AwkwardSD’s Best of 2025

Your end-of-the-year source for the best opinions on books, movies, and music

Despite what the subhead says, 2025 is the first year where I consciously thought: hmm, maybe I’m not as in-tune with pop culture as I thought. Perhaps that’s been the case for a long while and everyone has been too polite to tell me. Whatever the case, I’m getting older and I’m losing my edge. At one point, I felt like an authority on these kinds of things, but now I feel like I don’t watch or listen or read widely enough to be knowledgeable on the State of Art in 2025.

But if you write in some capacity and don’t put out a retrospective, you lose your writing license. Substack even has a secret police they send to your home and force you to opine at gunpoint.

So let’s get it out of the way, shall we?

Favorite books that came out this year

Old Soul - Susan Barker

This is exactly what I’m looking for in horror literature. Susan Barker’s story of a strange, ageless woman who’s been stealing souls throughout history sounds pretty heady (and nerdy) on paper, but Barker’s story is the most elegant, literary and unsettling book I’ve read since Our Share of Night. I wanted to reread this one the moment it ended.

Hey You Assholes - Kyle Seibel

Not only is Seibel’s story collection the funniest book I read this year, it’s also one of the most subversively touching. Siebel’s writing reminds me a little of Tim Robinson’s humor (especially in this year’s incredible The Chair Company): absurd set-ups that nonetheless reveal (and then elevate) the deep humanity underneath, which is sometimes not apparent until the last gut-punch of a sentence.

The Death of Us - Abigail Dean

A story of a husband and wife who were victims of a horrible Golden State Killer-esque home invasion. Years later, their tormenter has been captured and they’re asked to testify at his trial. Dean forgoes a lot of true crime plotbeats to create a lovely, harrowing vision of the ways a single act of violence can fester throughout our lives, as well as the resilience of not becoming defined by it.

Better to Beg - Kirsti MacKenzie

The voice and energy of this book is incredible. Better to Beg follows two musicians—Viv and Hux—in the early 2000s who set off on tour from New York to Los Angeles. As their fame and notoriety grow (thanks to the then-new blog buzz), Viv and Hux are forced to deal with both internal and external pressures of artistic integrity, romance, drugs, bachelorette parties, and shady record promoters. I love a good friends-making-art-together story, and MacKenzie’s feels more authentic than most.

Freelance - Kevin Kearney
It might be reductive to describe Freelance as a story about a possessed/haunted rideshare app, but it’s also such a cool idea for a novel that I’m jealous I didn’t think of it. But rather than Black Mirror’s obnoxious finger-wagging, Kearney treats his techsptopian horror story with intelligence and grace, capturing how something so malevolent not only feels alluring in our current capitalistic timeline, but frighteningly normal.

Favorite book that didn’t come out this year

I bookended (heh, get it) my year of reading with Westerns: Larry McMurtry’s epic Lonesome Dove and Charles Portis’ True Grit. While I enjoyed Lonesome Dove, there were many times I almost lost interest. I get why it’s a favorite, but I think the whole “hooker with a heart of gold” aspect of Lorena—really the only constant woman character in the novel—kinda wore on my nerves.

True Grit, on the other hand, is a goddamned delight through and through. I remember watching the Coen’s adaptation and thinking about the dialogue: ah! how very Coen-esque. But it was all right there in the source material! True Grit’s an incredible adventure—as close as “timeless” as they come—and Donna Tartt’s reading of the audio book is probably the best I’ve ever heard.

I’m keeping the Western theme going in 2026 with Danielewski’s new 1200-page epic Tom’s Crossing. Anybody down for a decade-long book club?

My year in reading

I had a damn good reading year. Honestly, if I had more stamina, I’d write about a lot more books on this list. Feel free to hit me up if you want some recommendations.

Movies

Eddington - Eddington is a sneaky epic. While pop culture is still kinda dancing around the Covid-19 pandemic, Ari Aster tackled it head-on with a Western (I guess I like Westerns now, okay??!) set in mid 2020, where phones and social media take the place of guns and shoot-outs (at least until the actual, breathtaking shootout at the end). An ambitious, fearless, messy, imperfect encapsulation of that year. I wish all movies swung this hard.

The Naked Gun - I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard in the theater.

Weapons - Not as scary as I wanted it to be, but amazingly original. Definitely earned its place on the shelf of modern horror classics.

Bring Her Back - This is a tough movie, but for those who are into extreme horror, there’s so much to admire. The imagery, tension, and subject matter are relentless, but there’s also a strange watchability and dark-dark-dark sense of humor that set it apart from, say, When Evil Lurks or Speak No Evil (the original) or any of those types of movies that make you lose faith in humanity.

One Battle After Another - The patient, instantly-iconic, almost-Hitchockian car chase through the Mojave desert is worth the admission price of this movie alone. But you also have Sean Penn (his mouth movements deserve an Oscar of their own) and Leo DiCaprio playing respective idiots who believe they’re the main characters in a story that’s not written about or for them.

Albums

Mclusky - The World is Still Here and So Are We

Mclusky’s first album in 21 years is their best. The unhinged rage, the sardonic humor, and the abrasiveness is the perfect antidote to a year when we saw so many people and entities bowing to authoritarianism.

Rosalía - LUX

Operatic and beautiful. Also unapologetically weird and ambitious. Of course Bjork appears on one of these songs—it’s the perfect fit.

Home Front - Watch It Die

Home Front is like Cock Sparer mixed with Devo. I’ve never been a huge fan of oi punk, but goddamn it, I can’t stop pumping my fist to these songs. Might even get some steel-toed boots now.

Viagra Boys - viagr aboys

I’ve loved Viagra Boys for a long time, but they’ve always been a singles band for me; their albums never feel quite complete. viagr aboys, on the other hand, feels like a huge evolution, where the band had a cohesive vision and stuck to it. And what a banger of a vision it is.

Lorde - Virgin

Sorry, Lorde is the best pop star right now. I don’t make the rules.