I’m Ben Targett, the owner of this blog and the latest adopter of the Creative Writing Society at Staffordshire University. Recently I have been inspired by music, and I typically specialise in writing emotional freeform poetry, but also occasionally post witty reviews, hoping to capture the signature deadpan style of the greatest British comedians.

Here’s my review of 2023’s best.

At the start of the year, I found one of my all-time favourite videogames, Hi-Fi RUSH. Its beautiful and vibrant hand-drawn anime art style, along with its thumping rock soundtrack make for an unforgettable experience. It would also go on to inform basically my entire music taste.

Later we also got the Game of The Year, Baldur’s Gate 3, which had taken over my entire life by the time January rolled around, with its immersive and extremely detailed fantasy world filled with exceptionally well-acted characters who have voice lines for every possible interaction you could imagine. It’s also probably no surprise that I also got into D&D around the same time I started playing!

I started a literature themed blog pretty early into 2023, with the first post being a very meta poem about how the internet affects creatives, which is also the first piece written by a classmate of mine! (They later also created the brilliant Junebug’s Song.)

Later in the year, I went to see Royal Blood play live. It was incredible, their live sound will have your ears ringing for weeks. Ben Thatcher parting the crowd to give us all high-fives even inspired me to write a poem from the perspective of a musician!

This year, my favourite book was In Cold Blood, which we were studying at university. The novel gives so much emotional depth and complexity to its characters that it will have you sympathising with killers, and the fact that it’s based on a real story seems almost unbelievable considering the immense care with which it plays with time and language to create a compelling story.

I also really enjoyed Never Let Me Go, which I wrote a review about recently. The novel is a bleak, depressing and hopeless dystopian, whilst having incredibly realistic characters whose love and friendships surviving through the brutality of the world they live in make up the core aspect of the story.