31st December 2025: End of Year Media Roundup
okay! i’ve almost made it through twenty-twenty-five (at time of writing) and i think it’s likely that i will not watch any new films, read any new books, or listen to any new music that i can fully digest between now and midnight. so! let’s get on with the media roundup.
music
firstly, let’s talk music. a lot of this year has been defined by long drives with my flatmate and we just recently did the five plus hour drive up from Sheffield so that’s what i’ve got on the mind right now. on our trip round the highlands & islands, we listened to every Mountain Goats LP in order, followed by the jordan lake sessions. obviously this was great fun for me, and i’ve come in with a renewed appreciation for some of the early stuff, which i hadn’t listened to in a while. i’ve been working on a kinda autofictional systematic review of all of them as a fun writing project as a result of all that. my current faves in the discog are Jenny from Thebes and Get Lonely, both of which i have listened to a hell of a lot this year. however, after driving down to Manchester more recently, we have figured out that long drives are the perfect time to listen to musical after musical because of how they break up and give a sense of progress to sections of the journey. so i’ve been getting into those recently.
oh! there was also the new one, Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan, which i liked but like also find the Lin-Manuel Miranda kinda bizarre (all i can think is, is that Lin-Manuel Miranda?). i would probably not put it on my top top LPs of the year but i have listened to it a good bit and some of it has hit just right at the right moments (“if there’s nothing left but water then let water be enough”). plus, the last track is hundy p yr girl bait (“it was broken to begin with, it was like that when we got here”). i think if this had come out during the homelessness arc i would have been obsessed (“well the first thing you learn is how far you can go with no gas in the tank, and the next thing you learn is how cold it can get at night”), but alas!
Come From Away (which i also watched the pro shot of this year) makes me sob. i think that says more about me and which emotional beats hit than it does about the show. i kind of hate the liberal focus on these communities all coming together to help foreigners as if they didn’t all vote for right wing freaks in the years following nine eleven. but still, that really specific emotional beat of kindness and connection and care makes me just fucking bawl, regardless of what i think about any of it. call it weakness or whatever.
aside from that, the actual musicals i’ve enjoyed best are all Sondheim (and we’ve been listening to a lot of Sondheim). my proper top number one fave is Into the Woods with the twenty-twenty-two broadway cast. Julia Lester fuckin kills as little red with this kinda precocious, kinda smarmy bent to the singing (“or four!”) that absolutely wrecked me when that smirk fades in Know Things Now (“isn’t it nice to know a lot…”). Patina Miller and Cole Thompson also deliver exactly the right vibes as the witch and jack respectively. the witch is most interesting when she straddles the line between fairy tale evil and unfairly maligned independent woman (“don’t you ever never ever mess around with my greens”) which Patina beautifully manages to synthesise in her performance of Last Midnight (“i’m not good, i’m not nice, i’m just right”). jack is also best played like completely head empty, which i think is what makes songs like Giants in the Sky work at all, else lyrics like “big tall terrible awesome scary wonderful…” would fall flat. anyway, the actual story is great too and funny and disarming and other adjectives and the ending (“the light is getting dimmer; i think i see a glimmer”) makes me start crying. Company is also fucking great. the other ones we’ve listened to i’m not as obsessed with (yet).
other albums i’ve been listening to this year include Drive to Goldenhammer by Divorce, which I dug pretty severly when it came out. none of the songs quite reach the highs of Gears or Scratch Your Metal but i’m always clamouring for more Divorce (hah). the sound of my spring spent cycling around glasgow, brief reprieves at friends’ flats, couchsurfing and carrying my shit in Bryn’s hiking bag, was Forever Howlong by BC,NR. i fucking love this album. fuck the haters (idk if there are haters but i assume there are haters because the previous album was perfect whiny boy breakup music and) this album is beautiful. i’ve kinda faded in listening as we’ve moved into autumn and winter but i am going to be blasting this again in a few months. the other few things i have really been spinning this year are UNKILLABLE ANGEL by Ada Rook, who i have been a fan of since like twenty-eighteen. this really has got me back into her output after i fell off after Forever in Your Heart, so now I need to go back and check the last few albums since 2,020 Knives (of which An Ocean is an all-time fave track of mine). the new Lola Young album, I’m Only F**king Myself, and the new saoirse dream album, saoirse dream, have both hit a similar emotional beat for me with regards to the absolute destruction of my whole sense of self by way of my love life this year (“i’m not a woman if i don’t have you” and “ruining beautiful things is an art”). i’ve also been going back and have listened to a tonne of Kid Dakota for some reason, so, shout out to Praegustator as well.
