2025 in Review

Some 5 Bag media I consumed and produced in a year of introspection

Here’s some stuff I liked and created this year. I read less in 2025 than I have in quite a while, which was partly by design; I needed the quiet.

Judging by the last two months, though, 2026 is already looking like a return to pageturning, as I’ve probably read more in the last 2 months than the previous 6, spurred in part by getting back into audiobooks for classics, and slow-reading Joyce.

As you’ll see below, almost all of my favorite reading came from micro or indie presses, which wasn’t intentional besides the fact that major presses almost never publish anything worth your time because they’re too scared to do anything out of the ordinary in a field only made relevant through sustained ingenuity.

Overall, it was a year of rejuvenation for me, and a ton of work on my very long novel in progress, which I’m about halfway-ish through drafting Chapter 4 of what will someday be 12. The good news is there’s no end in sight.

5 New Releases

Attila by Aliocha Coll, trans. by Katie Whittemore (Open Letter)
The Valeries by Forrest Muelrath (Expat)
The Endless Week by Laura Vazquez, trans. by Alex Niemi (Dorothy)
Wave of Blood by Ariana Reines (Divided)
Idiocy by Pierre Guyotat, trans. Peter Behrman de Sinéty (NYRB)

5 New Old/Rereads

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck
Empire Star & Babel-17 by Samuel Delany
The Odyssey & The Iliad by Homer
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (ongoing)

New/Forthcoming Books I Blurbed

Pan by Michael Clune (Penguin)
Flower by Ed Atkins (Fitzcarraldo)
The Endless Week by Laura Vazquez, trans. by Alex Niemi (Dorothy)
Hothouse Bloom by Austyn Wohlers (Hub City)
Poor Damned Souls by Charlene Elsby (Merigold Independent)
Being Towards Death by Mike Corrao (Crop Circle)
Designated Stranger by Gion Davis (Third Hand)

5 Film/TV (surely forgetting things but all video blurs together now)

One Battle After Another
Weapons
Ballad of a Small Player
Baby Invasion
On Cinema at the Cinema

(+1 I loathed over all the other trash: The Pitt)

Personal Publications/Projects

“Walden Homes” @ The Baffler
”‘People I Once Knew Who Died Searching for God” @ Post Pop Lit
”Christian Literature in the Gulch” in Rose Books Reader Vol. 1
”Shooter” in Tormented Flesh anthology
”He” in MEMO-001

You May Now Fail to Destroy Me
WANTED Issues Zero and One

Music

I didn’t listen to very much new music this year. Most everything I encountered sounded like it should only be sold at Starbucks, including the genres you should never have to associate with commerce.

See ya next year!