Why 2022 Has Been Aggressively Mid

2022 has been one of most mid years ever in terms of movies I’ve seen and audiobooks I’ve listened to. Just this month alone; Scott Derickson's new horror film The Black Phone: mid. Cooper Raif’s Shithouse and Cha Cha Real Smooth: mid. Joseph Kosinskis second movie this month Spiderhead, mid. His first being one the best action movies in recent memory, Top Gun: Maverick. The last few mid-tier movies from this year include Riley Stearns’ follow-up to his 2019 breakout film, The Art of Self-Defense, Duel. What might end up being the biggest movie of the year is Colin Trevorrow’s third JW movie Jurassic World Dominion.

And finally, and I know some people will crucify me for this, but man is Obi-Wan Kenobi, sans the last episode, one of the most mid-things I’ve seen this year. Much of the mid-ness comes from the extremely high anticipation of seeing two of the most iconic characters in the history of science-fiction together on screen again for the first time since 1977.

On the book front, titles that genuinely blew me away were few and far between; Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter and Recursion, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Beyond those few standouts, there were soooo many forgettable, flat, or straight-up cringe-worthy audiobooks I forced myself to get through because audible tokens are worth their weight in gold.

Some of the most extraordinarily banal books this year would be books 9–12 of the Wheel Of Time series, The Postmortal by Drew Magary, and Yesterday by Felicia Yap. The last two in that list had interesting enough concepts but failed to execute on any of them.

One of the most recent books I slogged through this year was Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. Picture The Martin written by someone trying to do Josh Whedon-like dialogue but, like, not funny. And before you come at me for not liking it for its politics, trust me, I fall very much in line with this book’s politics, maybe even farther left, but being heavy-handed with its messaging was FAR from the main complaints I had about this book.

God help me if the rest of 2022 looks anything like it has so far.