Well, not literally. But the end of the year? Yes. Very near, indeed. Which means that it’s time to start putting together year-end lists of favorite books and albums, a task that I always intend to fly quickly through only to then spend an inordinate amount of time fussing over.
My intent this year is to steer away from a traditional Top 10 style list and focus more on a selection of superlatives – really, I’m simply going to talk about the albums and books that I enjoyed and that I want to talk about. Shocking behavior from a man who runs his own website for just such a purpose.
I’ll have a decent amount of material to sort through – the 40-some odd books that I read for the first time this year and a slightly smaller number of albums – the process of which is always something of a fun trip down memory lane: remembering my favorite parts of a given work or where I was when I first experienced it and what else was going on in my life at the time.
And this year I’m structuring my year-end lists around what I read or listened to for the first time this year, rather than limiting myself to works that were released in the last twelve months. So it’s going to be an odd selection. Which is fine by me since I’m something of an odd guy.
Songs & Stories 