consumption.

Looks like Santa was good to Mara, bringing her that Real Doll she's been wanting (link NSFW). Only $5,499 (plus shipping), plus $315 for the Optional Hi-Realism Eyes and $150 for the Optional Real Eyebrows.

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It's that time of year, where everyone who's ever had an opinion trots out their "Best Of 20xx" list in order to validate their awesomely discerning senses of style and taste and probably something else as well.

I'm mostly only pretending to whinge. It's a useful exercise I think, going back through the year or decade and reminding yourself what or whose creative output struck your fancy or made you feel something, if for no other reason than reminding yourself that "ah, yes...I really did see some good movies/books/music this year."

What follows here is not a Best Of list, but my personal reference list of Other People's Best Of highlights that I haven't yet seen/heard/read. I keep this kind of stuff on VDuck not to demonstrate my own awesomely discerning sense of style and taste, but because there's literally no other place in my world where I will be able to reliably locate this list after I spend an hour or two making it.

So...welcome! It's not done yet, but...

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Film

There's quite an interesting and deep discussion on the last decade's films going on here, but I haven't really had to time to parse it. Yes I said parse.

• A Headless Woman (Martel, 2009).
• Beau Travail (Denis, 1999).
• 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Mungiu, 2007). This was on so many people's Best Films of The Decade list that I can no longer say that "I'm not in the mood".
• YiYi (Yang, 2000). Completely missed it the first time around.
• The New World (Malick, 2005).
• Pontypool (McDonald, 2008).
• Pan's Labyrinth (del Toro, 2008) and The Lives of Others (von Donnersmarck, 2006). We own both of these movies and for some reason I haven't finished either of them.
• No End In Sight (Ferguson, 2007).
• A Town Called Panic (2009).
• Anything by the Dardennes. I haven't seen a single one of their films b/c of the subtitling issue.
• Sang sattawat (Syndromes and a Century) (Weerasethakul, 2006).
• Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies) (Tarr, 2000).
  
• The Fantastic Mr. Fox (Anderson, 2009). For me, Anderson's movies have become increasingly annoying and empty since The Royal Tennenbaums, but this is supposed to fix things. At least we don't have to look at Bill Murray or the Wilsons in this one.
• Paranormal Activity (Peli, 2009).
• The Hurt Locker (Bigelow, 2009).
• 35 rhums (35 Shots of Rum) (Denis, 2009).
• L'heure d'été (Summer Hours) (Assayas, 2009).
• Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon) (Haneke, 2009).

Books

• In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust.
• Chronic City, Johnathan Lethem.
• Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life, Carol Sklenicka I looked at this and found the writing to be not-so-interesting.
• The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker
• Invisible, Paul Auster, (since New York Trilogy rocked my world, I'd tried six other Auster books and found most of them terribly disappointing, an opinion which I found out many others shared. Invisible is supposed to be a successful turnaround).
• The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell.
• The Believers by Zoe Heller. I really do not want to read this, but there's not a year-end list without it. I'll read a couple of pages.
• Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr.
• Legend Of A Suicide by David Vann
  
• A Meaningful Life by L. J. Davis (you can read 35 pages or so of it here)
• Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solstad

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