(I'm seriously considering jumping ship from Spotify to Tidal, but want some reassurance that playlists can port across easily and the music library doesn't have any glaring omissions... Watch this space.)
BOOKS
The Silver Book by Olivia Laing (novel, audiobook, UK, 2025)
God damn amazing. Shares something of the stripped down, psychological distance of David Szalay's Flesh, but set in the world of mid-1970s Italian cinema. Strap a rocket on this one and send it straight to my Best of the Year post!
Seed by Elisabeth Easther (novel, audiobook, NZ, 2026)
Primarily four women (two pairs of friends) who do or don't want to get pregnant and do or don't get pregnant. I say primarily as there are chapters from secondary characters' perspectives (husbands/partners, the receptionist at the ad agency where one of the main characters works...), and sometimes the narrator slips inside other characters' heads (including children) during a main character's p.o.v. chapter. Overall: a bit much. Maybe if there was just one pair of friends? Or a more regular switching between the groups? Less may have meant more, for this dunce at least.
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell (non-fiction, audiobook, US, 2023)
I really like Odell's How to do Nothing when I read it in 2020. I found Saving Time a lot harder to get into. It seemed to circle round what its thesis might be, without ever really clearly moving forward. All lit review, no fuse lit. (Apart from a growing belief that the best way to talk about time, and alternative framing of time, is within fiction.)
Plus I'm partway through 3 physical books and 1 audiobook, which I'll pick up in the next consumption diary.
FILM & TV
Daisy Jones & The Six (limited TV show)
I enjoyed the book (top 10 in 2023) because it resembled the kinds of Classic Albums / band bio shows my dad used to love... And I liked the album of songs from this show (also listened to in 2023)... but I didn't have Amazon Prime until this past month, so have only now watched the TV show. And, well, it didn't work. The first three episodes in particular, before Daisy Jones intersects with The Six, felt full of rock cliches and lacking in narrative drive. It felt like they were searching for A Star is Born but the plot and format of the source text kept them from reaching escape velocity for hours on end.
Like, I shouldn't be so bored that I'm searching the cast online. It was cool to discover Riley Keough is Elvis' granddaughter (and inherited Graceland!) and learnt to sing for this role (and her ability to sing is like, THE most crucial plot point). But still.
Oh well. I still think the feat of creating a goooood album of songs for a fictional band, sung by the cast, that still stands on its own in 2026.
Shows in progress: Beef (Season 2), New Zealand Spy (Season 1)
Movies abandoned partway: Now You See Me, Now You Don't, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, Jurassic World: Rebirth, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, The Naked Gun (2025) (some of these may have been from March, but the moral of the story is I can't seem to finish a contemporary Hollywood movie for the life of me).
Rewatches for me, first time for the kids: A Knight's Tale, Hook, Jurassic Park, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Whenever I update my website, specifically the ABOUT ME page, I put the content I am replacing here for... posterity, I guess. What conversation did I have with myself in 2019? Oh, here it is.
Anyway, here's what I've had on my website for the last two years (written shortly after I had a three week residency at the Michael King Writers Centre and will still riding the high of a productivity burst) and will replace shortly...
Bonus Q&A with myself (from 2024)
What are you working on at the moment? I'm finishing two manuscripts. One is a new novel (contemporary, with
elements of crime fiction) and the other is a short story collection (stories
written over the last 15 years). I'm also writing more book reviews and essays
than I have in a good while.
Do you write full-time?
No. I work full-time in the climate action/sustainability
space, which means I currently write around work and family commitments.
In this context, writing residencies, even short ones like
the three weeks I spent at the Michael King Writers Centre in 2024, are
invaluable. They let me focus in a way that is not possible to when writing is
measured in hours rather than days. But having a life is a critical part of my
creative process, too. Three weeks of solid writing would be fruitless if I
wasn't full to the brim with ideas (and frustrations) that have accreted over
months and years.
Is it your dream to be a full-time writer?
I've made the choice to live in New Zealand, have a family
and a mortgage and be a writer. I can have it all, just not
all at once or all the time.
But not having to work for money for an extended period...
that does sound nice.
What do you prefer: short stories or novels?
As a reader, I'm consuming more novels at the moment.
As a writer, perfection is unattainable regardless of the
form. Even so, I enjoy grasping for perfection in short stories. Arranging a
few thousand words, a limited cast of characters and a handful of settings in
just the right way seems like something a human brain could achieve.
But writing a novel? That requires an even greater sense of
self-delusion. Perhaps it's no coincidence my protagonists gravitate towards
madness in these longer works.
Your first two novels both had elements of historical
fiction. Is that a genre that has always appealed to you?
Actually, no. I fell into historical fiction with The
Mannequin Makers. After finishing the stories in A Man Melting,
I started working on a novel that took a character from one of these stories
and spent more time with him. I plugged away at this project for quite a while,
but always seemed to get bogged down. The novel was set in the present and
focused on a dude about my age at the time, with experiences not dissimilar to
mine.
