Best of 2025
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #194. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Elsewhere, here.
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Best Book
Your Forest – written and illustrated by Jon Klassen
I read many more kids books than adult books this year, many more times. Klassen is best known for a story in which the protagonist, a bear, eats a rabbit for stealing his hat. It allows me to do a lot of voicework, which is one quality I look for, but before my toddler was willing to sit through that one, he immediately took to Your Forest, which you can read in a calm tone like you’re recording guided meditation. There is no plot. A forest comes together, then it goes to sleep and then the forest ghost comes out: he is nice. I bought the book for the ghost. There is also Your Farm and Your Island, but they don’t have a ghost. Klassen does have a new board book about a ghost coming out next summer, just in time for my kid’s birthday.
Best Book my Kid Won’t Sit Through Yet
The Tailor of Gloucester by Beatrix Potter
I never had this book as a kid, but we had a VHS recorded off of PBS in which Meryl Streep narrated the story. Beatrix Potter has a facility with language on the level of any great writer of any period, and she is especially precise and evocative with her descriptions of objects; a quality so important to children’s literature; when the listeners are at an age where things are so much of what makes the world interesting. Her animals are also very naughty, which is the best kind of aspirational figure for the young. The Tailor of Gloucester opens like this:
“In the time of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets—when gentlemen wore ruffles, and gold-laced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta—there lived a tailor in Gloucester.”
Now say paduasoy and taffeta out loud. You won’t regret it.
Best Film that will not be Nominated for an Oscar
Black Bag. Dir. Steven Soderbergh
I don’t think Soderbergh has made a movie this hot since Out of Sight. It’s not a mode he goes too often, instead usually putting beautiful people at some remove from one another. He is good at it though. It helps that when he’s in this mode he casts leads that are skilled at signaling passion at a formal reserve, their lust coming from their impulsivity, but their hesitations as well. Clooney and Lopez in Out of Sight, and Fassbender and Blanchett touch each other, but they watch each other as well. They pause and take each other in, and you don’t ever know if they’ll chose to betray or consummate with the information gathered. Also, it was fun. The plot zigged and zagged well, and Marisa Abela got to play comedy and was good at it.
Best Television Show
Top Chef 2014-Present
A famous hater, I’ve been declaring TV to be OVER since Halt and Catch Fire, The Leftovers and The Americans all ended, (Succession, which started the same year The Americans ended, was the only show since that could touch them). That being said, I enjoyed some TV this year! Dying for Sex was a perfect miniseries: joyful and very sexy for a show about dying. The Pitt made me feel good about having watched every episode of ER and gave us some characters to love, which is what TV does best. The Lowdown was a fun ride with Ethan Hawke’s charisma. The Traitors was the hardest I laughed all year, but Long Story Short was the most consistent giggle factory. Death By Lightning encouraged me to Wikipedia some history. And there were plenty others I didn’t see and plenty more that I liked fine (someday I will figure out why I don’t like Severance that much and explain it to all of you, but it is ambitious and good enough to deserve a well thought out naysaying).
Still: the most sustained joy I got this year was mainlining old seasons of Top Chef while I packed and moved and unpacked apartments. The Boston season, where I started, still has a bit too much of the peacocking and shoving of the early seasons, and the cameras still make all the food look ass, but it introduced some characters that become important in later seasons, and I love when they make them all cook with old-timey tools at Plymouth. It’s a long journey through all those seasons, but worth it for the culmination in the really excellent show that came out this year, which had some of the best looking food I’ve ever seen on the show but also Massimo: a French Canadian/Italian foghorn who chopped a cutting board in half, broke everything in the kitchen, or set it on fire, and then came out with the fussiest little French dishes you ever did see. Another All-Stars season please!
Best Historical Name I Learned this Year
Roscoe Conkling
I wish I’d named my kid Conkling Ochshorn.
Worst Historical Name I Learned this Year
Adolph Deutsch
The Jewish film composer of many movies including Some Like it Hot and The Apartment. Unfortunate name!
Best Month/Worst Month
While I was living through a sad and angry time in my personal life last August, there were a couple weeks of perfect weather.
Song of the Year
Song of the Season
Game of the Year
Tickle and runaway. Haven’t tried it with an adult yet: report back if you do!
Album of the Year
Looking at my downloads history I am ashamed to have acquired nothing all year besides the one good song off The Secret Life of a Showgirl (the tragic turn on “Ruin the Friendship” is so sublime that makes me angry the rest of the album is so lazy). I’m a very slow music listener, but this is bad-bad, and I’m determined to do better. That being said, instead of immediately listening to the Geese album, I just keep listening to “Dirty Work” again. I’m sure Geese is great. I can’t wait to find out in 2027.
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Natasha Ochshorn is a PhD Candidate in English at CUNY, writing on fantasy texts and environmental grief. She’s lived in Brooklyn her whole life and makes music as Bunny Petite. Follow her on Instagram and Bluesky.
