This morning, I woke up with this feeling I didn’t know how to deal with… and 2009 was awesome

My top ten songs for the year (in no particular order):

BAT FOR LASHES – Daniel

DATAROCK – Give It Up

EDITORS – Papillon

FLORENCE and THE MACHINE – Drumming Song

FRANZ FERDINAND – No You Girls

KAREN O AND THE KIDS – All Is Love

LA ROUX – In For The Kill

METRIC – Help I’m Alive

THEM CROOKED VULTURES – Reptiles

FLORENCE and THE MACHINE – Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)

Best movie of the year:

Where the Wild Things Are

Admittedly, I’m yet to see District 9 (I bought the DVD yesterday) and Moon.  Star Trek was more awesome than anybody could have expected but still didn’t manage to be as absolutely perfect as WtWTA.

There were some right stinkers this year as well.  Coraline was probably the worst new film I saw this year.  Everything that WtWTA did well, Coraline managed to foul up (even though both films were largely exploring the same territory).  Dragonball Evolution managed to be disappointing despite the already low expectations (it wasn’t even fun).  And Up! was an exceptional waste of time.  I still can’t work out what the plot was.

The biggest disappointment was X-Men Origins: Wolverine.  What a bafflingly confused pile of crap that was.

Favourite meme:

Boxxy.  It was a good start to the year.

Best new book:

It was a bit of a shitty year for fiction.  A new Dan Brown novel and Eoin Colfer’s attempt to impersonate Douglas Adams rather ruined the year for me.

Unseen Academicals by Pratchett was a lot of fun.  It’s interesting to see the continuing development of Vetinari, and I wonder if there’s much more development in store for him.

In comic books, I really liked Messiah War.

Best new video game:

Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks.  It won’t break any records and it probably won’t go down in time as a classic game, but it is so much fun.

For sheer brilliance, special mention should be made of Batman: Arkham Asylum.  I bought it for my younger brother (who has an XBox) and it’s mesmerisingly good.