Best of 2000–2019, Not from 2000–2019

Happy New Vicennial! Rather than a boring round-up of things I've enjoyed in the past year, or even the last decade, here's a thoroughly tedious chronology of My Best TV, Films, Books, Music and Other Stuff That I Happened to Experience During Each of the Last 20 Years.

These are the cultural highlights that were most important to me At the Time (Aged 14–34), plus retrospective overall favourites by category and the Overall Best Thing of the 21st Century.

Importantly, many best things of the year Weren't Actually Released in That Year, because there are loads of other years to catch up on and I'm not some zeitgeisty freak. No, I'm clearly normal.

Based on Memory, Research, Guesswork and Existential Anguish. Selections from my old 2014–18 round-ups revised when I somehow remembered things more clearly years later.

Update: Replaced by expanded, ongoing, more historically accurate edition.

Ranking Father Ted

Revered by other comedy snobs, and obviously funny, I've never got on all that well with the ecclesiastical classic, finding it a bit cynically contrived and considering Big Train to be peak Linehan/Mathews.

I enjoyed its flights of fancy, but it's not something I've made an effort to seek out since I was a teenager who'd watch any comedy that came on, whether it was on my bedroom portable or a bus full of schoolkids on their way to Germany, hearing that theme tune over and over.

Still, it's something to watch and tediously compare. Here are a non-fan's Top Twenty-five Teds.

Alrightreads: Dinosaurs

Jurassic Park's still the best.


Jules Verne, A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (Voyage au centre de la Terre, a.k.a. A Journey to the Interior of the Earth)

1864 / Audiobook / 183 pages / France

****

I'd listened to a radio drama and seen the Willy Fogg adaptation, but glad I finally got around to this certified adventure classic. Verne's enthusiasm for elementary science and travel is infectious, before they head underground and things get enjoyably silly.

Various, The Science Fictional Dinosaur

1950-82 (collected 1982) / Audiobook / pages / USA/UK

***

Obscure picks from some big-name authors, most of these scientific dragon tales take a more serious and speculative approach than your Edgar Rice Burroughses, but some of them are still pretty dumb.

Faves: Frederick D. Gottfried's 'Hermes to the Ages,' Robert Silverberg's 'Our Lady of the Sauropods.'

Worsties: Robert F. Young's 'When Time Was New,' Isaac Asimov's 'Day of the Hunters.'


Michael Swanwick, Bones of the Earth

2002 / Audiobook / 335 pages / USA

***

This self-consciously post-JP prehistoric sci-fi takes the time-honoured time travel approach, overcomplicated with mysterious aliens and relationship angst at the expense of thrills or wonder.

Ricardo Delgado, Age of Reptiles Omnibus, Vol. 1

1993-2011 (collected 2011) / Ecomics / 398 pages / USA

***

I would've got more out of Delgado's silent film storyboards if I'd read looked at them at the time, at the height of Jurassic Park-fuelled Dinomania. I liked his scenic vistas the best, ominously pitting the pitiable reptiles against the indifferent forces of nature. The anthropomorphised action sequences were less enthralling.

Nick Attfield, Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me

2011 / Ebook / 160 pages / UK

***

I wasn't aware of these proto-grunge kids before, so this was an insightful and entertaining textual documentary to catch. Our chronicler takes an appropriately dismissive tone for the self-described "lazy" band, until he slips up and admits that it's a "great album" towards the end. I think that's going a bit far.

Alrightreads: Aminals

Watership Down's still the best.

Jack London, The Call of the Wild

1903 / Audiobook / 232 pages / USA

****

I didn't dwell on what brutal messages the author might have been imparting; just enjoyed the fusion between harsh realism and sentimental myth-making and a pragmatic brevity that more novels should embrace.

Clifford D. Simak, City

1944-51 (collected 1952) / Audiobook / 224 pages / USA

****

It takes a few tales before this chronicle of humanity's downfall and the rise of the mutant animals starts to come together, but it all adds up to a more compelling whole than most fix-up novels achieve. Simak's less convinced of the indomitable human spirit than many sci-fi writers, and while his fantastical transhuman solution might not seem particularly helpful, you can stretch some real-life analogies out of it, if that's your bag.

Colin Dann, The Animals of Farthing Wood

1979 / Ebook / 302 pages / UK

****

It was unlikely that reading the original children's novel as an adult was going to be as affecting as the classic cartoon was back in the '90s, but the adaptation turned out to be largely faithful. One improvement was gender-swapping some of the relentlessly male characters for a bit of balance, I don't know what Colin had against girls.

