I love music, but I have sort of eclectic tastes in music so I never listen to the radio--at home, I listen to my nearly 13,000 song library; for the car, I have a jump drive with an assortment of about 1,200 songs on it. I swear I'm not a hipster, but a lot of my music is folk/Americana (which is funny, because I can't stand country), singer/songwriter, or video game scores (which are great for writing). Again, I'm really
not a hipster, but you've probably never heard of most of my favorite artists.
(For the curious, my top 5: Nichole Nordeman, Sleeping At Last, Andrew Peterson, Josh Garrels, The Oh Hellos; probably the most mainstream artist I really like and listen to is Florence + The Machine, though I don't think her other two albums really compare well to
Ceremonials.)
I so rarely read anything that was published (or at any rate written) in my lifetime. In the past five years, I can easily name the books I've read that
were published since I was born:
Mother Earth Father Sky by Sue Harrison (and its sequels,
My Sister the Moon and
Brother Wind),
Song of the River and
Cry of the Wind by Sue Harrison (
Cry of the Wind ended on such a happy note that I haven't gotten around to reading the third book,
Call Down the Stars), and
The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu. I'm not counting Tolkien's posthumously published works, since they were still
written well before I was before--considering Tolkien
died well before I was born. Aside from those, the most recent books I've read in the past five years were
Ender's Game and
Neuromancer, four and five years before I was born respectively. (I hated
Neuromancer, but I love its opening line: "The sky was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.")