The Work of Selecting the Books and Movies of the Year
In an age of inattention, it’s hard to imagine that most people are seriously reading and watching enough media besides TikTok clips to competently select the "best" of it
The annual ritual of crowning “Book of the Year,” “Movie of the Year,” and similar accolades often unfolds with the pomp and circumstance of an ancient coronation, albeit one rendered “lighter than air” by the excessive application of insipid modern marketing methods. The very notion of selecting a definitive “best” from the Golden Corral all-you-can-eat buffet’s worth of cultural leftovers served up each year amounts to a venture teetering on the brink of absurdity. It’s a pursuit undermined by infinite choice and limited time, where the breadth of content — most of it eminently forgettable — vastly outstrips the capacity of any panel, polling group, or algorithm to consume and evaluate. This process, ostensibly a celebration of the best our popular culture has to offer, often devolves into a glorified game of Family Feud, underscored by takemakers struggling to guess what everyone else guesses is probably the book or film of the year.1
Each year, thousands of books are published; hundreds of mainstream films are released. Yet, the typical awards season narrows its gaze to a mere 10-15 titles that purportedly speak to the direction of the takewinds, the zeitgeist, the discourse, the current thing, &c. This selection process, however democratic or expert-driven it claims to be, inevitably skews towards works that have garnered the most media attention or the best marketing blitz, thus amplifying the echo chamber of critical and commercial acclaim. It's as though we're trying to sample the ocean's depth with a teaspoon, declaring whatever droplet we retrieve as representative of the vast expanse.
This reductionist approach to cultural appreciation is not just absurd; it's fundamentally flawed. The quest to quantify and award cultural achievements with titles like “Book of the Year” or “Movie of the Year” grapples with a stark reality: the average person's capacity — even the average critic’s capacity2 — to consume these works is far more limited than the volume of content produced annually. A deeper dive into the numbers reveals a world of consumption that's extraordinarly constrained, further complicating the idea of a universally agreed-upon “best.”
Recent polling paints paint a picture of reading habits that might surprise those who assume the text-heavy digital age has turned everyone into voracious readers or viewers.3 According to Gallup, the average number of books read by Americans has seen a decline, down to 12.6 in recent years from a higher average of 15.6 in 2016.4 Interestingly, this isn't so much about fewer people reading, but about people reading fewer books overall. The percentage of Americans not reading any books in a year hovers around 17%, consistent with past decades, but the share of those reading more than 10 books a year has significantly dropped from 35% in 2016 to 27%.5
This trend isn't uniform across all demographics. College graduates, traditionally among the most avid readers, have seen a substantial drop in the number of books read, from an average of 21.1 books a year between 2002 and 2016 to just 14.6 recently. This decline is mirrored, though less sharply, in other groups, with women and older Americans also reading fewer books than in past years.
Looking at digital consumption, the Pew Research Center reports that while e-book and audiobook readership has seen some growth, it remains a minority activity. About 28% of Americans have read an e-book, and 14% have listened to an audiobook in the last year, indicating that print books still dominate reading preferences.6 Only a small fraction of Americans are "digital-only" readers,7 further highlighting the varied nature of book consumption. Average book reading figures also mask significant differences in reading habits across age and gender. According to Gallup, women read more books (15.7) than men (9.5), and younger adults tend to read slightly more than their older counterparts.8
When it comes to movies, the situation is presumably similar, with individuals navigating an ever-expanding sea of content but often finding themselves limited by time, access, and interest. In any case, a wealth of anecdotal evidence suggests even ferocious critics pay little attention to what they’re screening, preferring to use it as background entertainment while posting, playing games on their phones, napping, or sliding into some smaller account’s DMs, then repeating some Rotten Tomatoes-style talking points about it when socializing with peers.9 This environment raises fundamental questions about the value and validity of “best of” accolades in cultural domains. Given the disparities in consumption habits — not to mention the subjective nature of quality and impact — awards like “Book of the Year” or “Movie of the Year” can seem at best a weather vane showing the direction of the takewinds and at worst a misleading gauge of universal acclaim that can be harnessed for further marketing efforts.
If, however, these silly awards must continue, how should they be conducted? Rather than striving for a definitive ranking or award, perhaps a broader acknowledgment of heterodox tastes, interests, and consumption patterns could offer a richer, more inclusive appreciation of cultural achievements.
But this raises a further question: whose consumption patterns? Not everyone — not even every critic — has the time, resources, or inclination to rake through this year’s rubbish to uncover the handful of pearls that have been tossed before the swinish multitude. Most people rely on half-remembered or quickly-skimmed recommendations, reviews, and preexisting awards to guide their choices, making the stakes of these selections even higher.10 But what is lost in this funneling process are voices and stories that might not fit the prevailing narrative or fail to catch the fleeting attention of the Family Feud-playing gatekeepers, those humanoid proto-AIs11 trying to guess what everyone else guesses they want.12
And let's not even start on the idea of using actual AI to select winners. While it might seem like a novel solution to the problem of human bias and limited capacity, it introduces a whole new set of complications. Can an algorithm truly appreciate the nuanced artistry of a novel or the emotional depth of a film? Likely, it would merely replicate existing biases, prioritizing certain of-the-moment “culturally significant” qualities that might be as superficial as they are codifiable — though it would probably do a far faster job of it.