When I finally gave up on this novel, I decided that the
next thing I worked on would either be set in the past or the future. The
future seemed too easy - I could just make things up - and I thought doing
research would help me feel like a proper writer. I was also piqued by the kind
of historical fiction that was being published in New Zealand at the time,
which played up the sense of Aotearoa as a predominantly rural backwater,
disconnected from the rest of the world. But that's not how most Pākehā saw themselves
before the advent of World War One. It was an age of newspapers and burgeoning
towns and department stores. It didn't matter it took the latest fashions from
Paris six months to get here by boat, because our seasons are six months
out.
So I chose to focus on two ideas that I'd been kicking
around for a while that needed to take place in the past, but reflected this
more cosmopolitan, connected vision of Aotearoa and devoted the next two or
three years to them.
It was rewarding, but also really hard.
My next novel, NAILING DOWN THE SAINT, wasn't
meant to be so hard. It's mostly contemporary, but does draw a lot on the life
of San Guiseppe da Copertino (1603-1663). It was really interesting to write
about a sleazy Hollywood director before, during and after the first eruption
of #MeToo in 2017. I guess that's one reason some writers prefer to stick to
the past: the illusion of immutability.
That, and no cellphones.
I can see how cellphones make a lot of mystery plots
improbable or impossible now, but they also open up new ways of communication
and connection for characters. Some of my favourite books in recent years have
been extremely online, like Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About
This, or phone-y (the opposite of phony, perhaps) like Big
Swiss by Jean Beagin or Wellness by Nathan Hill.
You attended the International Institute of Modern
Letters MA programme back in 2006. Is that when you wrote the stories in A
Man Melting?
No. I actually tried to write a novel that year — a great
experience but I think it was a mistake to try and write a novel from go to
whoa in eight months. Too many decisions were made for the sake of expedience
that then became so integral to the fabric of the novel that it was beyond
fixing (though I spent another year trying!). The manuscript now sits in my
bottom drawer along with the novel I tried to write when I was twenty-one.
When did you turn your attention to short fiction?
I've always written short fiction. It's a natural progression to start with the
shorter form and work your way up to the longer, if that's your goal. I mostly
read novels when I was younger (Douglas Coupland, Kurt Vonnegut, Chuck
Palahniuk), so that's what I grew up wanting to write. Tastes change, of
course, and eventually I found an appreciation for subtlety (though I still
love me some Vonnegut). After finishing my MA, I really wanted to keep writing,
but didn't have the reserves of energy needed to start another novel. So I
returned to short fiction.
The first two stories I wrote after doing my MA were 'Copies' (which has since
been included in three anthologies) and 'Another Language' (which won the
novice section of the 2007 BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards). Something just
clicked.
In 2008, while living in Edinburgh, I tried to write one million words in 366
days (it was a leap year). I only wrote 800,737 words, but it was a very
successful failure. Almost every story in A Man Melting was
written or revised during that year. There's also at least one story from this
year that I hope to include in my second collection, whenever that may be
published.
Fatherhood is a recurring topic in your work. Whether
it's Colton Kemp being a very bad parent in The Mannequin Makers,
or Duncan Blake trying to juggle Hollywood aspirations and a neuro-divergent
son in Nailing Down the Saint. To what extent is this a
reflection of your own experience as a son and father?
My father died when I was sixteen, which may be why the parent-child dynamic is
endlessly fascinating to me. That mix of nature and nurture imprinting upon the
child, but also the randomness of how these factors are expressed. The futility
of trying to shape a child too completely. The slow realisation that parents
are flawed and often fickle, and much later (too late?) their noble and tender
aspects.
I finished writing The Mannequin Makers before
I became a father, though my daughter did attend the book launch as a
six-month-old. Looking back, I was imaginatively projecting myself forward into
a state of fatherhood. Before that, my stories had been more interested in the
child's perspective ('Copies', 'The Skeptic's Kid').
These days, while parent-child relationships might not
feature in the high-concept pitch-line for the things I'm writing, these
dynamics will be there, idling beneath the hood and occasionally driving the
action.
Please name ten authors who people should be reading.
I don't like to single out writers with no context. People
should read widely. Read for enjoyment and to be challenged, though doing so
separately is fine. Read local. Read foreign. Read contemporary. Read beyond
the now. Read Meg Mason, Kirsten McDougall, Sayaka Murata, Cesar Aira,
Jack Butler, Barry Hannah, Thomas McGuane, Steven Millhauser,
Ali Smith, Rachel Cusk, Jenny Offill, Tyson Yunkaporta, Robin Wall
Kimmerer, Eleanor Catton, Curtis Sittenfeld, Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal
Stephenson, Andy Weir, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Emily Henry, Beth
O'Leary, Jim Shephard, Owen Marshall... How many is that?
Twenty-four.
Patricia Grace, Janet Frame, Iris Murdoch...
Okay, thank you.
David Vann, Sue Orr, Elmore Leonard....
