Happy New Year 2026!

 

May all my visitors here have a safe, happy, healthy, wealthy, and, most importantly, holy 2026. 

I have a good vibe concerning this upcoming year!

The 2025 Best-Ofs!

 

Shhhh … hear that? … listen … it’s getting louder … Yes! … I can hear it now! The noise, the cheering, here it comes … louder … Louder … LOUDER … LOUDER!!! It’s here! It’s here! Tens and tens and tens of people worldwide – all right, ten people worldwide … Cheering! Roaring!! Celebrating!!! It’s here! It’s here!!

 

IT’S HERE!!!

 

THE 2025 HOPPER BEST-OFS!

 

Yes, my annual tradition of the best and worst of all the literature, movies, TV, phases, and experiences Hopper has undergone in the past twelve months. All for your edification. Books and films to experience and enjoy – and those to avoid at all costs.

 

Now, without further ado, here they are –

 

 

Best Book:

   Nonfiction – My Effin’ Life (2023) by Geddy Lee

   Fiction / Re-reads – Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville, Conquerors from the Darkness (1965) by Robert Silverberg, Space Skimmer (1972) by David Gerrold

   Fiction / First-time – The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) by John Le Carré

   Notable Mention – The Seventh Scroll (1995) by Wilbur Smith. [This was an insane read and deserves its own blog post … perhaps in early January … trust me on this.]

 

 

Worst Book:

    Iceberg (1975) by Clive Cussler (all the embarrassments of 1970s culture)

   Stephen King’s It (1986) reread was slightly disappointing

 

 

Bucket Lists:

   As mentioned above, I read through Moby Dick for the third time – I dunno, it just gets better and better every time I read it. Also put away Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and The Confessions of St. Augustine.

 

 

Best Film:

   Horror/Science Fiction/Action – Frankenstein (2025) directed by Guillermo del Toro. What cinematography! What props! Plus an intelligent, human ending to tug at heartstrings.

   Comedy (alleged) – Friendship (2024). Truly and delightfully bizarre … but don’t watch with the wife.

   So many runner-ups – A Man Called Ove (2015 – the Swedish version, not the Tom Hanks remake), Good Boy (2025 horror flick with a dog as the main character), The Dark Divide (2020, midlife crisis meets bigfoot), Nobody (2021, old man John Wick), Being There (1979), Abigail (2024), House (1977 campy Japanese horror flick seen with Patch)

 

 

Most Disappointing Film:

    Dream Scenario (2023, where everyone on the planet dreams of a bald, frumpy Nicolas Cage)

   The Woman in the Yard (2025, where you watch a premise get wasted after a promising 20 minutes)

 

 

Best TV:

   Again, not a big TV year for me. I did enjoy the first season of Ash vs. the Evil Dead.

 

 

Worst TV:  

   The Lazarus Project – everything I hate in modern writing, and I mean everything. Identity politics, wokeism, vulgarity. Wife made me sit through first episode; you couldn’t pay me enough to sit through another one.

 

Personal Accomplishments:

   Losing 18 pounds the first five months of the year (but, unfortunately, gaining 10 pounds back at the time of writing).

   Shaking the dust off my electric guitar and shaving the rust off my fingers with something like 30 hours of serious practice.

   Assembling my daughter’s college bunkbed with her roommate’s dad, plus assembling two bookcases and an ergonomic chair on my own.

   Six trips to the confessional.

   Grew my record collection by 19 to 63 total.

   Met not one but two Little One boyfriends (and behaved myself the whole time).

 

 

Phases:

   Sugar-Free January 1st to May 20th

   UFO literature revisited (read 8 books in November and December)

   The Lindbergh baby kidnapping case – deep dive for one week middle of October

   Return to SF pulp paperbacks (read 9, gave up on the 10th – Asimov’s Foundation)

   Diary of St Faustina six-month reading journey

   Hell House LLC quadrilogy watched with Patch for Movie Nights in September and October

 

Favorite Phase:

   No, don’t make me choose!

 

 

Best Podcast / YouTube channel:

   Andrew Wilson debates. Discovered him in August and probably have watched twenty hours of him debating feminists, communists, transvestites, islamists, you name it, mostly in 1v1 debates but also Andrew versus a whole panel of opposition. He’s a little crude and rough around the edges, doesn’t bar any holds, and may be an acquired taste, but it’s a fun way to get the adrenaline flowing when your job involves generating reports and spreadsheets and more reports and more spreadsheets.

 

Song of the Year:

   Most anything from The Essential Frank Sinatra with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. I find it relaxing on the nerves, especially after all them YouTube debates.

