Preamble; in this essay I will use “- read, watch, listen to -“ as a shorthand for “consume” because I don’t like the word “consume”. I wish there was a better way to collectively refer to partaking of different media formats (books, podcasts, anime, tv shows, music, manga) but I haven’t found one, so - read/watch/listen to - it will be.

I don’t have that many criteria for what to read or how to choose what I read next. Though there are genres I gravitate towards, clusters of characteristics whose pull I feel stronger than other’s, I am mostly open to reading anything. My one criteria is that anything I - read, watch, listen to - should have a real possibility of being the best thing I ever have or ever will - read/watch/listen to - along some relevant characteristic.

To some, that might sound like a high bar. To others, low. And the first part of it is certainly high - the best - while the second part is low - along some relevant characteristic. “What are those characteristics”, you might ask, and I would have a hard time to answer. Usually it’s just a vibe based on a mix of public opinion and specific comments/recommendations from people I trust to have, if not my taste in media, then at least an identifiable taste in media that I can cross-reference with previous success of recommendations by that person.

To illustrate my process a bit more, this post will go through parts of my tbr shortlist and reading history to, for the former, say what I have an expectation might be outstanding of that piece of media, and for the latter, also whether that expectation held up.

My tbr consists solely of books right now. I recently caught up with One Piece, and have no other manga, anime, tv shows, or films in sight for the time being. One common theme that will run through my tbr is that, when approaching a new piece of media, I am very, very light on details about plot, character, or anything else that could be a spoiler. I rely very much on “vibes”, and heavily prefer to experience a book without knowing anything about its plot or characters beforehand. For many of these books, other than their vibe, I have at most only one or two data points about their contents, though Shogun is an exception. So, without further ado, here is a look at some of the books that are on my tbr, and why they got that spot.

Some books create their own relevant characteristic. Some examples of this are; Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson, Shogun, by James Clavell, and House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. From each of these books I get the vibe that they will offer something unique, though Cryptonomicon and Shogun’s uniquenesses are…related. From those two I expect to learn something new; from Cryptonomicon about cryptology, and from Shogun about Japanese. For Shogun, that’s mostly enough in itself for me to pick it up, but for Cryptonomicon I also have other influences pushing me to read it, namely that I have enjoyed Stephenson books in the past, all three; Snow Crash, Anathema, and The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, for different reasons. House of Leaves I have heard of as a horror-terror-thriller book that plays with the limits of its physical medium in a way other book don’t (or at least hadn’t, when it first came out). So these books I pick up purely for the promise of an entirely novel experience, that nothing else, or very few other things, can provide.

Some books I pick up purely on community sentiment. One example of this is Martha Wells’ Murderbot, which has racked up 6 Hugo and Nebula awards across its 6 entries - and that’s without taking into account the fact that Wells declined nominations for these contests for novellas 3, 4, and 5, and likely would have won those as well if she didn’t. When something sweeps the Hugos and the Nebulas for five years, you should take notice. I know nothing about this book other than that it’s sci-fi and that the main character is some sort of artificial intelligence, but all of this together is enough to think that it might be one of the best things I ever read in science fiction.

Some books I pick up because I get recommended it by two people from widely different communities, and who I expect to have very few overlapping influences. For example, both “booktuber” Daniel Greene and essayist Scott Alexander have praised Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart and its two sequels as something that melds together fantasy and sex/romance incredibly well into one coherent series. I quirk up when I hear recommendations like this from two unentangled sources as different as these two are. They are likely to have enjoyed different things in these books, or maybe the things that were done well were done so well that they both liked it, despite their other differences. In either case, I take this as a generally good signal that a work is of high quality.

Those books were among the wordier to articulate from my tbr. In less words; I think Malazan could be the best epic fantasy I read, due to its promise of world-building and characters. I think Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asphodel might fall into the same category as House of Leaves and Cryptonomicon, but this one I have even less idea of what it contains. Moltke on the Art of War might be one of the most important texts about victory ever written. The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry promises to be both profound, poetic, and full of wisdom about pain. The Signal and the Noise is recommended by community sentiment and the full force of Nate Silver’s work in the last decade.

Hopefully now you can understand my criteria a bit better. If you disagree with my formulation of my criteria, or if you think there is a different rules that better describe how I choose my books (from the selection you have seen here), I would love to hear it.

That’s the tbr done. What about things I’ve - read/watched/listened to - in recent times? How well do they hold up?

