Looking Backward/Looking Forward

2025 was a momentous year for me, personally—the culmination of over a decade of academic aspirations. I victoriously defended my dissertation and graduated with my PhD. The first half plus a little bit of the year was devoted to concluding that effort (and the second half to recovering from all that exertion!). There is something a bit unsettling about such personal success/accomplishment/good feelings against a backdrop of distressing, unnerving, terrifying, enraging events in the world, but so it goes.

Today I want to offer some thoughts on books I read and movies I watched that I newly loved—mostly things I read and watched for the first time, but one re-read that really sung for me this time. And then, some thinking about how I want to approach 2026 broadly and specifically in relation to my reading and watching, including some specific films and books I’m looking forward to encountering anew in the coming year.

BOOKS

Dayspring, Anthony Oliveira: The best thing I read in 2025, and the best thing I’ve read in a LONG time. Continues to hang around my brain and heart as my new favorite book—instantly entering my personal canon of sacred texts that shape me. In part, this is no doubt because the book seems tailor-made for me (which in some ways is a story of much of my media encounters for the year!)—a genre-defying, deeply, explicitly queer reimagining of the Gospel of John that moves across vast amounts of time and space, where Jesus is both undeniably magnetic, inscrutable, and deeply funny? Totally sold and it totally works. A book that no doubt to many would be heretical and blasphemous, but which I interpret and receive as deeply sincere and in many ways devotional. It’s just so good. Will never read the Gospels the same way again. Oliveira transformed my own thinking about discipleship and what it might really mean to love God. Excited to revisit and savor it this year.

Lady Knight, Tamora Pierce: The conclusion of the Protector of the Small quartet, and what a conclusion it is! Read that whole series this past year and loved it (sorry Isabel and Naomi for taking so long to actually read them, but you were right, they rule). I’ll atone for my negligence by introducing them to my children. Anyway, a fun, inspiring set of stories about adventure and standing up for others and not being afraid to stand alone and be a bit of a misfit and the community that you can build along the way.

Katabasis, R. F. Kuang: A fun, big-hearted, cathartic read since I’d finished my phd. Dug it.

Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, Oliver Burkeman: Read this as I was in some of my final dissertation revisions and it was a powerful call to repentance haha. Felt like Burkeman was writing to me in a lot of ways with the way he framed his invitations and everything else. Will likely be working on actually implementing some of the ideas here for the rest of my life haha.

A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle: I’ve read this a couple of times and liked it, but it never quite sung for me the way those beloved favorites do. This time that all changed. LOVED it. Amazed that I didn’t before! But thrilled that I do now. Excited to revisit it again and continue on through the series! What a wild, wonderful, bonkers blend of ideas and things in service of its theme about love! Awesome.

FILMS

Sinners (2025): just rad as hell. a genre movie that knows exactly what it is and leans hard into the particular expression of what that is and pulls it off beautifully. been with me since i watched it back in february. incredible.

Testament of Youth (2015): the sort of quiet, personal ethical/moral dilemma movie that is also my jam (and quite distinct from what Sinners is up to haha).

Wake Up Dead Man (2025): loved this one. a movie made in a lab for me, personally.

Truth & Treason (2025): devastating and moving and some fantastic mormon representation on screen.

Black Bag (2025): a deliciously twisty little thriller. excellent stuff that rewards rewatching.

And here’s a bunch of others because I watched a lot of good stuff in 2025, okay? And this is my list, so I’ll throw a bunch more out there: The Count of Monte Cristo (2024), The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), The Phoenician Scheme (2025), A Nice Indian Boy (2024), Hamnet (2025)

I’ve just started a new job and I need to make significant progress on my book about the films of Jared and Jerusha Hess (time to get it out of my head and on some pages!), so the big picture of 2026 is mostly trying to embrace a sense of “maintenance as revolution”. For my reading and watching, I want to face head-on my internalized sense that it is better to read or watch something new, instead of revisiting something previously read or seen. Even though I know intellectually, and experientially, that it is often incredibly rewarding to revisit things and that that’s absolutely essential to good, careful, sensitive, generous close reading (like I like to engage in). And yet. When faced with the chance to reread something or to take a chance on something new, I almost always feel like it is a better, morally superior choice to read something new.

So, embarking on a year of intentionally rereading and rewatching things! And not just things that I need to analyze.

Presenting my shortlist of Books to (Re)Read in 2026 (new to me titles are bolded):

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi

Little Women

Dayspring

LOTR

Lonesome Dove

Goose Girl (i’ve only ever read Goose Girl and am planning on reading the rest of the Books of Bayern, so mostly new to me, but opening with a reread)

East of Eden

Middlemarch

The Curse of Chalion

The Brothers Karamazov

Wolf Hall trilogy (i have not read the final volume in the trilogy before so 2/3 will be rereads and one third, new to me, at long last)

Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet

Heike’s Void

even with intentionally planning on rereading, it’s hard to avoid the pull of new books! I just can’t help myself from chasing the possibility of a newly beloved book!

AND a special shout-out to Rachel Rueckert’s The Determined, her latest novel about the pirate queens, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, hitting shelves this February! I’ve loved the story of Anne and Mary since I was a wee lad and am so excited to see what Rachel does with it.

and now for some films I’m looking forward to seeing in 2026 at home (again bolded are new to me)!

Dogma (1999)
Noah (2014)
Prometheus (2012)
The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982)
The Bishop’s Wife (1947)
The Mighty Macs (2009)
The Count of Monte Cristo (2024)
Presumed Innocent (1990)
Kundun (1997)
Das Boot (1981)
Gentlemen Broncos (2009)
Don Verdean (2015)
Wake Up Dead Man (2025)

and of course films i’m looking forward to seeing in the CINEMA in 2026 (the way God intended):

The Testament of Ann Lee (2025): this hits my local independent nonprofit theater in a couple of weeks and I CANNOT WAIT. so my jam.
The Odyssey (2026): I remain skeptical of the cast in these roles, but this promises to be a BIG movie best seen on the BIG screen.
Disclosure Day (2026): Spielberg with a funky aliens movie that seems like it might have some weirdly mormon theological possibilities? Sign. Me. Up.
”Wuthering Heights” (2026): i am an emerald fennel enabler—let her make whatever lavish, bonkers, wild, FUN thing she wants, source material be damned!
The Bride! (2026): i mean, obviously i’m seeing the latest riff on Frankenstein
Santo Subito! (2026): Mark Ruffalo as a priest with a complicated relationship to faith in a Vatican thriller?!? totally sold.
I Love Boosters! (2026): gotta see whatever boots riley has cooked up!
Behemoth! (2026): a great year for movie titles with exclamation points! tony gilroy’s latest—and that’s enough to sell me a ticket.
Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew (2026): having just reread all of these i am increasingly intrigued by gerwig’s choice to start her films here, but dig her work, so i’ll be there to see how it plays out.
Werwulf (2026): don’t always love what eggers gets up to, but i am always impressed with his immersion in his chosen world/time, and a werewolf story with time appropriate English (so should be sorta Chaucerian middle-english) has me very very intrigued!

lots of great stuff in 2025 and looking like 2026 will be filled with things just for me too!