Here are the list of books I finished in 2025:

• The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge — David McCullough
• Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy — Cathy O’Neil
• A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator’s Rise to Power — Paul Fischer
• Fever Beach — Carl Hiaasen
• Exodus — Peter F. Hamilton
• Nuclear War: A Scenario — Annie Jacobsen
• Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us — Sam Kean
• Is a River Alive? — Robert Macfarlane
• Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood — Edward M. Hallowell
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — Gabrielle Zevin
• Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI — Ethan Mollick
• Mickey 7 — Edward Ashton
• Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism — Sarah Wynn-Williams
• Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe — Steven H. Strogatz
• The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma — Mustafa Suleyman
• Beacon 23 — Hugh Howey
• Odyssey — Stephen Fry
• Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World — Jill Jonnes
• The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values — Brian Christian

My goal was 24 books and I read… 20. This is the first time in years I didn’t hit my goal! Ooof. I was probably too busy listening to Benson Boone.

Another year in the books. Another year of music listened and logged. The list mostly remains the same but with some really fun surprises.

1. Benson Boone
2. Black Sabbath
3. The Murder City Devils
4. Hot Water Music
5. Social Distortion
6. AFI
7. Bad Religion
8. Dispatch
9. Explosions in the Sky
10. Propagandhi

Let’s talk about Benson Boone.

Sometime over the summer, one of this kiddos came home from camp raving about Benson Boone. It turned into the soundtrack of our lives. Every time we were in a car, they asked to play Benson Boone (which was conveniently hooked up to my Spotify account).

Of course, it was also played constantly on the speakers in the house… also hooked up to my account. We listened to so much damn Benson Boone this past year (6 months even!) that my Spotify Wrapped showed me a fun statistic:

We (I) was one of the top 1% of global listeners in 2025.

That backflip though…

Here’s another “year-in-review” post (I’m done, I swear). Over the course of 2024, I read 30 books. My favorite books this year were Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and The Cuckoo’s Egg (I wrote about visiting the author at his Oakland house). My least favorite was easily Palo Alto (it was one of the few reviews I wrote this past year).

• Carl’s Doomsday Scenario (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #2) by Matt Dinniman
• Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann
• Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
• Caliban’s War (The Expanse, #2) by James S.A. Corey
• The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann
• Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
• Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
• The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
• Assembling California (Annals of the Former World, 4) by John McPhee
• The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest by David Roberts
• Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens by Steve Olson
• Dungeon Crawler Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #1) by Matt Dinniman
• Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris
• The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Clifford Stoll
• City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1) by Don Winslow
• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown
• Troy (Stephen Fry’s Great Mythology, #3) by Stephen Fry
• The PDA Paradox by Harry Thompson
• The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku
• California: An American History by John Mack Faragher
• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer
• Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter by Zoë Schiffer
• The Tetris Effect: The Game that Hypnotized the World by Dan Ackerman
• Death’s End (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #3) by Cixin Liu
• The Dark Forest (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #2) by Cixin Liu
• The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1) by Cixin Liu
• Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison
• Reading The Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth by Marcia Bjornerud
• Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

EDIT: Fixed hyperlinks. GoodReads changed how their reading challenge page is displayed and I did not update my parsing tool to account for this.

Last.fm has been diligently cataloging my music listening habits for nearly 20 (!!) years. Now that we’ve said goodbye to 2024, it’s time to look back at what I’ve been digging into. Compared to previous years, there are some interesting surprises. And stuff that is just absolutely the same as always.

1. Dispatch
2. Social Distortion
3. Hot Water Music
4. The Interrupters
5. Red Hot Chili Peppers
6. Angie Mattson
7. Aesop Rock
8. Guts
9. Natural Incense
10. The Juliana Theory

Dispatch and Hot Water Music have always consistently been in my top 3, (except for last year, where neither even made my top 10, weird). It’s no surprise that both of them rank up there as my favorite bands. I saw HWM earlier this year when they made their way back to the Bay Area.

Thanks to some iPhone photo memories, I was reminded of Angie Mattson early in the year — this is an artist who loved about 20 years ago and then literally dropped off the face of the Earth. Her music is no longer available on Spotify or Apple Music. I found a few videos that are still up on YouTube (who knows for how long), but other than the albums in my local library that Last.fm has logged, she apparently doesn’t exist anymore.