Links The
Quest for a Million Words - the record of a year spent writing like
stink. This
Fluid Thrill - My blog, where you can catch my thoughts about writing,
reading and whatever else passes my field of vision.
Craig Cliff on The Academy of New Zealand Literature's website
The start of 2026 has been hectic. From our petrol people mover's engine blowing up the week before the Iran war started (thank god we bought a 2nd hand leaf in November), to the normal day-job craziness with the start of a new semester and emissions audit season (and me starting an undergrad te reo paper), Ockham judging duties (long-list decision, short-list decision, best first book and overall winner decisions - with the latter stage completed on 27 March) to work on my own forthcoming book...
Which, yeah, is happening this winter. Like a lot of book things it was a case of nothing for a long time, then everything all at once. It's a collection of short stories. I was asked to write 1-2 new stories over the summer that could replace some previously published stories. In the end, I added one new story and set it very explicitly in early Feb 2026, so the main character is worried about ICE actions in Minnesota but didn't know war with Iran was the next step further down into hell - though she is very obsessed with large fossil fuel guzzlers (the story is called 'Ranger, Ranger, Ranger'). There's a symbolic comeuppance and now I'm wondering how it will play with readers knowing fuel price hikes were just on the horizon...
In parallel with writing this new story, I was working through my editor's comments on the rest of the stories in the manuscript. I may write more about this separately, a kind of four-books-in update to Notes on getting thoroughly edited(written in 2013 about the editing process for my 2nd book and first published novel).
BOOKS
(21 books in 3 months, not counting re-reads of Ockhams books. On track for a measly 80 books. Time will tell.)
Party Boy by Breton Dukes (novel, physical book, NZ, 2026) - went to the book launch at Woof!, which is where the opening section of the novel is set. Breton read part of this at the launch. It was like seeing a 4th dimension. A similar feeling pervaded the reading of the novel, with the main character traversing my patch of hilltop Dunedin for school and kindy dropoffs, and traversing the psychic geography of an anxious, overthinking, middle aged white guy who went to a conservative all boys high school.
Bread of Angels by Patti Smith (non-fiction, audiobook, US, 2025)
The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing (non-fiction, audiobook, UK, 2024)
Will there ever be another you by Patricia Lockwood (novel, audiobook, US, 2025) - sure, we're calling anything a novel these days, and this wasn't as good as No one belongs here more than you, but it was still great in that way early 2000's Simpsons was great (untethered by received logic etc etc).
Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O'Brien (novel, audiobook, US, 1974)
Life after cars: freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the automobileby Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon and Aaron Naparstek (non-fiction, audiobook, US, 2025)
Extremophile by Ian Green (novel, audiobook, US, 2024)
Heated Rivalry by Rachel Rein (novel, audiobook, US, 2019)
Enshittification by Cory Doctorow (non-fiction, audiobook, Canada, 2025)
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R.R. Martin (3x novellas, audiobook, US, 2015)
Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy (novel, audiobook, US, 2025) - hard to live up to I'm Glad My Mom Died, especially when jumping from memoir to fiction. I'll never know how this would have landed without the legacy of IGMMD.
Becoming Tangata Tiriti: Working with Māori, Honouring the Treaty by Avril Bell (non-fiction, audiobook, NZ, 2024)
Wonky Optics, RedEdits, The Black and the White, Chosen by Geoff Cochrane (4x poetry collections, physical books, NZ, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020) - re-reads for my larger project...
Football by Chuck Klosterman (non-fiction, audiobook, US, 2026) - I have read many Klosterman books, but his schtick in this context was almost intolerable. Like, just say your silly-but-sensible arguments - stop prefacing everything!
Atavists by Lydia Millet (short stories, audiobook, US, 2025) - these are linked stories, and probably closer to a novel that Will there ever be another you, but I'm glad it's billed as "Stories" on the cover. I really enjoyed this. Millet has been a fave author of my since I read Oh Pure and Radiant Heart back in, 2005 or 2006... I really should read that again one day.
The Breath of the Gods: The history and future of the windby Simon Winchester (non-fiction, audiobook, UK, 2025) - It's good when non-fiction authors have a voice, a style they can lean into. But Winchester's is just not for me. He tries to add cultural balance, but it comes off as token. He add the arguments against a rabid eugenicist but then continues to laud his theory of the wind. I can't recall a single mention of a female. And structurally its a shitshow. He starts by talking about the concept of global terrestrial stilling (winds are getting weaker and people are trying to figure out why) only to throw a sentence or two at the end of the book saying, oh, yeah, people aren't so worried about that anymore. Give this a miss.
Adventures in the Screen Trade: A personal view of Hollywood and Screenwriting by William Goldman (non-fiction, audiobook, US, 1982) - facinating on many levels. There's the sense WG is writing this in real time, assessing the state of Hollywood in 1982 and the slate of movies in the cinema at the time. There's the section at the end where he adapts his own short story into a short screenplay, then gets a production designer, composer, editor and director to assess (read: excoriate in the case of the director) his attempt. And all the inside baseball about the making of movies like Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, The Right Stuff and Marathon Man.