Jim Fusilli, The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds

2005 / Audiobook / 121 pages / USA

****

An album so universally revered that even I like it, this song-by-song analysis from a veteran music journalist is passionate, astute and interesting. Many lesser writers in this series tend to fall down at that third part.

Bryan Talbot, Grandville Mon Amour

2006 / Ecomics / 104 pages / UK

***

Another decent tale of corruption and betrayal set in a steampunk alternative history where most folk happen to have the head of an animal. It's been so long since I read the first one that I can't really remember how it compared. I think that one was funnier.

Ranking the Red Dwarf films

Doug Naylor never got to make Red Dwarf: The Movie, settling for a forthcoming feature-length special and some dubious multi-parters instead. This isn't about those.

Instead, here are 10 films (or films-of-the-TV-series) that are either confirmed or can be deduced to have influenced the look, tone or premise of the classic sci-fi sitcom.

Not the one-off parodies like Casablanca, just the main influences. Imagined or otherwise. Most of the time.

Ranking the Mel Brooks films

There are some great parody films out there, but the overwhelming abhorrence and laziness of the genre in general means I'm reluctant to give any of them a chance today, unless I already happen to like the person making it.

I don't know what I think of Mel Brooks, since I've never watched anything he's done as of the time of writing this intro. Some of these films are pretty popular though, and not just among idiots, so worth a try. Here's what I reckon about The Top 11 Mel Brooks Movies.

Free, pointless ebook: 1001 Books That I've Read

Dave Warburton, 1001 Books That I've Read

2015-19 (collected 2019) / Ebook / 178 pages / UK

*

Pithy "reviews" (some as many as four words in length) of a seemingly totally random selection of books organised by author, all copy-pasted from a blog without the original context (if any) or cover images to look at, and only some finickity tweaking to make the pages square up. I don't know why I bothered. At least it's free.

Download PDF

(1.38 MB)

Alrightreads: 2019 Books

Checking out some recent releases, like a normal person might do.


Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

2019 / Ebook / 291 pages / USA

***

Reading about how to read and write right makes me feel productive. A veteran proofreader offers handy tips for those writing or proofing in American English, others can work it out. I got quite a few notes out of it. [AU: Are all the Trump digressions really necessary though?]

David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

2019 / Audiobook / 310 pages / USA

***

Whether he's being selective or not, these relentless statistics are heavy. I hope some of the other civilisations out there fare better, we're done for.

Stewart Lee, March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019

2016-19 (collected 2019) / Ebook / 400 pages / UK

***

As much as I'll always venerate Lee, I've never followed his journalism with much enthusiasm. I enjoy his antagonistically weird style, but preferred the previous, more varied assortment over this one's dogged theme. Padding it out with a stand-up transcript creates the problem that an intervening show has been skipped over in the chronicles now. When are you going to annotate Carpet Remnant World, mate?

Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

2019 / Audiobook / 432 pages / Canada

***

Sequels are rarely necessary, but if you found the first book excessively grim and hopeless, Children of The Handmaid's Tale will provide some much-needed, hard-earned relief. Eventually.

Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

2019 / Audiobook/ebook / 656 pages / UK

****

I re-read Pullman's classic trilogy in-between the prequel and this sequel, so got more out of the continuing story of the almost-grown-up Lyra and Pantalaimon, respectively, than I did its scene-setting predecessor. It's similarly slow and ponderous, and the unambiguously magical setting feels considerably more humdrum and non-escapist than it did in Lyra's dimension-hopping youth. This is, of course, Pullman's heavy-handed point, and although it makes for a much duller and disposable trilogy, I'm still on board and the finale's likely going to be my most eagerly-awaited book of the next few years, credulous fanboy that I am.

Top 10 Seinfeld episodes

I've watched lots of Seinfeld on shuffle in the past, but recently decided to take it from the top.

Rating and reviewing 180 episodes ostensibly about nothing wasn't a chore I felt like putting myself through, so I decided to just enjoy watching it like some kind of normal person, only stressing over choosing some interchangeable favourites as it went along.

Ranking Christopher Eccleston Doctor Who

If Doctors are the nerdy child's equivalent of football teams, Christopher Eccleston is geographically 'my' Doctor, born a few miles closer to where I was than fellow underdog Paul McGann (though still about an hour's drive on the M6).