I started watching the two most recent seasons of Stranger Things based on some specific comments about what other people liked about it. They kept saying that they liked every character, or at the very least thought that every character was well done. I had not yet had that experience with a live-action tv show (I had something near to this experience with Arcane, an animated show from last year), and figured I would give Stranger Things a chance at it. I had watched seasons 1 and 2 previously, and while I had liked 1, thought 2 suffered a dip in quality. This was rectified in the later seasons, which I again would rate highly. However, while I think that Stranger Things’ work with its cast of characters is impressive, especially the way it has organically grown every season, I did not like every character in seasons 3 and 4. That does not mean, however, that I was wrong to decide to watch it. It held the potential for this to be true, and almost managed to deliver on it. Additionally, there were other parts of Stranger Things’ story- and character-arc structure that tickled my preferences and which, if they were what I had heard about and not the story, I would also have decided to watch it. This part it did deliver on, and I think that what Stranger Things did in regards to its handling of character growth and plot points is unrivalled in live-action media, and comparable to Avatar: The Last Airbender (keeping it vague for now, if you want the more spoiler-ish details of this, do send me a message).

I started reading Pokemon: The Origin of Species because I wanted more rationalist fiction in my life. I enjoyed HPMOR but do not particularly hold it in esteem for its narrative qualities, and was at the time craving something that did. When starting OoS I was prepared for something that was as good as HPMOR in the rationalist section, and hopefully a bit better in the story, characters, and worldbuilding section. And it absolutely blew those expectations out of the water. If you want my full thoughts, my review on it is here, but in short, it masterfully uses its three main protagonists to tell of different rationalist perspectives, and makes use of the Pokemon world’s skeleton pillars to create a full-fledged Pantheon.

I have written about The Righteous Mind, but not necessarily why I picked it up. It’s from 2012, and lays out the science of why people cannot tolerate each other. I think it plays fairly well as a description of the political landscape (now and then), but that it overplays its hand in saying that, just because we have certain moral foundations, that they are all necessarily good and that those - leftists, specifically - who have lost touch with specific moral foundations should work to pick them back up. I think I misjudged the way this book was seen by various communities. After reading it, I can see now the way some of the research that was highlighted within or conducted in concert with this book has become important in communities I am a part of, but I do not think this book is required reading for understanding those important parts of those communities. While the book might have been novel ten years ago, there has since come more succinct works and concepts that better caption the actionable understandings of The Righteous Mind, such as the Ideological Turing Test (which actually debuted before The Righteous Mind) and Scott Alexander’s I can tolerate anything except the outgroup.

I started One Piece on the promise that it would be “epic fantasy, but pirates”. This sounded both novel and enjoyable enough for me to give it a go. I think this promise came from two disparate sources as well; both “anitubers” and the aforementioned Daniel Greene praised the manga for the qualities associated with epic fantasy (though only Greene said it in those words), namely - a large world where things mentioned early in the narrative come back as later plot points, a large host of characters, exploration of characters’ powers, excellent worldbuilding which comes into play as exploration of different cultures and systems of government, and large set-piece battles. One Piece absolutely delivered on all counts. There’s not much more to say.

And lastly, where did this criterion start? I can’t put a finger on a specific date and tell you, but I think that I had said the words “this book forever changed my views on superhero fiction” one too many times, which made me realise that I should have that view on every piece of media I - read/watch/listen to. It should make me forever change my views on what is possible and doable within the constraints of that format and that genre. The book in question, I hope, is obvious. It is Worm by Wildbow.

I can recognize having this experience maybe once or twice more. One, for sure, is with the song “VIRUS (Prismo Remix)”, by KLOUD. After hearing it for the first time, every song I since has paled in comparison. To me, VIRUS perfectly mixes lyrics and electronic beats, the build-up and release of tension, an ethereal vocal line on top of a grounding drum-and-bass. According to my last.fm, since first discovering VIRUS on May 10th 2021, I have listened to it 172 times (for a total of 717 minutes), and counting, making it my all-time second most listened to song, only outcompeted by BFG Division, a track from the DOOM 2016 soundtrack I’ve listened to 253 times since the first time in 2017 - and which I have used as single-loop-repeat study and hype music since then.

There are some things that come close - March Comes in Like a Lion made me (re-)start thinking of anime as a serious genre that could tell stories that would resonate on multiple levels. The Stormlight Archives got me back into epic fantasy, through its huge world and compelling characters. Destiny 2 is vying to be this for videogames (through its combination of writing, lore, and gameplay), but isn’t quite there yet - but neither have had the genre-, and in the case of Worm dare I say life-defining, impact of the other two.