The Man In The High Castle, season 1, streamed from Amazon Prime.
This is an excellent 10 part TV adaptation of the Philip K Dick novel, (which I shall be ordering from the library tomorrow). Produced by Ridley Scott's company, this is some of the best American TV I have seen in a long time.
Inherent Vice, by Paul Thomas Anderson, was a blast: very funny, properly stoner and occasionally shocking, and then strangely heartening.
Charlotte DuCann's book 52 Flowers that Shook My World. I have mentioned this before, but it was certainly one of the best books I read last year, and it was a year of reading many books. It is so rare to find a real take on the path, not in the footsteps of a guru, or in any pre-existent tradition. Fiercely honest about herself and her travels, as well as people she meets, DuCann's book is dense and rewarding on so many levels. She writes against empires, both literal and metaphorical, and I have been greatly inspired to continue to dismantle my own inner 'foreign installations' and to continue not to collude with the outer systems of power and control either. You can get this book via her blog or from Two Ravens Press.
China Mieville's Three Moments of an Explosion is superb SF, in stories of varying lengths, some extremely short, others more like novellas. I missed my tube stop twice as I couldn't look up from the page. One of the stories was too gruesome for my tastes, but the rest were full of ideas that had my head full of extrapolations even after each story ended. I have also heard that his tremendous 2009 book 'The City And the City' is being adapted for television. The central conceit of the story, compared to a mixture of Kafka, Orwell and Philip K Dick, is hard to describe without massive plot spoilers, so if you haven't read it, do, or just enjoy the upcoming BBC2 adaptation.
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