Favorites of the 2010s: An Introduction

The Lists:

-Video Games

-Albums: Part One

-Albums: Part Two

-Films: Part One

-Films: Part Two

At the end of 2009, I was a 16 year old high school student stumbling out of the end of my (at the time) only romantic relationship and in desperate need to find something else to think about.

So I did what curious teens did in 2009 - I looked at internet blogs. It being the end of 2009, I was confronted with a ton of "End of the Decade" lists, categorizing the best of anything and everything from 2000-2009. I inhaled these lists, grateful that someone had reached into the chaotic piling of everything at our fingertips and arranged something I could actually process. I've always loved lists - my notebooks as a kid are filled with lists of "my favorite movies," "cool Star Wars Jedi," "the best animals," etc. - and even now I keep meticulously detailed lists through Google Drive and Excel spreadsheets. I've often joked about how every facet of my life is collected in some kind of list...but it's not really joking. Every book I've read, show or movie I've watched, game I've played, album I've listened to, concert I've been to, etc., is documented somewhere, at least since I started doing this a decade ago. I'm not sure if my innate love of lists contributed to reading so many of them, or vice-versa, but it's one of the only ways I can make sense of all the noise in my head and in the world around me.

I read a lot of those 2000s lists and was blown away by how much art I was missing out on. If you rely just on the mass culture advertisement machine to let you know about stuff, you’re only seeing a tiny fraction of the art that’s out there. Being a person who’s always liked art but also being an irritatingly pretentious teenager, I decided that this would become my new obsession: knowing about film and music. I dove into it head-first, back in the days of renting DVDs from Netflix, and started watching the films I saw show up on these lists over and over again, and listening to the albums in the same way.

I vowed to myself, after a few months of this artistic explosion, that at the end of 2019 I’d make my own versions of these lists. Mostly as a way to reflect back on my life from ages 16-26, but also so that other people might find them one day and discover great art. Or at least, that some sad and anxious teen could find something worth spending time on.

Here we are, and 16-year-old-Jon, I’m keeping my promise to you.

These lists, in some small way, chronicle the close of the decade that saw me graduate high school and college, get a car, fall in love, write a novel, travel through Europe, get a job, move out of my parents’ house to college dorms to the family beach house to an apartment with my girlfriend, and become, hopefully, a better person.

I've posted my 25 Favorite Video Games of the Decade, my 100 Favorite Albums of the Decade (Part I and Part II), and my 100 Favorite Films of the Decade (Part I and Part II).

Ranking art like this is a fool's errand at best, especially when it comes down to films I saw only once many years ago. These lists should be taken with a lot of salt, and any particular ranking can and likely will change in my head within a day or so of posting the list. Still, they've been fun to think about for these last ten years, and I think they'll be fun to write up too. Don't worry, I won't wax poetically about each and every entry - I'll save most of the short write-ups for the very top of the lists.

Hopefully you’ll find something here worth checking out, or at the very least, get to know me a little better. Thanks for reading!