films
that was a lot of music! i also watched a lot of films. let’s do this by director and then get into some standouts, i think makes the most sense?
so, this year there was a big Chantal Akerman retrospective at the GFT (i think it was like a BFI thing?) and i watched all of them that they showed. this was i think like a dozen films in total. i had actually just watched Je Tu Il Elle on my own when i was going through some french films after work before i left my flat to be homeless instead, and then i just happened to notice that it (and the rest) were on at the cinema. so i got the comparison between the home cinema and cinema cinema environments. and like, Akerman’s work fares so much better from being in cinema. like, i have a nice setup, right? i have a projector and a huge screen and i was watching stuff and night with proper speakers, so usually i think it doesn’t make a tonne of difference, but with her work it does. the way Akerman creates a sense of time completely dissolves if you can at any point get up or check your phone or really do anything except sit in a dark room. it’s really incredible stuff. like this is an extremely cold take – Chantal Akerman is the greatest director of all time – but that’s how i’ve come out of this year feeling. my favourite of hers is Toute une Nuit which just like moved me with this kinda formal brilliance and disregard for stupid shit like plot and character development and anything that isn’t like, pure cinema (whatever that means). anyway! i found it all very affecting and i thought like most of them were perfect (even and especially Golden Eighties) and i dragged a different friend along to almost every one of them i was so excited. we have no choice but to stan (if people still say that).
there are another couple directors who i fell in love with this year. John Cassavetes has become a minor obsession of mine. as of writing i have only watched three of his films – Opening Night, A Woman Under the Influence, and Love Streams – but as far as I’m concerned those are three of the greatest films of all time. the other director is Julia Ducournau, whose back catalogue i caught up with earlier in the year and whose latest film i brought a couple pals along to see in cinema. she is definitely my favourite working director. something about her hits yr girl’s brain just right. i wouldn’t say she’s underrated but like, defo under appreciated on a vibes level. anyway, they’re all perf but my fave one I watched this year (twice!) was Raw.
honourable mention to Bong Joon-Ho, who i already liked but watched some of his early stuff this year (in addition to the somewhat moist Mickey-17 [not bolded cause not a rec or a fave or whatever]). Barking Dogs Never Bite is yr girl’s perfect kill all dogs film and Memories of Murder is maybe my perfect neo/noir. need to watch some of the others but before that i need to show those two to my friends.
i went to the cinema a lot this year, kinda half on my own i think and half with friends. i had a serious cry when David Lynch died in January, so it was nice to later see Blue Velvet at the GFT, especially since i hadn’t seen it in a few years. other nice rewatches include Ran, which was even more devastating on the big screen, and Redline, which i saw with some pals and with the director present! there was even a q&a, which was good, and my gf B— even asked a question (then came with me to buy a cigar, which was kind of a non-sequitur for her i think but was nice for me to have some accompaniment).
anyway, my actual film of the year i guess that came out this year (in the UK at least) is One Battle After Another which is just, like, idk another PTA masterpiece. i saw it with my pal A— after taking her to see Boogie Nights in cinema which was just fucking phenomenal (the firecracker scene in cinema especially oh my god) and really nice as like, smthn to chat about also. like, okay, detour here but i love a good cinema trip with my friends and this has been a great year for that. if you are reading this and i have done a cinema trip with you – even if i have paid for it – thank you for coming. i love hearing what my friends think about the films we watch and what gets them excited and getting to talk about what gets me excited, and even sometimes seeing them start getting excited by that too. but anyway, new PTA is lit and my legs and tummy felt like jelly by the end and the needle drops were like genuinely not tacky or played-out somehow and jesus christ it is nice to walk out of something feeling renewed in my efforts to fight fascism. honourable mention also to Weapons which i watched twice. extremely excited to see more Zach Cregger whenever whatever he’s next doing comes along.