Social Distortion was coming back to town and I was so excited to see them. And then a few days before the show, I tore my ACL in a paintballing incident with friends (go figure, it was my first time ever playing paintball), and I could barely walk.

Fun times all around, really. Here’s hoping 2025 is even better — even though this year starts off with the letters W(ednesday) T(hursday) F(riday).

Previous years in music:

• 2023
• 2022
• 2021
• 2020

I didn’t do a great job of reviewing every book I read this year, but still read a good number of books this year. My Goodreads goal was 24 books and I hit 30.

This is down from 40 in 2022, 56 in 2021, and 60(!) in 2020. Kind of an interesting correlation between the pandemic years and what has happened as we’ve come out of various lockdowns (e.g., more activity outside is less time reading inside).

Anyway, this year’s list of books is below. My favorites were The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Tracers in the Dark. My least favorite was easily Blindsight.

• Apollo 8 by Jeffrey Kluger
• They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera
• Tracers in the Dark by Andy Greenberg
• Prequel by Rachel Maddow
• Imperial Deserter by Andrew Moriarty
• The Explosive Child [Sixth Edition]  by Ross W.Greene
• Blindsight by Peter Watts
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• The Last Island by Adam Goodheart
• Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
• Blasphemy by Douglas Preston
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
• The Ferryman by Justin Cronin
• Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Spy by David Wise
• Tyrannosaur Canyon by Douglas Preston
• Slow Horses by Mick Herron
• The End of the World Is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
• How Not to Kill Yourself by Clancy Martin
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• From Cold War to Hot Peace by Michael McFaul
• All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley
• Red Rising by Pierce Brown
• Heroes by Stephen Fry
• Trinity by Conn Iggulden
• The Monster’s Bones by David K. Randall
• Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright
• Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

Chuck Ragan of Hot Water Music (taken by me)

It’s time for the yearly (semi-yearly?) update of my favorite bands according to Last.FM. It is kind of all over the place this year!

1. Chuck Ragan
2. The Glitch Mob
3. Creedence Clearwater Revival
4. Vansire
5. The Lawrence Arms
6. AFI
7. The Interrupters
8. Deer Tick
9. Two Gallants
10. The Rolling Stones

It’s that time of year again! Thanks to Last.fm, we can compile all the songs and artists that I’ve listened to over the last year. The results? (Same as it ever was, really.)

1. Hot Water Music
2. Dispatch
3. Dramarama
4. AFI
5. Led Zeppelin
6. The Rolling Stones
7. The Who
8. Bob Dylan
9. Dire Straits
10. They Might Be Giants

Spotify has wrapped (which is fun and cool) and I had some initial opinions on it, via Twitter:

My Spotify Wrapped 2021 is just going to be kids songs all the way down, isn’t it?

Fortunately, it wasn’t! With regards to looking back at musical tastes, I’ve always been partial about Last.FM and it’s also a fun thing to look back on when I remember to grab the data in time — especially since Spotify Wrapped is fully baked around the beginning of December. (Though, that’s probably because a lot of people’s profiles will be overrun with Christmas music.)

My top artists for 2021 are:

1. Bad Religion
2. Bob Dylan
3. Dispatch
4. Fat Freddy’s Drop
5. The Sounds
6. Hot Water Music
7. Joe Strummer
8. Polyphia
9. Bing Crosby
10. The Beatles

Bad Religion tops the list due to reading their biography earlier this year and just really going back through their catalog remembering some of their songs.

It’s kind of interesting comparing it to my musical tastes from 10 years ago. Hot Water Music and Bob Dylan were there. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Oh, joy. What did I listen to this year in order to get through a global pandemic, lockdowns, an election and all that fun stuff? According to Last.fm

1. Dispatch
2. Hot Water Music
3. The Glitch Mob
4. Anti-Flag
5. Johnny Cash
6. Tropidelic
7. Rodrigo y Gabriela
8. Slightly Stoopid
9. Guts
10. The Rolling Stones

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been sending music data to Last.fm for nearly 15 years! Because of this, we can start doing some crazy things… like compiling a list of all top artists I listened to over this entire decade.

From 2010 to 2019, the list is:

1. Bob Dylan
2. Hot Water Music
3. Johnny Cash
4. State Radio
5. Dispatch
6. Daft Punk
7. Chuck Ragan
8. The Glitch Mob
9. Bad Religion
10. Frank Turner
11. Aesop Rock
12. DJ Shadow
13. Manu Chao
14. ait-J
15. Widespread Panic