What I've Been Doing in January: Animorphs and New Stuff

    Now that it’s February, I suppose its high time I share my goals for this year. Obviously, I have some of the regular goals: workout, eat better, get a better job, move out, yada yada yada. But I also established a yearly theme, an idea purported by CGP Grey.

    My yearly theme is this: To fix my relationship with nostalgia. Here’s the thing: During the last 6 months of 2020, not only were the vast majority of books I read rereads, but I don’t think I watched a single new show. No, instead I binged through several shows that I’d seen several times previously.

    Obviously I enjoy revisiting media that I’ve already ingested. I find a great deal of value in it, which is why I do it as often as I do. But I fear that in my perusal of things past, I’m missing out on new things. The 500 unread books that sit on my shelf gathering dust. The cultural touchstones that I’ve ignored.

    I broke up my yearly theme, since it is rather specific for a theme, into four seasonal, or quarterly, themes. The them for the first quarter is New Stuff. Either reading new books (or at the very list cycling books from my tbr shelf to my read shelf), new television shows, new movies, new music.

    In pursuit of that, what I read in January: On the Clock by Emily Guendelsberger; the Return, the Diversion, and the Ultimate, all by K.A. Applegate; Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley; and the Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White.

    To be honest, only two of those books were entirely new to me: On the Clock and the Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein. And only two moved from my tbr shelf to my read shelf: Frankenstein and the Dark Descent. And yes, the Animorphs books maybe should not even count towards my yearly reading goal. And yet, I’m quite satisfied with the ratio. It’s far better than any months’ reading from the latter half of 2020 (mostly dominated by my Animorphs reread; and yes, I do realize how I sound talking about the Animorphs).

    Lets move on to movies: I actually had a secondary goal for this year, to simply watch more movies. Possibly at the cost of watching TV shows, but we’ll work on that particular ratio during another season. I am proud to say, though, that I’m fairly certain I watched more movies in January than I had in the whole of 2020, at six. The movies were Like a Boss (2020), The Hunger Games (2012), Enola Holmes (2020), Kevin Hart’s Guide to Black History (2019), Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune miniseries (2003), and Pieces of a Woman (2020). Four of those movies were new to me! The same four movies were released within the last two years. For someone who is often years behind in media consumption, this is something I’m quite proud of.

    I did also discover some new music via spotify. A standout song is Svrcina’s “Meet Me on the Battlefield”, as well as watch some new TV: I’m slowly but surely working my way through Kim’s Convenience Store, binging a couple of episodes once or twice a week which is nice. I also started watching Wandavision, because I did.

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    Which leads me to my plans for February: I would like to power through the last four Animorphs books, put this reread behind me, so that I can start another reread with some friends I’ve managed to convince to read Animorphs alongside me. I also plan to watch a MCU movie per day in February, which will allow me to catch myself entirely up on the MCU while giving some wiggle room to skip days if I’m particularly busy. This means, however, that the only “new” movies I’m likely to watch in the coming month are the MCU movies I’ve skipped, which will be a far narrower ratio. I’m making my peace with that, though.