So, what's the best solution? Honestly, I’d dispense with the outdated notion of awards seasons altogether. These accolades, as much as they aim to celebrate artistic achievement, often end up constraining our understanding and appreciation of culture to a narrow band of visibility. They're far less definitive than, say, selecting the MVP of a sports league, where statistics and performance can be quantitatively assessed within a closed and sufficiently representative data set.
In the vast, sprawling landscape of books, movies, and other cultural detritus, there is no single story, voice, or vision that can claim supremacy. Our quest for the “best” should not overshadow life’s rich pageant of artistic expression that defies easy categorization or comparison. Instead of elevating a select few pop cultural Chicken McNuggets13 to the pedestal of “Book of the Year” or “Movie of the Year,” let's embrace the plurality of experiences and perspectives to be found anywhere that the creators actually care. Let's celebrate the weird, the flawed, the profane — for in them, we find what’s left of our shared humanity.
This is regardless of whether they’ve read or watched it. Indeed, most of the time, the best way to mine the critical consensus — as an old mentor of mine once told me — is simply to read other reviews and parrot what most of them are saying, Rotten Tomatoes-style: “Back then, people usually just skimmed one review in one readily available magazine, if they read anything at all, so browsing the entirety of the still-disorganized World Wide Web of Lies to survey the opinions of Stanley Kauffman, Owen Gleiberman, and J. Hoberman carried zero risk. Peter Travers, in particular, was a great ripoff resource because Travers reflected the popular consensus about as well as any favor-currying hack during the pre-Rotten Tomatoes age. My mentor would then spend an hour or so typing his own review, a paraphrase of whatever was in these other pieces that he believed was a fair return for the 50 bucks he received for each article.”
Especially nowadays, since most of them are just on their phones 24/7/365, skimming takes from higher-status posters and then offering slight variations on those take for “consumption” by their “followers.”
Kanye West, to his everlasting credit, proudly boasts about never having read a book. My father made the same claim. If pressed, I will say something similar by way of this quote from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: “For my own part, I am resolved never to read any book but my own, as long as I live. I shall lock up my study door and throw away the key.”
This data is self-reported, so it’s almost certainly lower — no respondent has probes attached to their eyeballs to verify whether they’re finishing every single footnote or acknowledgements section, though this is my dorky standard for posting a review on Goodreads. I’d guess the average number of books read is somewhere between 3 and 5, of which more than half are either Barnes & Noble-grade softcore erotica or Harvey Porter, Boy Wizard-style YA tomes.
Again, this is self-reported, and it’s likely still way too high. I take no pride whatsoever in finishing books, or any tasks for that matter — you should work smarter, not harder, and even “Doctor” (honorary!) Samuel Johnson was willing to abandon a text once he got the gist of it — but I recall being fascinated by how the graduate students would lug around books, perhaps to give the illusion of reading, yet do little more than skim reviews (of course, I’ve written about this phenomenon, too).
Audiobooks with a good narrator whose voice still plays well at 2x speed are wonderful for tedious commutes. Also, if you’re someone who prefers to watch or listen to media at 1.5x-2.0x speed, anime is a great option, given how long many of the shots are held and how often they’re repeated, usually for budgetary reasons (recall the repetitive fighting and “hulking up” sequences in Dragonball Z).
If all books were available in this format — and thanks to Anna’s Archive, most are — I’d be among them.
See the footnote, supra, about softcore, mass-market erotica and YA fiction. That stuff does numbers, and women read the heck out of it.
One of my relatives, as I’ve noted previously, would hurry to buy tickets to the latest MCU or DCU film, then fall asleep almost immediately. He’d wake up to do a little online gambling or posting, go outside to his car to smoke a blunt or eat something, and return for the post-credits sequence. Such a person is the perfect 2024 content consumer, paying money to passively consume content that functions somewhat like the semi-degraded food, the “cud,” regurgitated from the reticulorumen of a ruminant.
A book or film has a better shot of finding itself in the running for the big awards if it’s already won a few big awards. There are exceptions to this rule, but it’s mostly airtight: if you don’t have it, you can’t get it — and if you can’t get it, you don’t have it.
Small language models (SLMs), if you will.
For my money, some of the most interesting films ever made, such as Freddy Got Fingered and Southland Tales, can be found among those that are widely regarded as the worst films ever made. In a few cases, the critical consensus shifts and these come to regarded as classics, but usually this isn’t the case.
Dipped in the Szechuan Sauce that once launched more hot takes than Helen launched ships.
Freddy Got Fingered is a Criterion selection this month. Time is a flat circle and Happy Women's History Month.
I've converted to digital, because the backlight helps me see and it's easier to mark passages and find them again.