oh! i also did a few marathons, before i forget. shout out to D— for joining in with all of them and providing me food and warmth and comfort. it was genuinely fucking incredible to watch all of Revolutionary Girl Utena in one day, and like, just fucking devastating oh my god. that’s one that has been staying in the brainspace since i saw it. i also did a “french new wave-athon” over two days that was drop-in drop-out. we closed with the best one which i finished with C— and that was Céline and Julie Go Boating which has immediately become my favourite film of all time. i cannot imagine a film more suited to yr girl than this: women eating rocks hallucinating a tv over and over again while laughing about it with each other for three and a half hours, in french. just fucking incredible. i want to live inside this film, which is i think thematic.
books
apparently i have read thiry-five books this year, with a more-or-less fifty-fifty non/fiction split. so, let’s do this in two parts, i guess, starting with fiction.
so, i kind of had a minor crisis about the fiction i was reading at the start of the year. between February and August (inclusive) i read two fiction books: one was sub two-hundred pages but took me more than two months to finish and one was a young adult graphic novel about Superman. i don’t super know what happened beyond my life and everything i thought i cared about falling apart, and then trying to read Fluids (no bold, sorry) by May Leitz just not really doing it for me even though it was exactly the kind of contemporary queer horror that lines up with my taste. and it’s not that there’s anything wrong with the book or that i was missold or it just didn’t hit quite right for my vibe; i think my vibe was the thing that changed. until we got into September and i read Kaiju Preservation Society (no bold, not sorry) did that kind of click for me though. i hated Kaiju Preservation Society with kind of a passion that led me to start going to the library and trying to figure out what i want to be engaging with right now, and the answer has turned out to be noir (so thank you, genuinely, mom for sending me a copy cause like, even if i didn't enjoy it per se i did get something out of it).
now i have only read a few different authors so far in the genre so i’m still getting acquainted with things, but my early vibes are much more towards nordic noir rather than british stuff – at least in terms of contemporary fiction (i read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy this year and it is as good as everyone says it is). i didn’t finish the Elly Griffiths novel i started because it just felt too, like, cute or quippy or like, fun, and i finished The Malt Whisky Murders by Natalie Jayne Clark but had the same issues. Åsa Larsson and Jo Nesbø though… well, Larsson has the sauce – i’m still unconvinced by Nesbø. Anyway, i started at the ending because that’s what they had in the library and then went back to the beginning with the Rebecka Martinsson series. The Sins of Our Fathers is like, kind of exactly the vibe for me right now and i am looking for more of exactly that, which the first book in the series was not quite but still a great read and i can see how we’re moving in that direction already. there’s something about the way Larsson can characterise someone so strongly and with such empathy in such little space, and knows just how and when to fit their perspective in to give the narrative more depth and impact than just following some pithy protagonist around would do. she gets you to feel the real social cost of everything that’s going on, beyond just a crime has been committed or someone has been murdered and that’s bad cause you already know that’s bad. i can also feel Nesbø moving towards this hopefully once the series stops being so misogynistic, or like, so misogynistic in such a boring way (please have women characters that are more than just stakes for Harry Hole please god you can do it i believe in you). Redbreast was getting there, but like, still not quite. but the books do get my blood pumping and pretty enjoyable to pick apart after the fact, so i’ll keep reading Jo, don’t you worry.
i also read Excession by Iain M Banks, which is the best sci fi novel of all time aside from Use of Weapons, coincidentally also by Iain M Banks (which i did not read this year, but deserves commendation anyway).
onto the non-fiction! i got big into queer theory and feminism and crap this year. after Fluids, i pretty quickly read The Dialectic of Sex by our girl, Shulie, which i loved save for the factually inaccurate historicising and the racist bits and that kind of thing. it’s a book from the seventies, so like, caveats apply. but, like many dykes before me, that invigorated me to be more feminist in an actually substantive way. i read a bunch over the summer, both on my highlands & islands trip and on my big train trip to and from Greece with my sis (biological). if you know me irl you have probably heard this already, but i genuinely cannot recommend Hermaphrodite Logic by Juliana Gleeson enough. when i say “sex is constructed” i do actually mean that, and this book lays out what that means, how that works, and explains what gender actually is and does in a way that is grounded in a material history of activism that should get a fire going in any queer organiser with a heart that pumps blood. i have also enjoyed and derived a lot of value from the works of other feminists writing in a similar vein, namely Jules Gill-Peterson, Sophie Lewis, and Talia Bhatt, and reading all these authors together enhances each of their individual works. shout out also to Sarah Schulman, of whom i read both Conflict is not Abuse and The Gentrification of the Mind this year and i’m not actually going to say that one person is right about everything but if one person were to be right about everything it would be Sarah Schulman. CinA is defo kinda weird at points and repetitive and goes on a bit, but it also got me to just start calling people on the phone which has materially improved my life, something few books do – at least so directly.