The Uncool: A Memoir by Cameron Crowe (non-fiction, audiobook, US, 2025) - more inside baseball, this time 1970s music journalism. Crazy to think of Crowe interviewing these rocks stars as a 15 and 16 year old.
MUSIC - FEBRUARY
FILM & TV
Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie - saw this at the single cinema session in Dunedin... loved it. Looking forward to the sequel in another 17 years!!!
Project Hail Mary (the first movie I've seen in a cinema with my kids since Frozen II) - I loved the book, and loved this adaptation.
The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal - Season 1 - was always going to be a bit of a hagiography (directed by the late lead singer's brother) and would play up the Canada's Band angle, but there was enough in the third-quarter about messy band dynamics and less-than-perfect later albums (it has always been my opinion that: fuck Bob Rock), and as a non-Canadian mega fan I learnt some things and enjoyed it on the whole.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms - Season 1 - really good. Got me to read the novellas.
Heated Rivalry - Season 1 - interesting. I read the novel to see how that worked.
Sinners - I thought it was okay.
A lot of AEW and WWE (and related YouTube content) as I'm still exploring the narrative implications of professional wrestling in this post-kayfabe phase... I still don't know if this will come to anything.
[Playlist at the bottom of this post if you can't wait to listen]
Best Song: Stephen Wilson Jr - 'I'm a Song - Live at the Print Shop'
This category is reserved for the best song released in the calendar year... But 2025's winner isn't clear cut. The song appears on the 2025 album, son of dad (deluxe), a reissue of a 2023 album with extra tracks, including this one. As the 'Live at the Print Shop' suggests, this is a live recording. It was actually a YouTube video, posted in October 2024. Here it is:
So many things to say about this song about songs... But firstly, kudos to the sound engineer at the Print Shop.
I didn't come across this song (and Stephen Wilson Jr) until December 2025, when 'I'm a Song' made Rick Beato's top 10 songs of 2025 (more YouTube!). I got chills listening to the first minute, and went straight to the full video, and listened to it about six times more that day, tearing up each time.
My son was like, what is happening?
It's so good, I said.
The song went straight onto our roadtrip playlist as we went to Christchurch and back for Christmas, Naseby and back for a camping entree, and Golden Bay and back for proper camping (complete with four straight days of rain at the end). That's a lot of k's, and a lot of spins for this track.
I also devoured son of dad, and there's some bangers on there, too. 'Cuckoo', 'Patches', 'American Gothic', 'Year to Be Young 1994', 'Holler from the Holler'. And then there's some slow, sad songs from the heart, like 'son of dad' and 'Grief is only Love.' Sometimes the grunge influence is to the fore (in 2025 SWJ also released a 4-song EP with covers of Nirvana, Temple of the Dog, Postal Service and Smashing Pumpkins!). Sometimes the Nashville country songwriting is a little too... obvious (think 'Fancy Like' by Walker Hayes and Ke$ha). Sometimes you wish he'd open his mouth a little wider when he sings. But all in all, I love this guy.
(Bonus points for his backstory, which you can research yourself. Late starters/late bloomers in the music business a definitely a softspot for me. And the fact he's married to Leigh Nash, the lead singer from Sixpence None The Richer, is one of those weird, I can't believe these historical timelines intersect things, like how Oxford University was established before the Aztec Empire emerged.)
Honourable mention - songs (that don't appear on any of the top albums below)
Knockin' Heart - Hamilton Leithauser (no shame in second place)
Irish Goodbye - Somebody's Child
Dinosaur - Soft Launch (strong Local Natives vibes)
Louie - Arcy Drive
Black Dog / White Horse - Big Special
Elephant - Jasmine.4.t
Bovine Excision - Samia
Bloodline - Truman Sinclair (manages to overcome the vibe it's a Neil Young cover)
Marionette - Twisted Teens
Wet Dog - Dead Gowns
Under the Table - Balancing Act (actually from late 2024, but I'm hella late with this list; nobody's perfect)
Top 10 albums of 2025
Friendship - Caveman Wakes Up
Friendship have been releasing albums since 2017, but I first came across them in 2025. 'Free Association' was the song. It might still be my favourite of theirs. But then I'll listen to the opening bars of 'Tree of Heaven'... Or the part in 'Resident Evil' where he sings 'Some shithead in my living room / Playing Resident Evil'...
There's a Bill Callahan quality to Dan Wriggins' voice, a Dave Berman/Silver Jews vibe to the lyrics.
I mostly had band-written bios on Spotify, give me a Wikipedia page anyday, but Friendship's bio is pretty good at describing their music/this album:
...Okay in elevators, not great for dinner. On Caveman Wakes up, the band's historically capacious definition of country music grows wider still. Shambolic guitars are offset by flute pads, bleary poetry is set against a Motown rhythm section.... like if Talk Talk came from a dingy Philadelphia basement and was fronted by James Tate... steeped in reference and experimentation, delivered casually and as a dire warning, dedicated, above all, to music's creative soul.
