What Was Your Favorite ____ of 2023?
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We haven't had a good roundup of everyone's favorite ____ of the year in a while! Let's discuss movies, podcasts, TV shows, books, recipes, and more…
Your 2023 Favorites
Here's a template for everyone to use…
- Movies:
- TV:
- Podcasts:
- Books:
- Recipes:
- Best purchase under $25:
- Other:
Kat's 2023 Favorites
Movies: Barbie (and I hate to say it but the latest Mission Impossible movie was very enjoyable!)
TV: What We Do in the Shadows (season 3 is hilarious), Jury Duty, Strange New Worlds
Books: Personal History: A Memoir; Love, Theoretically; The Hurricane Wars
Recipes: Korean Rice Bowls/Stealth Health, Chicken Parmesan Gnocchi/Stay Fit Mom (from this cookbook), and Peanut Butter Protein Balls/Clare Morrow (We had a LOT of recipe duds this year!)
Best purchase under $25: Well, it's close — this lightweight throw blanket is super soft and great for summer; some colors are under $30. It's very similar to this bed blanket that I still love.
Other: Best makeup purchase: Youthforia BYO Blush (stay tuned next year for my review)
Kate's 2023 Favorites
Movies: Of the movies I actually saw in the theater this year, Barbie and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves were so much fun.
TV: Beef (Netflix), with the excellent combination of Ali Wong, Steven Yeun, and a '90s-nostalgia soundtrack
Podcasts: The Retrievals was a horrifying account of a major scandal at Yale's fertility clinic — and yet another example of the dismissal of women's pain.
Books: None of the fiction that I read (lots!) came out this year, but for nonfiction, Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond was an amazing deep dive into poverty in America today.
Best purchase under $25: This window birdfeeder. I got it from a local store (for maybe $17), but here's one at Amazon that's similarly affordable, but a little bigger. We have three other feeders, so we mostly bought this one to entertain our cats, which in turns entertains us — humans watching cats watching birds (the circle of liiiiiife).
Other: Not exactly a groundbreaking statement, but I love my Kindle. At the beginning of the year, I bought the smallest, lightest one (a 2022 model) for $120 (and 11 months later, it's cheaper, grrr). It's so much better than reading on my phone (surprise surprise), and because it's not a tablet, I can't get distracted like I do on my iPhone. (I like this case.)
Readers, what were your favorites of 2023?
We have been catching up on a lot of old stuff.
Movie: Blindness
Series: A Spy Among Friends
Books: The Lincoln Lawyer series
Recipes: Almost everything we have tried from The Mediterranean Dish
Other: Hask Argan Oil Shampoo and Conditioner; dirt cheap but really good for dry curly hair
this may be a dumb question but is there an app (or a way to do this on an existing app) that tells you the most efficient ways to visit several places. Like specifically college vists. is there an app that lets you put in multiple places and they say “it most efficient to go lehigh to bucknell to gettysburg” I recognize that you can look at a map and see where all the places are in relation to each other but looking for more help than that.
I’ve always just added all three destinations into Google Maps (on a computer, not a phone) and then dragged to reorder to find the shortest route.
i did’t know you could do that, let me see…. thanks!
It’s technically called the Traveling Salesman problem and can be solved via approximations.
A better idea is to put them into google maps and play around with the order.
Movies: Asteroid City, Reality, Nyad, The Killer
TV: Succession, Good Omens, Happy Valley, Jury Duty
Books: Babel by RF Kuang, In Memoriam by Alice Winn, The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen
Recipes: anything by Hetty Lui McKinnon (in the NYT or her book, Tenderheart)
Movies: Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One, Joy Ride, John Wick Chapter 4,
TV: Only Murders in the Building, Reservation Dogs
Podcasts: If Books Could Kill, Maintenance Phase, The Bechdel Cast
Books: The Sun and the Star by Rick Riordan
Apparently we have also been catching up on old stuff!
Movies: Take Shelter
TV: We watched a lot of CDramas this year and really enjoyed them (Forbidden Flower, which was recommended here, and then TTOETM and Lost You Forever)
Books: Nothing recently published, but I read Tana French’s In the Woods (after watching Dublin Murders last year) and Connie Willis’s Crosstalk
Recipes: The Georgian roast chicken recipe from Anna Voloshyna’s cookbook
Best purchase under $25: also a bird feeder for humans to watch cats watching birds
Movies: I know I should say Killers of the Flower Moon, which I really enjoyed, but Barbie
TV: a cute little series called Starstruck on HBO
Podcasts: NYT the Daily, not new to me, but I listened a lot
Books: State of Wonder by Ann Patcheyt
Recipes: One Pan Farro with Tomatoes by Smitten Kitchen (the easiest lunch ever)
Best purchase under $25: probably Bombas socks!
Other:
Movies: Barbie? Didn’t watch many
TV: Our Flag Means Death, Righteous Gemstones
Podcasts: Maintenance Phase
Books: This is how you lose the time war