2020 in Music, Film and Books
Here are all the books I finished (and some I started, which I define as having read more than 20 pages), my favorite albums from this past year, and the movies I watched that stuck with me. The books are organized alphabetically by author. As always, I wish I read more, watched more, and listened to more. Here’s to more of all of that in 2021 (and hopefully less death and suffering).
Books
Finished
The Bloody Chamber — Angela Carter
The Man Who Was Thursday (RR) — G.K. Chesterton
Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed : Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power— Adam A.J. DeVille
The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Re-Read (RR)) — Neil Gaiman
Mercian Hymns — Geoffrey Hill
Black Leopard, Red Wolf — Marlon James
Lit — Mary Karr
Therese — François Mauriac
After This — Alice McDermott
Know My Name — Chanel Miller
Beloved — Toni Morrison
The Silmarillion — J.R.R Tolkien
The Claw of the Conciliator (Book Two of The Book of the New Sun) — Gene Wolfe
Afropessimism — Frank B. Wilderson III
The Changeling — Joy Williams
Started
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness — Michelle Alexander
Dare We Hope That All Men May Be Saved? — Hans urs von Balthasar
Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life — George Eliot
The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature 1870–1914–Richard Griffiths
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man-James Joyce
The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity — Eugene McCarraher
Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church — John W. O’Malley
The History of White People-Nell Irvin Painter
Gravity’s Rainbow — Thomas Pynchon
Swallows and Amazons — Arthur Ransome
Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God — Edward Schillebeeckx
On Naming the Present: God, Hermeneutics, and Church — David Tracy
The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief — James Wood
Music
Favorite Albums
My favorite albums from 2020, in no particular order (playlist included below). This is not meant to be exhaustive — a lot of great albums came out this year. These are just the ones that took up the most auditory real estate.
Your Hero Is Not Dead — Westerman
Punisher — Phoebe Bridgers
græ — Moses Sumney
RTJ4 — Run the Jewels
songs — Adrianne Lenker
Shore — Fleet Foxes
Saint Cloud — Waxahatchee
A Written Testimony — Jay Electronica
A Hero’s Death — Fontaines D.C.
Song For Our Daughter — Laura Marling
Miss Anthropocene — Grimes
The Passion Of— Special Interest
Yes — Shinichi Atobe
Every Bed — Porridge Radio
Songs to Define A Year: 2020
These are songs that meant something this year, a year when solace was hard to find. These offered brief glimpses of respite. These songs were able to keep their seats as the weathered hulk of the ship of this year took on cataract after cataract. They stuck around.
These songs also greased the wheels of this year for me, kept these past months, of fogged glasses and wet sleeves, clicking along. Some of them capture a specific emotion, some stare our current political and social realities straight in the face, some commemorate those we lost, some do all of the above.
So, as I think back on this year, with the help of these songs, two thoughts come to mind.
I, along with Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman, would also like a “small vacation.”
Most of all though, I raise the same prayer as Robin Pecknold: “May the last long year be forgiven.”
Films
Below are all the films I watched this year, some for the first time, some for the millionth. Below are some favorites, again in no particular order, along with the full list on Letterboxd.
Memories of Murder — Bong Joon-ho
Uncut Gems — Benny and Josh Safdie
Paris, Texas — Wim Wenders
Yi, Yi — Edward Yang
Ikiru — Akira Kurosawa
The Red Shoes —Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Network — Sidney Lumet
Wings of Desire — Wim Wenders
Mikey and Nicky — Elaine May
