Each year, I like to reflect on the media I interacted with in. Since 2023, I’ve been tracking everything that I finish in a big list in my diary. In 2024, I finished 122 things, which I felt was a good effort! In this post I’ll detail my recommendations so you can find the best of those 122. Note that these are things I finished this year, so some of them are old or came from a different year, but for most of these it was my first time experiencing them.

Books

Winner: The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott

For the longest period this year, I thought Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton was going to be my choice, and then I read The Rain Heron. When I finished the first part, I jokingly described it as The Lorax for adults. After I finished the second part, my mouth dropped open and I got chills, which doesn’t normally happen for me when reading. The book is set in an unamed country in the middle of a coup, but I like to think it’s Australia. It revolves around themes of the environment, duty, and tragedy. I can’t recommend it enough.

Highly commended: Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt.

This is one that isn’t my usual genre but I enjoyed it very much. It’s an exploration of family, as a grandmother adopts her granddaughter while her own daughter is dealing with a of a drug addiction. It’s small-scale and incredibly touching. I didn’t cry while reading this, but I came awfully close.

Films

Winner: Inside Out 2 (2024)

Pixar is renowned for their emotional storytelling and they are back to their best with this one. I watched it on a plane which is always embarassing as I was then trying to hide my free-flowing tears from the person seated next to me. In general, I think the Inside Out films do very well with their themes. In the first one, Joy realises that you can’t only be happy all the time, and sometimes you have to be sad. Rather annoyingly, this feels like the same theme of this movie, just slightly extrapolated. Still, I liked the conceptual ideas it grapples with, particularly the multi-faceted approach to identity. It’s well-acted and a great film overall even if it does make fun of ethnomusicology.

Highly Commended: American Fiction (2023)

This is a great satire of book publishing as an African American author tries to parody diversity tropes only for his book to be taken seriously by everyone. It’s very witty and becomes very meta as it goes along, which I really enjoy. I think it’s a fascinating dissection of identity politics, but it does so in a very clever way. Without delving too much into the politics of it, I do think diversity initiatives etc have done a lot of good but this film does a great job of exploring how they can be harmful in extreme cases. It raises a lot of questions and I think that’s a great thing for any work of art.

Games

I’ll be honest, I only finished 4 this year and none of them I feel are particularly worth talking about. The one I’ll give a shoutout to is Professor Layton and the Curious Village, which I played on my phone. It’s a cute puzzle game originally released for the Nintendo DS but it works very well on modern phones with the big screens. The puzzles are brain-wracking and there’s a clever murder mystery plot to tie it all together. Worth playing but I don’t recommend too strongly unless you are really into puzzles

(TV) Shows

Winner: Boy Swallows Universe (2024)

A great semi-biographical tale of a young boy who gets swept up into Brisbane’s underground crime ring. It’s incredible for two reasons. One, it’s a Netflix original, which are usually hit or miss and two, it’s an Australian production, which are especially hit or miss. Somehow it manages to pull through. The book was one of my favourites this year and the show is an amazing adaption. It was clearly made with a lot of love, and it manages that perfect Aussie blend of humour while telling what is in all a dark story.

Highly Commended: One Piece (2023)

I don’t watch anime, so I knew nothing of this going into it, other than that it was one of those huge Japanese properties. It had a humongous budget, rumoured to be around $1 million per episode, and it shows. It is sleek and a very fun action-adventure series. To me it felt a lot like Pirates of the Caribbean in a more fantastical setting: the humour is very similar but the world is more crazy than Earth. It’s got quite a touching story and I didn’t feel embarassed watching it which is always a positive with adaptions like these.

There you have it! What were your favourite things you saw or interacted with in 2024? Let me know in the comments below. I am very keen for recommendations for the new year!