Arthur C. Clarke
  7. The October Country, Ray Bradbury
  8. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, Ken Liu
  9. N., Ernesto Ferrero. About the short stay (~1 year) of Napoleon on the Elba island.
  10. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, M. John Harrison
  11. The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle
  12. Niente di vero, Veronica Raimo
  13. Dalle rovine, Luciano Funetta
  14. Branchie, Niccolò Ammaniti
  15. La verità su tutto, Vanni Santoni
  16. Ultimo piano (o Porno Totale), Francesco D’Isa

Comics

  1. Aldobrando, Gipi
  2. Les Équinoxes, Cyril Pedrosa
  3. Here, Richard McGuire
  4. S., Gipi
  5. Daytripper, Fábio Moon

Non-fiction

  1. The Midrange Theory, Seth Partnow

Games

  1. Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye (PS4) The best game I played this year.. is a DLC. But what a DLC it is! It’s a game on its own. It doubles down on the first game (already a masterpiece), introducing a new storyline that complements the original one, and new awesome mechanics (still within the time loop) and discoveries. It’s going to leave you WOW again and again. The overarching theme is now fear, and the gameplay is scary(-ish), very fittingly.
  2. Return to Monkey Island (Mac) A great return. Nostalgic. It packs a punch.
  3. Death’s Door (PS4) Very cute looking adventure. You are a crow that collects souls in the afterworld. Nice combat mechanics, it’s a bit of a soulslike, but easier (so it’s ok for me).
  4. Inscryption (Mac) Looks like a deckbuiling roguelike, yet it’s something more than that, and it’s full of meta. I really enjoyed the mechanics and how the game evolves into something different. I wish there was a way to keep playing with some of the mid / late-game rules.
  5. Citizen Sleeper (Mac) A text-based scifi adventure, with an interesting storyline and tough ethical choices.
  6. Star Wars Jedi: The Fallen Order (PS4) Haven’t played SW games in a while, but this was suprisingly not terrible? On the contrary, it reminded me of the old Jedi Knight games, in a good way.
  7. Frostpunk (PS4) Strategic game set in a glacial Earth. Grow your community facing the weather that gets colder and colder.
  8. The Forgotten City (PS4) Stuck in a temporal loop, need to solve a weird mystery in an ancient Roman village. It’s based on Skyrim’s engine and it shows (it looks dated).
  9. It takes two (PS4) A rare split screen 2-player game. Enjoyable though not my cup of tea. Not sure it deserved all those accolades, but its variety is refreshing.

Film/TV

Restricting to things published in 2022, very few movies.

  1. Pinocchio, Guillermo Del Toro
  2. Apollo 10 1/2, Richard Linklater
  3. Hustle, Jeremiah Zagar

A few other ones that are not worth including in a “best of” list - Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange (quite fun), Secrets of Dumbledore (meh), Thor: Love and Thunder (🤮). Movies I’d like to recover.. if I ever have the time: White noise; The northmen; Triangle of sadness; Crimes of the future; Licorice pizza; Nope; Everything everywhere all at once; The Fabelmans; Bones and all; Aftersun?; Vortex?; The menu?; Top Gun?; The pale blue eye?; Glass Onion?.

  1. Andor. Suprisingly good, considering how terrible most of the rest of Star Wars media (only other notable exceptions being Mandalorian and Rogue One).
  2. Thermae Romae Novae. Weirdly funny anime about ancient Roman vs modern Japanese thermal baths.
  3. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
  4. Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. I liked the concept. A couple of episodes were very good, some were not.
  5. The Dropout.

Obi-Wan Kenobi was terrible. A couple of other shows such as the new seasons of shows like The Boys and Stranger Things were OK. Shows I might want to recover: Severance; Slow Horses?