Ten Favorite Things of the Decade

Toward the end of my time as an undergraduate, my roommate and I took a walk to talk about the past couple of years and about what we planned and anticipated in the years to come. Finals were wrapping up, and the long winter was relaxing into spring. The day was bright and the boughs of the trees glowed with blossoms, but just looking down at my feet and caught up in conversation, I never realized that the narrow streets in that little town were beautiful. I didn’t see until we stopped and looked back. 

The end of the decade gives me a stopping point, an opportunity to appreciate the beauty that I passed by in putting one day in front of the other. So here’s a list of some of my favorite media that was released in the last decade, in order of interacting with them. I don’t think that they’re the best things that came out in the decade, but they’re what impacted me and I recommend checking out.

A Memory of Light (2013) Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

A Memory of Light is the last book in the Wheel of Time, completed after Robert Jordan’s death by Brandon Sanderson. In our senior year of high school, some of my friends and I drove down to Barnes and Noble on the day it was released to pick it up. For me A Memory of Light is an end of an era: of brick and mortar bookstores, high school, and exclusively reading fantasy. And at the time, I didn’t appreciate how masterfully Robert Jordan constructed and paced the Wheel of Time, but looking back I can see it as one of those rare series where ambition is matched by execution. 

Nightcrawler (2014) Dan Gilroy

While A Memory of Light was the end of an era Nightcrawler was the beginning of a new one. I didn’t watch a lot of movies growing up, and Nightcrawler felt like one of the first movies I chose to watch. And it was like nothing I had ever seen before. It was dark, and manic, and savagely polemic. It opened up the doors to the weird movies and weird books (like Dostoevsky) that would come to define the middle of the decade for me.

PBS Idea Channel (2012-2017) Mike Rugnetta

I’ve already talked about my love for PBS Idea Channel, so I’ll just say that PBS Idea Channel was a parallel and radically different education to what I had in college.

DAMN. (2017) Kendrick Lamar

I don’t know if DAMN. is Kendrick Lamar’s best album of the decade, but it was the one that first hooked me, specifically the song FEAR. It was storytelling with a rhythm that took me into worlds I didn’t know existed, both musically and sociologically. And personally, DAMN. came at a time of change, when I made an effort to overcome my own selfishness and choose weakness over wickedness.  

The Light and the Dark (2010) Mikhail Shishkin

I read the Light and the Dark in basically two days over my family vacation, before I went back to where I live for grad school for another academic year. I was considering graduating out of my program with a masters degree and radically shifting career paths. Early grad school was a very isolating time for me. I felt as if the world and I were mutually opaque; when we looked at each other all we saw was smoke and vapor. But the Light and the Dark has a blind and blinding hope in love, to outlast us when we die, and know us when we think nothing else can. Looking back it feels like a providential prelude to a year I would never have asked for or imagined. 

Paddington 2 (2017) Paul King 

I could talk about Paddington 2 forever (and have). It’s beautiful, and moving, and everyone should watch it even if there is an animated bear.

22, a Million (2016) Bon Iver

I actually listened to 22, a Million before 2018, but it was just way too weird for me at the time. I was expecting Skinny Love and got 22 (OVER S∞∞N). It was jarring. But revisiting it later in the decade, I came to really love Bon Iver’s later work. 22, a Million a work like Flights by Olga Torczuk where the form matches the function. It’s about alienation, from self, from God, from others, and the work itself is alienating. Justin Vernon’s signature falsetto is buried under layer and layer of distortion. Yet somehow, despite the mechanical distortion, irony, and isolation, beauty and humanity rise out of and overwhelm the album. 

The Buried Giant (2015) Kazuo Ishiguro 

While genre often dictates how authors write and what themes they address, Kazuo Ishiguro makes genre a mere variation on his slow, forgetful, melancholic theme. From a description of The Buried Giant it looks like a normal fantasy book, there are knights and dragons, swords and sorcery, but actually reading it feel like only Kazuo Ishiguro books. 

First Reformed (2018) Paul Schrader

First Reformed is a strange movie. People levitating is strange, but it’s also a Christian movie that is highly critical of the church, specifically in regards to climate change. It’s social criticism that lands, challenging the theology and ethics of a church that seems to be both in and of the world. I think that it’s ultimately a hopeful movie, but because it is so strange and ambiguous, there’s plenty of room for uncertainty, which I also love. 

H(A)PPY (2017) Nicola Barker

Nicola Barker speaks my language. There aren’t many books that I read and think ‘I have to read everything this author has ever written!’ but H(A)PPY is one of them. I loved the use of text and font to convey tone in voice in I AM SOVEREIGN, but in H(A)PPY the text and typography convey emotion and nuance as well as tone and voice and most importantly silence.

Barker is an author who doesn’t fully trust words to carry truth and meaning, and because of this distrust, she writes like literally no one else I’ve ever read. She uses words and books in ways that make audiobooks basically impossible. H(A)PPY is a dystopian satire of mindfulness that blossoms out of control, undermining language, and reminding us that some truth is paradox, and that silence can say things too deep for words.