My Culture Tracking In 2024

The day before therapy last week, my last session of the year, I’d realized that tracking the books I read, and the movies and television shows I watch, has something of a self-regulatory effect despite the rhythms involved being more irregular than regular. It’s not a way in which I’ve previously thought about this habit.

At any rate, culture is revelatory and so here’s just a brief mention of the things I read and watched over the course of the year just ended.

• I read 22,000 pages of books, starting with Sea Change by Gina Chung and ending with The Rise and the Reign of Mammals by Steve Brusatte, and totaling 69 books. My shortest book was One the Fox Roads by Nghi Vi and my longest was Survival Is a Promise by Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

• I watched 100 hours of movies, starting with Foe and ending with Shoplifters of the World, and totaling 59 movies. I had nearly as many rewatches as first watches, including having watched Shoplifters of the World 10 times, The Martian 3 times, and Cradle Will Rock 2 times last year alone.

• I watched 1,000 hours of television, starting with an episode of Moonlighting and ending with an episode of From, and totaling 79 shows. My most-played shows were Doctor Who, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Homicide: Life on the Street, Northern Exposure, and The Zoo—four of which were full series rewatches so this makes sense.

The music I listen to is tracked automatically by Apple Music, but you can’t publicly share your Replay. It’s also not entirely representative of my active listening habits, because I don’t have a way to instruct it to ignore the Sleep Lofi playlist I use when I go to bed. This makes the Top Artists and Top Songs list entirely useless.

However, the Top Albums list does accurately reflect my active listening, and my minutes played my top five were: The Fallout (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Finneas O’Connell, Strange Country Jukebox by Anjana Vasan, Mosquito by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, It’s Blitz by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Fever to Tell by Yeah Yeah Yeahs—those last three reflecting that I frequently put the entire Yeah Yeah Yeahs catalogue on shuffle.

I wish that Apple Podcasts generated something similar, but it doesn’t, and I don’t intend to spend three days trying to do all that math myself.

The weirdly self-regulatory impact of tracking these things (notwithstanding Apple Music) stands in contrast to once upon a time having also tracked, multiple times a day, both my mood and my location, both of which things instead became wildly dysregulatory—although currently I do daily track my state of mind, but just the once at the very end of the day.

Time for more books, movies, music, and podcasts, and television shows.