In defense of end-of-year lists

Or how you'll pry my reading challenge from my cold, dead fingers.

List-making gets a lot of flack. Yes, the churn of best-of-lists across the pop culture spectrum that gets put out between mid November and end of December is exhausting, repetitive, and often sits in a venn diagram of laziness, recency bias and publicity (I get it, I get it, everyone loved the new Sally Rooney).

However, I love lists. Making them, reading them, and discussing them. To-do-lists, wish lists, action plans. Retrospective lists, in-and-out lists, pro and cons lists. Lists of films and shows to watch, of first watches and rewatches. Lists of books to read, books read, books abandoned, books reread. I enjoy the private self-discipline of keeping lists, even if aided by public apps like Letterboxd or Goodreads or StoryGraph, it’s always a source of private pleasure. But I always want to wait until the very last minute, the very last day of the year, before finalising them. Partly, because I want to squeeze out every possible moment to catch up on reading and watching that I have missed out on. And, crucially, I love the drama of a last minute rush. (One year, I realised on the evening of the 31st December that I had miscalculated the amount of books I had read and was one shy of meeting my self-imposed reading challenge. I gulped a book in ninety minutes, my heart beating at rabbit pace the entire time.)

Revisiting the films I’ve seen or the books I’ve read serve as prompts to remember the experience of encountering them, whether a film was watched in the sleep-deprived frenzy of a film festival, or in a new cinema visited whilst travelling, or at a press or awards screening, or at home. While books themselves carry those memories, each stain and crease and annotation a reminder of how you read it, I rely on my yearly film lists to remind me of how and where I watched a film, and the initial thoughts and emotions that came with it.

What bores me of the list-making exercise is the “best of” element. Without the context, the “best” element is all peacocking, revealing more about the way one wishes to be perceived by others (cool, in the know, slightly ahead of the curve but not in a smug way) rather than about the thing itself. There are always omissions, too. There are films that have not been watched in time (I still haven’t seen All We Imagine is Light), films you adore you cannot publicly share, and, if you work in film, a space-time discombobulation wherein you watch films a year or more ahead of its general release.

I always struggle with the exercise of ranking, because there are particularities of a certain film that make them somehow memorable, and those particularities might not mean that they are, as a whole, the “best” of their kind. (The earnest batshittery of Robbie Williams-as-CGI-monkey-man in Better Man elevates the trad music biopic format or the enormous, extra-textual weight of Demi Moore’s performance in The Substance surpasses the film itself).

So here is my unranked, favourite stage, book, film and TV experiences of 2024:

A Feather on the Breath of God (Sigrid Nunez, 1995)

A Taste of Mango (dir. Chloe Abrahams)

Baby Reindeer (created by Richard Gadd)

Babygirl (dir. Halina Rejn)

Better Man (dir. Michael Gracey)

Demi Moore in The Substance (dir. Coralie Fargeat)

His Three Daughters (dir. Azazel Jacobs)

Hoard (dir. Luna Carmoon)

Interview with the Vampire Season 2 (created by Rolin Jones)

La Guitarra Flamenca de Yerai Cortés (dir. Antón Álvarez)

Longlegs (dir. Osgood Perkins)

Love Lies Bleeding (dir. Rose Glass)

Maria (dir. Pablo Larrain)

My Death (Lisa Tuttle, 2004)

Nosferatu (dir. Robert Eggers)

The Wooden Man in Oddity (dir. Damian McCarthy)

Presumed Innocent (created by David E. Kelley)

Ripley (written and directed by Steven Zaillian)

Romantic Outlaws (Charlotte Gordon, 2015)

Say Nothing (created by Joshua Zetumer)

The Brutalist (dir. Brady Corbet)

The Hotel (Daisy Johnson, 2024)

The Story of a New Name (Elena Ferrante, 2012)

The Years (directed by Eline Arbo, Adapted as De jaren by Eline Arbo, Almeida Theatre)

Woodworm (Layla Martinez, 2021)