much to the chagrin of my friends, i have gotten into Lee Edelman, reading both No Future and Sex, or the Unbearable (the latter of with was half him and half Lauren Berlant) this year. coming off the back of the anarchist theory i was reading at the end of last year, these have helped me put whatever i was grasping at into much sharper focus. if you’ve listened to the demos or read the stories or anything and you even know the gist of either of these, i think the impact they’ve had on me is pretty obvious. i guess they came at exactly the time to hit just right as well. reading something about sentimental futurity and the negativity of queerness mostly feels intuitive when i was going through my straight divorce for (among other reasons, prominently including me treating my husband badly) being a dyke. i think a lot of the lacanian stuff is like, whatever, right? myself, R—, and my flatmate occassionally come to a (loving?) head over stuff like this, where my flatmate will want to put out something for the leatherdykes which uses the phrase “centering desire” to which i will object that we are identifying with the drive and R— will object that it’s all desire. this is mostly funny because if you know me then you know i’m not really concerned with being right more than i am with being annoying (which is why i prefer writing prose fiction and not essays), but also like, R— still hasn’t lent me their Deleuze so maybe when they do god willing this coming year i’ll be back in the blog space like “i was so wrong; desire isn’t based on lack; rhizomes and so forth.” but my point is that i think a lot of Edelman’s (and Berlant’s) observations are really sharp regardless of how you phrase them, and are easily appropriable to an anarchist, more materialist, critique of culture. the language is fucking fun as well, like, that’s when i really got it was when i found out Edelman was a poetry guy and the writing is all like, load-bearing wordplay with regards the actual substance of the text. that’s peak yvette shit.
i also read This Writing Life by Annie Dillard, which was great and helped me kinda get the strength to fully redraft something i had spent a long time finishing.
next year
i am mostly just dreading twenty-twenty-six because however bad this year was continues straight on through into January and beyond, regardless of whether i replace my calendar. i plan to continue reading nordic noir, get onto the Wallander books, the Martin Beck books, the Viveca Sten novels, and have a peep at the Millenium triology. there’s a couple of books on consent that i need to nab from the past few years that i want to read, as well as the Edelman that came out a few years ago and The Spectral Woman by Ciara Cremin, which came out recently but i has only just made its way to my next up pile. also, Alice Stoehr’s collection Again, Harder is coming out in May which i am beyond fucking excited for. there’s also Persona by Aoife Josie Clements coming soon which i’m excited for too.
intentions regarding films include more John Cassavetes, more Agnes Varda and Jacques Rivette, more Radu Jude (who i haven’t even alluded to in this but whose Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World was a fave of mine this year, and i want to see what the other Romanian New Wave directors are doing as well) and actually starting on some of the directors who i am certain i will enjoy but just haven’t gotten round to yet (Gregg Araki and Béla Tarr come to mind first). maybe i will even watch more Catherine Breillat.
idk what music is coming out or what i want to listen to. will probably be more musicals. who knows.
anyway, huge shout outs to Category Is and Good Press, both places where i have bought an enormous quantity of books. also shout out to Mono where i was buying my records before i stopped doing that because i was homeless for a bit. shout out the GFT because genuinely it’s hard to overstate how much it meant to be able to park my bike somewhere and be somewhere i felt safe and comfortable and didn’t have to socialise and could just watch some really good shit while i was homeless. spending a whole day watching films and rambling about Sauchiehall street kept me feeling like, even if i didn’t have my own bed to sleep in, Glasgow was still my home.
at any rate, love y'all, and here's a photo of yr girl with the fixie outside the GFT (creds to a stranger whose name i never got)
