We’ve made it through another year, and that means it’s time for my annual “Best Of” list. As always, my tastes might differ from yours. Some people look at these and wonder if I read or watch anything that’s not science fiction or fantasy or super heroes. Sure, but those tend to be my favorites. And away we go!
Best Television Show – This gets trickier every year. I don’t watch a lot of shows anymore as they air. I’ll DVR a bunch of episodes and watch them over the course of a week instead of waiting a week between each. Some of my favorite shows are on the CW, a station I don’t get with my cable package, and I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t want just to watch them on the CW app, replete with ads. I’ll likely wait until the latest seasons appear on Netflix. It’s killing me to find out what the Flash and Supergirl are doing!
A couple years ago, I named Mars the best show. It was a six-episode season on National Geographic that depicted a fictional journey to Mars a couple decades from now. What made it great was the mixture of real science and showing things happening on our planet today that will eventually lead to the reality of that trip. The second season has just wrapped, and it was nearly as good as the first. There was much talk of climate change and how that will affect what we do on Mars someday. If you enjoy good science and the dream of traveling to another planet, find some time to watch this show.
My family makes it a point to watch Survivor every week. We enjoy the reality show which just finished its 37th season. And what a season it was! The people they had competing were true characters and provided endless drama and entertainment. After a few seasons of ho-hum, Jeff Probst and company served up a winning season.
However, the winner this year is a show that’s been around for ten years. Modern Family was a highly entertaining show when it debuted a decade ago, but, like many shows, it struggled to find its way as its characters grew older. What do you do as the children in a sit-com start to graduate from high school? In what might very well be its final season, the cast and crew have found the exceptional formula that worked so well early in the run once again. If this is indeed the final season, it’s shaping up to be one to remember.
Best Book – Reading novels is a big part of my life. However, the amount I’ve read this year has been somewhat damaged by a new app provided by the Owatonna Library, Hoopla. It allows five free check-outs a month, and I use them all on comic book graphic novels. Then I take my wife’s library card and get five more. There are a lot I’d like to read, so that cuts a bit into my reading time of other material.
One thing is that I don’t always read a lot of brand-new books. For instance, I’ve just gotten around to reading Wonder, the book that took young adult fiction by storm a couple years ago and has since been made into what I’m told is a delightful movie. This story of a ten-year old who was born with genetic deformities and how he starts going to a real school is charming and heart-breaking all at once.
I wrote this summer about a great string of books I read, where each one seemed to be better than the previous. Quite often, when I’ve read a really outstanding book, I’ll try to find one that is fluff, just to reset my mind. But I’ve been lucky this year, where even some of those have turned into great reads.
My favorite book of 2018 was Iron Gold by Pierce Brown. You know when a trilogy is complete and then the author writes another book, how you might suspect it is a money grab and can’t be as good as the trilogy? That’s what I was worried about when this continuation of the space drama that Brown had written appeared. He had left it in a good place. And then he made it better. Iron Gold was certainly better than the previous book, and I can’t wait for the next books to arrive in coming years.
Best Movie – While most of the movies I go to a theater to view are set in outer space or have superheroes or both, one of my favorite movies of 2018 was Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic about Freddie Mercury and the rise of the band Queen. Just the soundtrack was enough to place this near the top since Queen is arguably one of the greatest rock bands of all time. The movie itself was very good and did a nice job of tracing the rise and fall of this iconic group.
As soon as Solo came out, everyone wanted to know what I thought of the latest entry in the Star Wars universe. While many critics panned it, I found it entertaining. It was nothing more and nothing less than what I expected. Watching a young version of Han Solo and (a younger) Chewbacca was fun. It wasn’t meant to be something vital and important to understanding the core movies.
My favorite movie, probably to the shock of nobody, was Avengers: Infinity War. Thanos has been looming in the background of the Marvel movies almost from the start, and to see him rampage around the Earth and face off with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes was a great joy on the big screen. And now the trailers have started for the sequel, coming in April. Will Marvel run out of magic with superheroes at some point? I hope not before the finale of the Avengers saga! Will that be my favorite movie of 2019? Tune in next year!
A special nod to a great book/movie combination. I read The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and then saw the movie. Wow. The book and movie are both extremely powerful. You can just experience one or the other, but both make things even more powerful. Highly, highly recommended.
I wish you all the best as we start 2019!
Word of the Week: This week’s word is metagrobolize, which means to puzzle or mystify, as in, “The reader was metagrobolized by the columnist’s strange proclivity for superhero movies.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!