I've never felt any special attachment to his incarnation, but his relative scarcity in the canon – just the one run of episodes, not even hanging around for Christmas – makes him an interesting curio and means I'm not sick of seeing his mugging face like some of his more popular successors. There's also the extra novelty of his series being the debut year – definitive firsts, growing pains and all.

Here's what I reckon are The Top 11 Ninth Doctor Stories, for no more pressing reason than it was going to happen sooner or later and I felt like some light reading.

Ranking the Philip K. Dick novels

Read over four years, I don't know whether the benefit of hindsight and fallible memory make this more or less reliable than the lists I recklessly improvise in real time while reading along. I can't trust that my memories are real anyway.

Here are my The Top 46 Philip K. Dick Novels.

Alrightreads: Real Dicks

PKD's unpublishable non-SF novels. Written 1950–60.


Philip K. Dick, Gather Yourselves Together

1950 (published 1994) / Audiobook / 292 pages / USA

**

Even a bad Philip K. Dick book is usually worth reading for the throwaway ideas he packs in and Easter eggs reminding of better works. That's just one of many ways his debut novel fails to establish tradition. You can say that its vast emptiness mirrors the barren industrial setting, if you're feeling generous. There's some thoughtful amateur philosophising amid the tedious romance, but it's not worth the trouble of seeking out.

Philip K. Dick, Voices from the Street

1952 (published 2007) / Audiobook / 301 pages / USA

**

Like many young writers, at least back then, part of Dick's learning curve was learning to cut down and not be so comprehensively dull. The semi-autobiographical character study is realistic but a chore to sit through for completion's sake. This failed novel didn't see generous publication for more than half a century, and he probably would've preferred it to stay that way.

Philip K. Dick, Mary and the Giant

1953-55 (published 1987) / Audiobook / 230 pages / USA

**

A worthwhile exercise in writing a three-dimensional female character – not that he'd put those lessons to use in most of his books – this unpleasant soap opera is less a waste of time than his other early 'mainstream' books, but only because it's shorter.

Philip K. Dick, The Broken Bubble (a.k.a. The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt)

1956 (published 1988) / Audiobook / 246 pages / USA

*

Dick had written at least one sci-fi classic by this point and was on a roll, so to keep returning to this less fertile ground of contemporary California is just a waste of time, not to mention financially unwise. This tale of age-gap swingers is pervier than most, but with repetitive character types and situations, the non-sci-fi has ended up being even more formulaic than the dystopias, so not the change of pace you might expect. It might be more polished than the earlier ones, I was too bored to pay attention, but the goodwill's run out.

Philip K. Dick, Puttering About in a Small Land

1957 (published 1985) / Audiobook / 291 pages / USA

*

If nothing else (I can't find much to appreciate), Dick's failed populist novels are a chronicle of the changing times, with the ubiquitous radio repair shop now offering TV repairs, more liberated sex talk and characters fussing over horror comics. The straying couples have children this time around, which might reflect Dick's own changing circumstances, I don't care enough to look it up.

Philip K. Dick, In Milton Lumky Territory

1958 (published 1985) / Audiobook / 213 pages / USA

***

Now that we've all got flying cars and android butlers, this tale of typewriters, small-town enterprise and pursuing the low-key American dream seems as exotic as the sci-fi worlds. More light-hearted and wholesome than his previous realist novels, this is one of the few that could serve as a welcome break in your chronological reading rather than a completist chore.

Philip K. Dick, Confessions of a Crap Artist

1959 (published 1975) / Audiobook / 171 pages / USA

***

The best of Dick's non-SF novels, this was the only one that made it to print during his lifetime, and we wouldn't have been much worse off if the others had been left in a drawer. Loveable kook Jack Isidore is probably one of his best characters and a rare positive treatment of someone with mental illness, at least in the early PKD canon, especially in contrast to the self-destructive neurotypicals he cohabits with.

Philip K. Dick, The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike

1960 (published 1984) / Audiobook / 223 pages / USA

**

A dark Californian Gothic tale of bitter rivalry, spousal abuse, race relations and remarkable skulls, this is one of his better realist novels, but we're back to being overlong and boring again.

Philip K. Dick, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland

1960 (published 1986) / Audiobook / 199 pages / USA

*

I was hoping for more from the non-SF PKD apocrypha, but most have little going for them beyond providing a time capsule of American society and attitudes. By this point, the themes and characters feel recycled even more than in his most phoned-in dystopias. He wisely decided to concentrate on his more profitable genre strengths from now on.