Petey USA - The Yips
Another artist that's been around a while but was new-to-me in '25. This album might have made the top spot if it included 2023's 'I tried to draw a straight line', which includes the lyric: 'You see, how I've been kinda angry / since the Kings lost to the Lakers / In the Wester Conference finals / Ain't it funny when you find out everything is fake.'
Niche sporting interests aside, The Yips is brimming with great songs, like the title track/album opener, 'Model Train Town', and 'As Two People Drift Apart'. There's a definite LCD Soundsystem vibe to the instrumentation (as if LCD Soundsystem wasn't also derivative), but the arc of the compositions bend towards indie rock rather than EDM. There's an emotional rawness to the lyrics that James Murphy could never reach. This is dance music to listen to while lying face down on your bed.
Blondshell - If You Asked for A Picture
This was my contender for the album where my taste and my 13-year-old-daughter's taste would overlap (she loves Tate McRae, Adela, Katseye, the Pitch Perfect movies, K-dramas and Queer Eye). But I've not heard her play Blondshell of her own volition yet. This is not conducive evidience: I remember buying Jimi Hendrix's greatest hits on CD when I was about 13 and hiding it from my dad in case he thought I wanted more of his music recommendations.
I really rated Blondshell's debut, which made my top 10 in 2023. 'IYAFaP' is a step up in terms of songwriting and composition, but it still has the bedroom grunge undercurrent.
Lead single 'T&A' typifies this growth, opening with a wall of guitars, then pulling back to a Nirvana-esque subdued verse. 'Thumbtack' has a country-vibe. Lyrically, these songs aren't a world away from Olivia Rodrigo ('I don't wanna be your mom, but you're not strong enough' - 'Arms'), but they sit a lot better against this musical palette than a pop-forward one. And there are songs addressed to a parent, or a lover where the singer is the one doing the letting down. A song like 'Event of Fire', with its refrain 'What if I'm burnt out?' is ageless / timeless. Though maybe I'm glad it doesn't hit the same with my 13-year-old daughter.
Julien Baker and Torres - Send a Prayer My Way
I've had albums from both artists make my top ten before. But nothing from Torres had ever quite reached the heights of 2015's Sprinter. And Julien Baker's mental health issues have been well documented (I had tickets to her subsequently cancelled Wellington show in 2019) and wondered if this teaming up with other artists (see: Boygenius) was becoming a crutch.
So my expectations for this collab weren't through the roof.
But boy howdy.
It's very country. And very good.
'Sugar in the Tank' sounds like the Eagles x City of Color x Fleetwood Mac.
'Bottom of a bottle' is a top five Brandi Carlisle song.
'Tape Runs Out' is literally inspired by Songs: Ohia.
These are all compliments by the way.
And writing this, I've loaded the full album up in my queue. So good.
Ben Kweller - Cover the Mirrors
Late 2024/early 2025 I went on a Ben Kweller discography dive. And then news of a new album emerged - how it would be a tribute to Kweller's sixteen-year-old son, Dorian, who died in a car accident. I wasn't sure I could handle a full album of this (Kweller is less than 2 years older than me). But then I got obsessed with 'Dollar Store' (featuring Waxahatchee) when it came out in Feb and it didn't seem too on the nose. Three days before the full album, 'Oh Dorian' (featuring MJ Lenderman) came out and it wasn't maudlin. It was catchy. More country than anything Kweller had done before.
So too the full album manages to smuggle in sadness and loss while you're marvelling at the breadth of genres this one-time grunge wunderkind is incorporating.
Viagra Boys - Viagr Aboys
Time for a change of pace. And tone.
The Swedish post-punkers sing about Chandler Bing, trying to get free sweaters from LL Bean and your mum's OnlyFans. 'I am a man that's made of meat / you're on the internet looking at feet.' This is just the first song.
As if an edgelord gained sentience / a sense of humour.
Butthole Surfers for the age of GenAI.
And then you reach 'Medicine for Horses', track 6, which drops the bpm way down. It's a bit Carseat Headrest, a bit Arcade Fire. 'Hey baby, can I borrow your car? / I wanna drive it into a wall and make us two-dimensional.'
Totally different. Totally great.
Florry - Sounds Like...
Okay, so the name of this album encourages the kind of comparisons I've already indulged in too much in this list, so I will not reference another artist when talking about Florry.
From the ragged chaos of opener, 'First it was a movie, then it was a book,' to the careful tunelessness of 'Hey Baby', the uniting thread of all these sounds is a love of 1970s country rock (not naming names).
There's a Spotify playlist that sometimes pops up on my homepage called 'Indie Twang'. This, my friends, is Indie Twang bandisonified.
Geese - Getting Killed
This album was on A LOT of best of lists. Call me basic. Call me a follower. Call me fucking Ishamel, because at least I was on the bandwagon for 3D Country, which also made my Top 10 in 2023 (a theme seems to be emerging).
