Blogger's choice awards

(A bit of a detour this week - into media favorites)

I like GoodReads, the web site that helps you (their blurb):

• see what your friends are reading.
• keep track of what you've read and what you'd like to read.
• get great book recommendations from people you know.

When Colleen (or maybe it was Marin) first sent the GoodReads link to me, I went crazy, entering in all of the books I've read over the past gazillion years. But once I had finished compiling my reading history, my contributions to GoodReads dwindled to a book every month or two. The problem is, GoodReads is only about books and books make up a small part of the media I (please give me another word, "consume" seems so banal - absorb? digest? ah well...) consume nowadays.

What I'd love to find is a GoodReads for all the other media - podcasts and movies, and radio shows and websites and magazines and (yes, even the boob tube) TV shows. So I thought I'd make a stab at it here. What follows (which I admit is an amateurish beginning without the database and Friends e-connections and fancy-shmancy user interface) is a list of a few of my favorite things. (Sing along..."Podcasts on roses and bright shiny movies, warm woolen web sites and books that are groovy, brown paper magazines wrapped up in string..." etc etc)

Some of my favorite podcasts:

• I love "Fresh Air", and I also hate it, depending on the day. When Terry Gross focuses her interviewing acumen on a topic of interest to me - politics, religion, science or economics - her show is terrific. She has a talent for crafting questions that draw people out, and that ask them things that I would ask if I were a clever interviewer. Her interviews with controversial characters like Tim Lahaye or Bill O'Reilly provide revealing insights into the way these folks think and act. On the other hand, when she plays the NPR version of Barbara Waters, dabbling in pop music or TV shows (topics in which I have zero interest), I feel that she's wasting her talent on trivial trash. Why is "Fresh Air" under the podcasts, you may ask? First off, I am seldom near a radio when it broadcasts, and secondly, in iTunes I can delete the crappy shows where Terry enthuses breathlessly about "Desperate Housewives" or "The Wire".
  

• The Cato Institute's podcasts are much more than just libertarian propaganda. Cato provides a forum for politicians, historians and economists of all stripes to present their views. They usually invite two or more renowned guests to present differing views of an issue. Listening to Cato podcasts gives me the feeling of being a fly on the wall of the halls of power.
  

• "On The Media" is a straight-forward and intelligent look at how the news is reported (not to mention that Brooke Gladstone, who I met when NHPR brought her to Concord, NH, is my secret crush). You might think that a weekly show that's all about making media would be insipid and navel-gazing, but I often learn more about the news from OTM than I do from the news.
  

In the interests of brevity, here's a quick list of some of my other favorites:

• Movies - "Brazil" (every minute is brilliant), "The Great Match" (I never thought I'd use the word "cinematography" when explaining why I loved a movie - Thanks, Murray!) and "A Clockwork Orange" (many of Kubrick's films, like "2001: A Space Odyssey", show their age, but this one is just as powerful as it was 25 years ago).
  

• Books (or rather authors) - John LeCarre (I wish the Cold War hadn't ended), William Gibson (sci-fi that's more than cowboys in space), John MacPhee, E. B. White and John Steinbeck
  

• Web sites - NYTIMES.COM (check out the Freakonomics and Dick Cavett blogs), forecast.weather.gov (mmmm, weather porn about northeasters "bombing out in the Gulf of Maine!"), thesaurus.com (when you need another word for "consume" and you need it now!)
  

• TV shows - "The Daily Show" (John Stewart doth protest too much when he says "we do humor, not news"), "The Colbert Report" (although Stephen can be too much to take, sometimes), Red Sox games, "Mystery" on PBS (Helen Mirren is my other secret crush, but why is so much of the rest of PBS programming nothing more than "self-help for yuppies"? Will someone please put Suze Orman out of my misery?)

• Radio Shows - "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me" (but only when Paula Poundstone is on), "Morning Edition" (although I have to warn you that NPR will never keep you up to date on Amy Winehouse), "Lucky Dog Radio" (on iTunes Radio)
  

• Magazines - "Harpers" (if only Lewis Lapham didn't have to use the word "mammon" in every issue), "The Atlantic" (long articles that are actually worth the time it takes to read them), "Paste" (just for the CDs and DVDs)
  

Okay, your turn. What are some of your favorites, and why?