Alrightreads: Dawn of the Dick

PKD's early sci-fi novels. Written 1953–55.

Philip K. Dick, Vulcan's Hammer

1960 / Audiobook / 139 pages / USA

**

Whether or not it was really the first sci-fi novel he wrote, as Wikipedia's dubious bibliography claims, this is clearly a less assured writer expanding his prescient short story about AIs stealing AIs' jobs by throwing in generic sci-fi action rather than idisyncratic oddities. The uncharacteristically straightforward and methodical plot is refreshing, but lightweight.

Philip K. Dick, Dr. Futurity

1960 / Audiobook / 138 pages / USA

***

Heady themes like ethnic cleansing and euthenasia are the subjects of this early PKDystopia, dealt with in very trivial ways. Then our blacked-up hero goes on a pulpy time travel adventure featuring a literal time's arrow and it gets more fun.

Philip K. Dick, The Cosmic Puppets

1957 / Audiobook / 127 pages / USA

***

Like a precognitive audition for The Twilight Zone, this short early novel of suburban cosmic horror has very few of what would become established as PKD tropes, helping it to stand out in the canon if not the genre.

Philip K. Dick, Solar Lottery (a.k.a. World of Chance)

1955 / Audiobook / 188 pages / USA

***

The first distinctively PKD novel, its pot-luck dystopia is more satirical than credible, but could have been a classic with more recognition in the lottery of fame. The disparate plot strands don't pull together all that well, but that's the case for a lot of his books, even with experience. It's a lottery.

Philip K. Dick, The World Jones Made

1956 / Audiobook / 192 pages / USA

***

A particularly dark and philosophical work exploring moral relativism and determinism, lightened somewhat by compulsory aliens because it's the fifties.

Philip K. Dick, The Man Who Japed

1956 / Audiobook / 160 pages / USA

***

The satirical fascist dystopia is slowly maturing, but not as tangible as they'll be later, feeling much like the contemporary '50s but with interstellar travel and borrowing from Bradbury. You can probably read more into this tale of futile rebellion than the author concerned himself with when bashing out words for food.

Alrightreads: Finales II

Second last words.

Roger Zelazny, A Night in the Lonesome October

1993 / Audiobook / 280 pages / USA

***

Zelazny's last completed work was this more coy precursor to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, told from the unfamiliar perspective of the familiars of familiar characters. Nice for Victorian lit and horror fans, but one of those pet projets that was probably more fun to write than to read.

Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

1985 (pub.2006) / Ebook / 304 pages / USA

****

We can't watch these lectures, but since Carl talks like he writes, there's not much difference between these transcripts and his other books, until you get to the Q&A at the end where he patiently responds to people who think they know better. This veers towards the Demon-Haunted World side of things, but still takes time out to contemplate the cosmos which is what I'm here for.

Gillian G. Gaar, Nirvana's In Utero

2006 / Ebook / 105 pages / USA

***

It took me about a decade after my first nonplussed listen to appreciate the connoisseur's Nirvana album, but it still wasn't quite my favourite. I was hoping that an insightful commentary might tip that, but instead got a methodical chronicle of studio dates, repetitive statements of intent and overblown near-controversy. Nevermind.

Harlan Ellison, The Voice from the Edge, Vol. 5: Shatterday & Other Stories

1966-2003 (collected 2011) / Audiobook / USA

***

The last of the curated audio archives, this feels more bent towards the horrific, but it turns out I've said that about most of them. A semi-autobiography, comedy and romance with a unicorn keep things varied.

Faves: 'Shatterday,' 'Basilisk,' 'Goodbye to All That.'

Worsties: 'In the Oligocenskie Gardens,' 'Shattered Like a Glass Goblin,' 'Susan.'


Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 4: The Tempest

2018-19 (collected 2019) / Ecomics / 256 pages / UK

***

The conclusion to this drawn-out, self-satisfied series was Alan Moore's retirement from comics (so he says), and it's a fitting finale as the pop-culture omnipastiche catches up to the comics of the writer's own upbringing and early career. Bitter and twisted to the end, he also takes the opportunity for some parting pot shots at the state of the industry and culture generally. He was the best.

Alrightreads: Fourquels

Further unambitious sequels. Stick with what you know for diminishing returns.

Robert A. Heinlein, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

1985 / Audiobook / 382 pages / USA

**

By the end of his illustrious career, Heinlein was mainly writing for himself and established fans who still cared. I've read some of the shared universe books that this one references, but that didn't lend any goodwill to this pervy retro farce. It doesn't take itself seriously, but it's never actually funny either.