Back then, I said:
"3D Country" is basically a whole album designed to get my son to complain. From the discordant jangle and drunken vocals of album opener '2122' to the tuneless trumpets, broken glass and violins on closer 'St Elmo', there's a lot of provocation going on...
This album, more than any other in 2023, made me feel like there was still a place for noise and denim in somewhat-popular culture.
Not everyone is a rock critic, or reads their best of lists or listens to those kind of podcasts, so whether Geese has ascended above somewhat-popular culture remains to be seen.
Getting Killed is a little less rock, a little more musical. But Cameron Winter's voice still noodles all around the scale. His lyrics are sometimes psychedelic, sometimes political, sometimes daft. It's easy to see the backlash building. But for now, lets enjoy this moment where a discordant art rock group rules the roost.
The Amazons - 21st Century Fiction
The last few slots on a list are always the hardest. Do you go for the album with a couple of standout tracks but the rest kind of never stuck? Or something that was solid from start to finish but its highs were never quite as high.
I'm opting for the former here.
My Blood' is such a good track. It's very big. Unshy about taking up space. Which isn't something most of my indie twangy list so far can really boast. There's definitely something about the UK that allows space for bands to be more straight-ahead. Think the 1975. Think Foals.
21st Century Fiction adds to the canon of stadium rock while remaining underrated.
Flycatcher - The Wrench
'Brother' came out as a single in 2024, and doesn't appear until the penultimate track on The Wrench, but it's very good. Definite Nirvana vibes - calm verses, 'Yeah, yeah' chorus, but a much cleaner guitar sound, a more straight-forward approach to lyrics. 'I wanna be like my brother / He learned to work with hands / He just dismantled the engine on my minivan.'
The lack of cynicism is refreshing.
There's no reversal in subsequent verses. His brother remains virtuous and worthy of emulation. The singer may be a dirtbag, but the fact he admires this virtuous, simple man, means maybe there's hope for him too.
The rest of the album is good. Highlights just now as I re-listened : 'Dissolve', 'Down', and album closer 'Super Bowl' ('You always hated Tiny Dancer / I can't agree with you on that').
Honourable mentions - Albums (* means they also had a song in contention for best of the year)
Communions - Unreconciled
NO CIGAR - Under the Surface
Preoccupations - Ill at Ease
Perfume Genius - Glory*
Alan Sparkhawk & Trampled By Turtles - self-titled
Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band - New Threats from the Soul
Hayley Williams - Ego Death at the Bachelorette Party
Snocaps - Snocaps
Wednesday - Bleeds*
Miya Follick - Mid July*
Albums from 2024 I missed at the time, but would have probably waltzed into that list
Wunderhorse - Midas
Wild Pink - Dulling the Horns
Older album & artist that I listened to for the first time in 2025 and liked the most
Kia ora and apologies for lateness. But with lateness comes improved accuracy (an error in my spreadsheet meant one of my top 3 reads of the year wasn't featured in my Best of 2025 Instagram post).
2025 was unprecedented. Certainly in terms of the quantity I read. 149 books in total.
The year before I read 100 (which was a record). My target for 2025 was 100 again. See below all the graphs for my other targets.
The main reason for overachieving was signing on to be a judge for the fiction category of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. This meant I had to read 52 books from late September to around New Years. It's not even accurate to call this a pile of reading. It was several piles of reading.
(And with the short-listing and eventual winner yet to be decided, I still have a fair amount of re-reading ahead of me, thus potentially messing with my 2026 reading stats...)
I've included these books in my overall stats, but when we get to the best reads, I've excluded all NZ books released in 2025 so as to retain confidentially/mystery/plausible deniability until the final awards announcement in May. But I should say that IF I had included these books in contention, six of these books would have been in my top 11 (there was a three-way tie for 9th). So there were definitely some good'uns!
Reading stats
A continual theme here will be how the Ockhams reading has skewed the stats. Starting with year of publication. It not unusual for my reading to be dominated by books published in the last 2 years. In 2024, it was 20 books released that year vs 25 in 2023. But in 2025, it was 78 (52%) from that year and only 19 from the previous (13%).
In terms of nationality, normally the top 3 is US, NZ and UK, with NZ sometimes on top by a slim margin... Not so slim in 2025:
In terms of the type of book (novel vs story collections vs non-fiction etc), novels normally come out on top. Last year 60% of books read were novels... this year, 60% were novels. Which is interesting. There were a bunch of story collections and a couple of novella collections in my judging reading... but the reason novels didn't dominate further is because while doing my Ockhams reading, I didn't/couldn't listen to fiction audiobooks while commuting or gardening or whenever I'd normally slip an audiobook on. So it upped the non-fiction quotient slightly and bought balance to the force.
Speaking of audiobooks, in 2024 I listened to 77 audiobooks and in 2025 I listened to one more. So all the growth was physical books. Not just the Ockhams reading, but more poetry collections, including my Geoff Cochrane project, which I need to complete in 2026.
