I’d say Happy New year but… Instead I’m Wrapping 2025

Wow, I have been crazy busy with the holidays, then work gets hectic, and my daughter starts competition season and our weekends are gone for what feels like forever. I honestly have not had the mental capacity for my usual Happy New Year/2025 wrap up post and this has been done in pieces and edited together. (For example, my final edit before posting I found i didn’t make this post till Feb in 2025 so I seem on par 🙄)

As I’m sure a lot of you are feeling, it just isn’t possible to say Happy New Year this time around the sun. With the world’s greatest Shit Show happening here in the US; I’m ready to end my trial subscription to 2026 and get the next version.

Recent events have felt like we are living in a dystopian novel with hatred and fascism running rampant. It is a struggle just to get out of bed let alone function like it’s a normal day. Stress, panic, and anxiety is my basic setting right now and I’m doing all I can to hold on to any shred of light I can. Things may be falling apart but my wife and I still have responsibilities and our children to raise.

Before I get going on a rant filled with rage and sadness, let’s get back to the regularly scheduled programming. I have been writing end of the year wrap up posts since I started my blog back in 2013. I’m a sucker for an end of the year wrap up and with every company sending one out I am loving it. So let’s review some of my favorite wrap ups.

Since my blog has been mostly book reviews I’m going to start with my reading wrap up from Goodreads.com. I beat my reading goal this year by 16 books. My highest number of books read was in 2015 and I read 104 books. I still had an amazing year of reading with a smaller goal of 30. There were so many books I rated 5 stars and several I would have given more to if I could.

Top 3 books of the year were:

The full wrap up from Goodreads is:

Almost as often as my posts on books I post about my love for movies. Mainly Horror movies. Letterbox has made my Type A mind so very happy. I love creating lists and tracking what I’m watching which then leads to the very cool wrap up. One of these days I will actually subscribe to Letterbox and track all my owned movies too.

I have also given a lot of movies 5 🥃 this year but not all of them came out in 2025 so it makes sense letterbox picked these 3 for the wrap up. I really did watch a lot of my old favorites over movies that came out in 2025. Let me be clear, I am not ashamed at all. I loved each one of these. Out of the 410 movies I logged, 335 of those were horror movies.

Some other cool facts from this year’s movie watch are I participated in 2 horror watch challenges (100HorrorMoviesin92Days, and HorrorMoviesfortheHolidays). I completed the 100 in 92 days but fell short for the Holiday watch along managing only 29 out of 40. I kind of lost steam at the end. I watched a lot of my favorites right at the beginning and just wasn’t interested in watching potential “meh” movies just to stay in the Holiday spirit.

Something I have written a few posts about is music. I may not talk about it a lot, but it is my soul. I have learned recently that my brain has to have a soundtrack. Whether it is on my speakers or in my headphones, I absolutely love the Apple Music, and the wrap up every year. For the 4th year in a row, Motionless in White is my top listened to Artist. With a new song out today (Jan 28) and hopefully a full album this year, I would suspect it will continue the streak for 2026. My son did write a review that I let him Guest post for Sleep Token’s Even in Arcadia because it moved him so much he had to talk about it. I get it, after reading his review and giving it a listen it quickly became part of my regular rotation, it was even my top album of the year. Check out my replay:

No big shock that my top Genre was metal. It is my life blood, but I do love me some K Pop Demon hunters and Dua Lipa. “Dua Lipa” has become an adjatiave around my house. It describes that one artist that is so out of left field but someone loves it. Like my Daughter loves Pop like ,Olivia Rodrigo, but we say Ice Nine Kills is her “Dua Lipa”, or for my son Doja Cat is his “Dua Lipa”. When we use this with outside family and friends, the look of pure confusion is hilarious.

Next up, I wouldn’t call myself a gamer, but I do love video games. PlayStation also has an end of the year wrap which I always find interesting because unlike my books and movies, I don’t track my game play the same way. I didn’t realize that the wrap up doesn’t stay around for long with PS so I only screen shot my top games for 2025. None of the other cool stats like how much I played on console versus my PS Potable. So here are my top played games of 2025:

I even got a wrap up from my CPAP machine. I will not bore you with the details but I will say I am doing a great job using the machine that helps me breath when I sleep.

So…. What to expect from 2026??? Honestly I am feeling defeated and stuck, and suffering mentally. I know what I would like to do and that is get more into this. I said that last year and I did, I had more posts, and more of them were regularly scheduled. I really got back into reading and because of that started getting ARCs for reviews which is great.

I hope to expand that, I want to write more book reviews. I am looking forward to some new albums coming out so look for reviews on those, and I swear!!! I will get at least one Whiskey/Bourbon review up. This is the bar and I hardly talked about cocktails this year. That has got to change. Plus, depending on how this Blues season goes and St. Louis City starts, I may actually write about sports.

Welcome to the new year. Hope to see you along for the ride. Cheers.