 

Workout Tally:

   37 weightlifting sessions

   68 miles walked

   Not nearly as well, physical-health-wise, as 2024, where I lifted 46 times and walked 20 miles more. I am a few pounds heavier, but what’s more concerning is a worsening lack of flexibility. For 2026 I would love to get in 100 workouts next year – with deep stretching before and after – plus around 150 miles walked. I recognize that this is highly optimistic.

 

Reading Tally:

   43 books / 18 fiction, 25 non-fiction (if you count 5 UFO books as “non-fiction”)

   Re-read the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, Genesis, and Revelation

   Abandoned 8 books anywhere from 30 pages to 431 pages in

   Re-read 8 books, not counting the Bible books above, mostly science fiction from my youth

 

Proudest Moments:

   Seeing Little One posing in her first class teacher picture after six months of student teaching. Also watching her grow independent with her own car, an off-campus apartment (with her two bffs), and a serious relationship.

 

   Patch with her first retail job managing a woman’s clothing boutique, getting her permit and taking her out driving a dozen times on the way to getting that driver’s license, and being accepted into all four colleges she applied to.

 

2025 was a decent year. Had better, had worse. I enjoyed most of it, albeit with a hint of sadness as the little ones are now young adults and are starting to forge their way through life, more and more independent of their parents. Next year Patch will be leaving us for college for extended periods of time (she’ll be way out of state) and that will bring new challenges. And there may be a new pet in the near future. We’ll see.

Book Review: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

 

 

© 1963 by John Le Carre

 

This novel was a bucket list accomplishment for me, and, to be honest, an act of courage.

 

My mother-in-law, well-read in the genres of mystery, espionage, and New York Times best-seller lists, is a huge Le Carré fan and has been recommending him to me right from day one, almost thirty years ago. I knew Le Carré as an intellectual master builder of intricate plots, shadowy characterizations, and don’t-look-behind-the-curtain all-is-not-as-it-seems scenarios. Cat-and-mouse who-can-you-trust and who-can’t-you-trust. Twists and turns, third act revelations that will drop the jaw agape in wonder. A parsimonious writer who only deals out to the reader clues that seem senseless to what is shown unfolding. A storyteller who crafts a tale backwards but tells it in a deceptively straightforward way.

 

In lieu of all this, I was intimidated.

 

Sometime fifteen or twenty years ago I decided that the water’d be fine to jump right in. And being Hopper with an overly large ego and inflated sense of comprehension, I started with Le Carré’s masterpiece: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. And immediately got lost fifty or sixty pages in. Could be life with a newborn in a new house; could be the surgeries I had around that time. Or it could be I was just not ready for it. I put it away, sold it to a used book store, and vowed I would return at some later point in life; hence, the bucket list.

 

My mother-in-law sent me some money for my birthday back in September and this rekindled the interest. I decided to start off where the Internet pretty much unanimously tells Le Carré newbies to start off with – The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. And I fearfully kept it on my shelf until, quite on a whim and after three exhausting literary false-starts, read in in a week in mid-December.

 

My daughter’s kitten Sweet Potato stretching out with my 

copy of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

If I were to encapsulate the plot in a short paragraph, it’d be something like this: world-weary MI-6 intelligence officer Alec Leamas, fresh off losing a double-agent escaping at the checkpoint at the Berlin Wall, is recruited for one last mission – one last strike against the red menace before being allowed to “come in from the cold.” He’s to play a defector, be picked up and brought into East Germany, where he would lay the groundwork to eliminate London’s nemesis, a brutal genius named Mundt. Leamas plans to do this by lies and suggestions in his debriefing. But things escalate and swerve out of control, as things like these tend to do, and however cautious our hero is, mistakes are made – or are they? Not everything is as it seems, and third act revelations abound, culminating in a finale Mundt-like and brutal in its concision.

 

I was able to follow the novel, the allegiances, and the surprises, and enjoyed it immensely. That weekend I went to a local library and found a 1990 Le Carré book, The Secret Pilgrim, on sale for a dollar. But Le Carre is meant to be read in some kind of order, if only to stay as spoiler-free as possible as the author references earlier plots in later books. So I was planning to buy some prequels to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold with any Christmas money. But the Mrs. beat me to it and wrapped Le Carré’s first and second novels, A Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962) and placed them under the tree. I’m currently reading a SF paperback (my last from my pre-holiday haul a few weeks ago), and will crack Call for the Dead come January.

 

And after that, George Smiley, in Le Carré’s masterpiece, the “Karla” trilogy:

   Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)

   The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)

   Smiley’s People (1979)

 

“Grade” for The Spy Who Came in From the Cold – A-plus. Probably the best first-time fiction I read this year.