Evan Dorkin based on the story by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

1991 / Ecomic / 75 pages / USA

***

It's not exactly a cinematic classic, but the Bill & Ted sequel was one of the defining films of my childhood and the one I'd most like to see in a restored director's cut, incorporating the various randomly deleted scenes that are still present in this premature comic version. It also fascinatingly suggests that Bill Sadler's Death was going to be an unwieldy skeleton of some kind, seemingly something of a last-minute decision after they'd got more important stuff like the costumes sorted. The adaptation was efficient, I get more of the references now than when I was six.

Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham, Miracleman Book Four: The Golden Age

1990-91 (collected 1992) / Ecomics / 160 pages / UK

****

Alan Moore left this comic in a right state, but Gaiman embraces the disconcerting utopia, telling disparate tales of people, gods and resurrected android replicants trying to find their place in the new world order. By focusing on the little people it's more relatable than Moore's Miracleman became, but without those three volumes of context I imagine it would be pretty impenetrable. It's hard enough when you're following along.

Harlan Ellison, The Voice from the Edge Vol. 4: The Deathbird & Other Stories

1957-2010 (collected 2011) / Audiobook / USA

****

These audio anthologies are a long way from scraping the barrel yet, with most of these stories and novellas being winners or nominees of some prestigious award or other. The tone's generally pretty grim, but nothing you should take too seriously.

Faves: 'The Deathbird,' 'The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore,' 'Count the Clock That Tells the Time.'

Worsties: 'Ellison Wonderland,' 'The Creation of Water,' 'The Beast Who Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.'

Peter Watts, Echopraxia

2014 / Audiobook / 383 pages / Canada

**

Blindsight is one of the best modern sci-fi books I've read, so I had reasonable hopes for the sequel that didn't take long to get dashed. The author continues his philosophical discourse through transhumans and unconvincing technology and pushes the space gothic vibes further, but he neglects to make the story entertaining this time around.

Alrightreads: Threequels

As in third books, etc. Not sequels with an elaborate lisp.


Hergé, Tintin in America (Tintin en Amérique)

1931-32 (collected 1932) / Ecomics / 62 pages / Belgium

**

Fresh from his racist hunting holiday in the Congo, the intrepid reporter sets his sights on cleaning up Chicago's gangland with a detour via Red Indian country. It's an interesting period piece of the time, but it's mainly a tedious catalogue of death-defying escapes from suffocation, drowning, lynching, freefall, burial, explosion, high-speed collision, industrial mincing and various bullets, nearly all thanks to sheer luck more than wits. Sometimes the dog helped.

Alan Moore and John Totleben, Miracleman Book Three: Olympus

1987-89 (collected 1991) / Ecomics / 128 pages / UK/USA

***

As happened with late Swamp Thing around the same time, Moore's Miracleman swan song goes off the rails as he turns it into the sci-fi pet project he wants to write instead, narrated in that same highfalutin voice all his pompous supermen have. It was a struggle to get through, except when it briefly becomes action-packed in his most unflinchingly violent comic issue outside of From Hell. John Totleben admirably keeps up.

John Darnielle, Black Sabbath's Master of Reality

2008 / Ebook / 101 pages / USA

**

Likely the most lightweight and pointless entry in the 33⅓ series, the Mountain Goats guy eschews the customary technical analysis and oral history approaches to tell what's presumably a fictional story of an institutionalised teenager finding comfort in Black Sabbath. From this perspective, feelings, dubious folk tales and false assumptions rule over facts. You won't learn anything, but there probably wasn't that much to learn anyway.

Danny Wallace, Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play

2008 / Ebook / 406 pages / UK

***

The contrived scrapes were going to get stale sooner or later. This crisis of maturity is more relatable and less wacky, thus less entertaining.

William Gibson and Johnnie Christmas, William Gibson's Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay

2018-19 (collected 2019) / Ecomics / 136 pages / USA/Canada

**

Alien³ has a bad reputation, centred around it not being very good. Its overriding grimness means that not even the nostalgia of it being the first 18-certificate film I was excitingly allowed to watch more than a decade early doesn't give me any fondness for it. I didn't expect William Gibson's rejected pitch to be any better, and with its dull and formulaic plot and bizarre lack of Ripley not excused by the other returning characters, it's probably worse. Still, it's always satisfying to see these curious artefacts unearthed and presented authentically in spite of taste.