Every year I try and track the diversity of authors (somewhat of a proxy for diversity of perspectives and topics). It's imperfect. I don't fully research the biographies of each author. So, for example, I don't report on percentage of LGBTIQ+ authors, but at least four of the books had these communities at the heart of their content. Even gender, which I have tracked, is imperfect. Dudes came out on top in terms of book count in 2025 (and have for three of the last four years, for a variety of reasons).
Okay, that's enough graphs. One last thing to do before I re-reveal my top ten from the 97 non-Ockham eligible books I read in 2025... to check in on how I did against the reading targets I set for 2025 (long before I knew I'd be judging anything).
Read 100 books - TICK
Read at least 10 single-author poetry collections - TICK (read 15)
Read at least 20 physical books - TICK
Read at least 10 non-fiction books by female authors - TICK (read 12)
Non-white + translated > 40 - FAIL (27 read)
For 2026, I'm going with just two targets:
Non-white + translated > 40
Read at least three fat classics that around at least 100 years old
Hadn't read this before. If you've only read Geoff's poetry, this novel is pretty much what you'd imagine his novel would be like. Alcoholism. Attention to life at the level of the sentence, the word, the syllable. And the sex scene - the chutzpah!
Flesh by David Szalay (2025)
I'm only now realising that this top three, which could have gone in any order, are each published 30 years apart and deal with masculinity (and how to write a novel) in quite different ways.
on the Booker Longlist [it subsequently won]... this one hit for me. V v v v v good.
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (2024)
I didn't write comments on any of the books in my April-May post (I swear I started something quite long about it... But I was doing a running thread of my reads on BlueSky at the time (it was my 30th book to that point) and said:
Still thinking about Rejection (lol). Tony Tulathimutte really went there!
A Good Winter by Gigi Fenster (2021)
I missed this off my Jan-Feb post for some reason, but said this on BlueSky:
A creepy tour de force of narrator voice. Everyone will know an Olga (but this Olga out Olgas them!). So, so good. I can't believe it's 4 years since it came out already (blame the COVID years). Highly recommended.
The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe (2024)
All I said about this in my August post was, "Good", which is kind of rude. I've been a fan of Coe's since I read The Rotters Club and his biography of B.S. Johnson. Proof has Coe's signature trickfulness (as opposed to trickiness) on display. Could even be a good place to start, if you've never read him before.
Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabhattin Ali (1943)
Didn't say anything about this in my December post, but it was interesting on first listen, and doubly so after the foreword, which was put at the end of the audiobook, and provides some historical and biographical context that was illuminating. Reading a lot of physical books again this year made me realise how much I like the guff around the main text (dedications, acknowledgements etc), and you miss a lot of that with audiobooks. Having a reflection / appraisal of the work at the end of the audiobook is great. Like the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. I think I just want to go back to being an English Lit undergrad...
It's Only Drowning by David Litt (2025)
The first non-fiction book on the list. Again, I didn't say anything about it in December, when I was prepping for a long weekend trying to surf at Riverton. Litt's account of learning to surf, and surf alongside his MAGA-or-worse brother-in-law, is frequently hilarious.
the rare book where the author gets the subtitle rather than the title. Made me feel a bit less dark on the future by showing how the internet could have been ruined multiple times over the last four decades so maybe there's hope yet.
Okay, last day of 2025... For completeness I'll get this December post out of the way, and over the next week or so post my best books and best music posts (though I've put the highlights on Instagram already, with top 5 tv shows as a bonus).
MUSIC - DECEMBER
BOOKS
As previously, I'm not going to list all the books I've read as part of judging the fiction category of the Ockham NZ Book Awards. I've finished my first read through of the 52 entries, and will now be returning to some to help with long-listing and short-listing decisions the panel needs to make in January.
It's Only Drowning by David Litt (non-fiction, audiobook, US, 2025)
Paper Cage by Tom Baragwanath (fiction, audiobook, NZ, 2022)
Incidental Inventions by Elena Ferrante (non-fiction, audiobook, Italy, 2019)
A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver (non-fiction, audiobook, US, 2025)
Driving to Treblinka by Diana Wichtel (non-fiction, audiobook, NZ, 2018)
Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali (novel, audiobook, Turkiye, 1943)
TV SHOWS
Nobody Wants This - Season 2
Basically that's it. Lots of reading! And being away (3 days in Riverton for daughter's birthday and the last week in Christchurch for Xmas) means minimal screentime. Nice.
In pulling together my top 5 shows for 2025 (Andor, Adolescence, Unreal, The Rehearsal, Win or Lose), there's quite a few shows I'd like to catch-up on when I get time and have the right subscriptions, like Pluribus, Platonic, Task, Hacks (last I checked, there was no legal way to watch the latest season in NZ).
Note: as I mentioned last time, I'm a judge for the fiction category of the 2026 Ockham NZ Book Awards (books pubbed in 2025, longlist/shortlist/winner announced in 2026) so need to read about a dozen novels/story collections a month to be done by the end of the year and make longlist decisions early in Jan. I won't include any of these books in my summaries here, but will include them in my end of year reading stats. Safe to assume I'll crush last year's 100 books read (and whatever the previous record for physical books read might be).
Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand by Nick Bollinger (non-fiction, audiobook, NZ, 2022)
A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern (non-fiction, audiobook, NZ, 2025) - kinda annoying how obviously this book was written for a North American audience so every aspect of NZ life needed to be glossed.
Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka (novel, audiobook, NZ, 2021) - I'd seen Whiti talk about the recording of this audiobook on social media, so was keen to check out this version. (She does a great job).
May You Have Delicious Meals by Junko Takase (novel, audiobook, Japan, translated, 2025)
Kill Your Darlings by Peter Swanson (novel, audiobook, US, 2025)
New Transgender Blockbusters by Oscar Upperton (poetry, physical book, NZ, 2021)
A Thousand Blues by Cheon Seon-ran (novel, audiobook, South Korea, translated, 2025)
This is For Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee: the inventor of the World Wide Web (non-fiction, audiobook, UK, 2025) - the rare book where the author gets the subtitle rather than the title. Made me feel a bit less dark on the future by showing how the internet could have been ruined multiple times over the last four decades so maybe there's hope yet.
Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney (non-fiction, audiobook, UK, 2025)
MOVIES & TV
Nobody Wants This - Season 1
The Chair Company - Season 1
Inside Llewyn Davis
Tick, tick... boom
Forrest Gump* - my daughter was watching it for the first time, and I found it hard to tear myself away to do the dishes or whatever. Moved a lit faster than in my memory.
Fighting with my Family
And quite a bit of WWE content, which may or may not translate into research for a project
I'm one of the judges for the fiction section for the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, which means I need to read every novel and short story collection published in 2025 that is submitted for the awards. So far I've received two boxes of books (33 books in total) and there's at least one more box to come later in the year. I'd read three books already (score). So that's going to mean I smash some of the reading targets I set at the start of the year (read 100+ books, read 20+ physical books) but means some of the other targets will be harder to achieve (like read 10 non-fiction books by female authors).
(I could tally the numbers now and see, but I'm going to keep myself in the dark till I do my 2025 reading wrap up post).
Before the first box of books to judge arrived, I got a box of books I'd bought from the THWUP sale, which was mostly just Geoff Cochranes. I started a project to re-read all his poetry collections and come up with my own Best Of list, and compare it to the contents of The Collected Geoff Cochrane (which I bought but haven't read). I didn't quite finish this process before the Ockham judging bow wave hit, so this might be a Jan 2026 project :)
BOOKS
Into India, Aztec Noon*, Acetylene*, 84-484*, Pocket Edition*, Hypnic Jerks*, The Worm in the Tequila*, The Bengal Engine's Mango Afterglow* by Geoff Cochrane (poetry, physical books, NZ) - see above.
Tin Nimbus by Geoff Cochrane (novel, physical book, NZ) - Hadn't read this before. If you've only read Geoff's poetry, this novel is pretty much what you'd imagine his novel would be like. Alcoholism. Attention to life at the level of the sentence, the word, the syllable. And the sex scene - the chutzpah!
The Bookshop Detectives: Tea and Cake and Death by Gareth and Louise Ward (novel, audiobook, NZ) - Book Two in the series. Diminishing marginal returns.
The CIA Book Club by Charlie English (non-fiction, audiobook, UK)
Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir by Craig Mod (non-fiction, audiobook, US)
Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata (novel, audiobook, Japan) - was actually written before Convenience Store Woman (terrific) and Earthlings (even better), but translated into English after those two and published in 2025. Not as strong.
Show Don't Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld (short stories, audiobook, US) - Kinda hated that a story made me empathise with Jeff Bezos. But: goooood stories.
Audition by Katie Kitamura (novel, audiobook, US) - Flesh by David Szalay is still my favourite book on the Booker Shortlist
A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (non-fiction, audiobook, US) - both a superserious takedown of space colony hype and also quite funny.
Rusty Brown by Chris Ware (graphic novel, physical book, US) - a real doorstop of a book. Can be thrilling at the level of the page in terms of composition / juxtaposition, but can also feel slow and dense. Would be interested in what someone who reads a lot of graphic novels thinks.
Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami (novel, audiobook, Japan) - think Earthlings x Never Let Me Go.
Electric Spark: the Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson (non-fiction, audiobook, UK) - overpromised and underdelivered in terms of revelations (though there was certainly a lot of words).
+ 8 NZ works of fiction in my judging capacity, which I will remain cagey about.
FILM & TV
Honestly, the only thing I can remember watching (besides sport), was The Truman Show with my kids (first time for them, not for me). Maybe the odd Taskmaster episode. I tried watching Season 2 of The Night Agent, got bored. Season 2 of Squid Game: ditto. Season 1 of Untamed: samesies.
Books! Give me books! Or podcasts. Or another season of Unreal (please?).
Oh, I watched the Devo documentary, and Beau is Afraid, finished Black Mirror Season 7, and the documentary series Wrestlers about OVW (that was really good).
