Music (Tracks)
… because Spotify Wrapped doesn’t know shit about me, I swear.
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When The Sun Hits – Slowdive
- The start of this year featured a strange and unexpected dive into the world of Shoegaze, a stream of alt-rock where characterized by the guitarists having more pedals than a warehouse of bicycles. The genre can live up to its name, layers upon layers of reverb drowning the vocals, and your senses, while the band stare lovingly at their own feet, or more likely their navels. Not this song. This song takes me places, and makes me nostalgic for a place I’ve never been, heartbroken over someone I’ve never met.
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The Mind Electric – Miracle Musical
- For the four other songs in this list, my inclusion of them doubles as recommendation. Not so with this one. To me, it sounds like what your dreams would look like while someone frenetically cut out parts of your unconscious brain and put them back in new, avant-garde orientations. Or an opera from the future, that has been copied and transferred between a thousand different VHS tapes of increasing degrees of dereliction. Or a troubled musician’s attempts at telling their life story while being electrocuted repeatedly.
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There, There – Radiohead
- Radiohead.
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Stars – Philip Quast
- This year I finally, finally watched Les Mis, and I can’t believe nobody had told me to see it before. There are a lot of great tracks in the play, and there’s a lot of debate over which one is the best. Unfortunately for everyone who thinks another song earns the top spot, they have failed to factor in a crucial detail, which is that they are wrong, and I am right. (And no one sings it like Quast. NO ONE.)
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Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks – The National
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I listened through High Violet about once every two weeks, in 1st Year. It started off sounding sort of fuzzy and out-of-focus, the mix feeling murky and uninviting, the tracks repetitive and meek. For this reason I thought it would make great, unobtrusive background to my studying, only to discover how hard it was to turn my attention completely away (though in all fairness, few activities can’t pull me from schoolwork). And I found that I loved it more and more with each listen, it was like a whole different album had been hiding there the whole time, so understated and subtle I’d missed it before. It went from a complete dud to my ears to a highlight of the years listening.
But one night turned it into an all-time great. It was move-out day for the Hub. For those not in the know, it’s a Church of Ireland/Methodist chaplaincy students can live in during Uni. And I loved it. There’s too much, far too much, to say on why. I suppose the main reason is that I’d spent the last 7 years of school longing to belong and never quite achieving it, on some level thinking that maybe I couldn’t, and then I went to Hub, and before you knew it I did, and I knew I did. That simple experience, of feeling known and enjoyed… God is good.
But the end crept up on me, without me noticing. That morning people packed up their stuff and left, one-by-one, and it still didn’t feel real. Then one of my best friends went to say goodbye to me and his face told me that no, it was. I cried, then, though you wouldn’t have thought I was. Tears often take a while on their journey from my heart to my eyes. But later, when I was the last left, and the house was still and dark and I saw then that what was, was, and wouldn’t be again, that the 18th house of the street would be there again in a year and would be filled with new people and and new voices and new jokes, but the House 18 I knew was gone and burned to the ground before me. The tears finished their journey, the Caleb Water Cycle fulfilled. And I put the album on and it was more beautiful and sweet and sad and jubilant than I’d ever heard it, than I’ll probably ever hear it again. This song is emblazoned on my heart.
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Books (Fiction)
- The Remains of the Day
- I’ll love sci-fi and fantasy until the day I die. That being said, the discovery, upon reading this book, that I could enjoy literary fiction just as much, was a delight. As was the novel itself; it’s a beautiful period piece about duty and love and how good we are at ignoring the truth that threatens us. The kind of book that’s good for the soul.
- Cloud Atlas
- I love novels that play with the form itself, and the way this book does it is truly unique. It’s really a set of stories that interweave with one another – I won’t say how, I think experiencing it yourself is far more fun – and despite being entirely different in setting and time-period and even writing-style, they come together to make a surprisingly cogent whole. Ghostwritten, also by this author and the work preceding this one, was also excellent, and actually in some ways even more enjoyable. But Cloud Atlas, I’m very sure, has mysteries hidden beneath the words on the page, and will have to be revisited at a later date.
- Tomorrow and T_o_morrow and Tomorrow
- I have a terrible habit of ignoring my mom when she recommends things to me, and I’m really a fool to do so when she keeps bringing gems like this to my attention. The concept of the book, friends who start a video-game company, hooked me immediately for obvious reasons. But the questions it snuck in, right under my nose, fantasy worlds and the real, success and art, identity, disability, and love in all its forms, they’re still rattling round my head.
- House of Leaves
- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAin all seriousness, there’s a lot of hype around this book. I think it’s a bit pretentious, a bit proud of itself for being so big and heavy and hard to read. I think it took more than a leaf out of Infinite Jest (which I’ve just begun), and large chunks of it are insultingly crass and totally pointless. But. It’s like nothing I’ve ever read before. It’s been bloated to unneeded scale, coated sometimes in too many strange bells and whistles, but there’s an excellent story in here, one frightening and sad and, in some places, terribly terribly deep
- Monday Starts On Saturday
- This book is trully bonkers. It reminded me, perhaps because of the Soviet-bloc-sci-fi connection, of the short stories of Stanislaw Lem, which I loved. Like them, this book is zany and verbose in equal measure. It’s so strange it’s hard to follow at points, and it wasn’t until the end of the first quarter that I had any solid grasp on what kind of novel I was even reading. Few books have me smiling and laughing out loud like this one, and there’s some really interesting satire around science and bureaucracy in here too.