Blog Features

2025 in Review: The Books

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Good Morning Folks. As I often do, the start of a new year is a time for reflection back upon the previous one. While I never can seem to keep exactly the same rhythms anymore, I figured I might branch out and start what are hopefully a new series of yearly “in review” posts. 2025 was one of those years where I had to lean on distractions heavily, and those distractions came in many forms. Some of them were comfort gaming, others experiencing new anime, and an awful lot were the books that I read. This morning I am going to talk about some of the more significant books that I enjoyed. I set my goal for 30 books and ended up reading 38. For those curious, I use both Bookwyrm and Storygraph to track my reading journey. Bookwyrm is a federated client so it is very easy to share on Mastodon if the mood strikes me and I want to write a proper review of a book. Storygraph I mostly use because it has a really good recommendation algorithm, that has fed me a few books that I otherwise would not have paid attention to.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism

Probably my favorite single book of the year was My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix. This was my entry into this author’s work and at some point I want to check out more books. I read Witchcraft for Wayward Girls and it did not quite land the same for me. I think that might be in part because so much of this is my adolescent years bottled and packaged up into a novel form. It takes place in the 80s that I remember so vividly, and the pair remind me a bit of two of my friends who were always together but similarly somewhat mismatched. There is a made for amazon movie for this book… but I could not get through it. It just did not capture any of the magic of this book for me about demon possession and undying friendship.

Dungeon Crawler Carl

If we are not talking about single books, then my highlight of the year is reading the entirety of what has been published so far in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. This was my first foray into RPGLit and while I loved it… I am not sure if the larger genre is really my thing. In truth it takes a few books for this series to really reach its stride, and I think part of that is Matt Dinniman shuffling off the normal constraints of the genre and leaning into the best aspects of this cast of amazing characters. Specifically I LOVE the voice acting of Jeff Hayes, and if you have read these in text form, you owe it to yourself to listen to the audio books as well. Right now A Parade of Horribles is supposedly slotted for release in May and I am literally almost thrumming with excitement for it.

Murderbot Series

Another series that I fell in love with this year is Murderbot. In the months ahead of the release of the television series, I burned through these books and they are really comfortable reads. Each of them is very short and very focused, with a fast moving narrative that is just a delight. This will be another one of those series that I consume happily whenever a new book comes out, and at some point I should really dive out into the other things Martha Wells has written. Reading these books has made me realize that I might be slightly on the spectrum, just because the running internal monologue of Murderbot feels so god damned familiar to me.

News Flesh Series

In the column of… I should have read this decades ago… we have the Newsflesh series. Legitimately I remember seeing Feed at borders so many times and almost picking it up. I love Seanan McGuire, and I had no clue that Mira Grant was a pen name until earlier this year when I dove down this rabbit hole. This series is so damned good that it is almost painful that I did not read it before now. So many great characters delivered with only the level of sass that Seanan can. At some point I am going to start the October Daye series, because I am fully on board with anything crafted by this author I think. If you like zombies and honestly a kind of fresh spin on them, or at least fresh for the time in which these books came out. I highly suggest giving these a read. They go pretty quickly.

In the biggest disappointment or the year… we have Space Oddity by Catherynne M. Valente. I loved the adventures of Decibel Jones in Space Opera last year so freaking much, that I was rather excited to read this sequel. The problem is… this book is a bit of a meandering mess. It eventually does find its heart and lands the plane safely… but holy shit are you going to have to wade through a lot of nonsense to get there. More than anything it feels like this author was pressured to write a sequel and had zero fucking clue how they wanted to do this thing. The entire first half of the book could essentially be removed and you would still have a reasonable plot. It just sort of feels like stalling until inspiration hit and then rushing to the finish line.

Camp Damascus

Camp Damascus from Chuck Tingle is the book that almost broke me. I had never read a Chuck Tingle book before, but this is very much not the usual “pounded in the butt by” book. This book is bleak… really fucking bleak. It is extremely well crafted and does a phenomenal job of exploring the themes of “gay conversion” camps through the lens of horror. Sure this is horror and sure there are fantastical elements, but the core of this narrative is all too real. It is well worth a read but it was a bit of a suckerpunch that left me reeling for awhile. I finished the book on March 27th, and it was not until July 23rd that I even attempted to read another book. Sure I had a really fucking bad July… for reasons I have gone into at length in so many posts… but this book drained me of the will to keep reading for awhile.

Sworn Soldier Series

Another series that I really enjoyed last year was the Sworn Soldier series by T. Kingfisher. Essentially this is the Gothic horror of Poe, Shelly and Stoker for a modern audience. Each of these books is pretty short, similar to the Murderbot books and are extremely easy reads. What Moves the Dead is effectively a re-imagining of the Fall of the House of Usher, and from there we get more interesting snippets of nature gone wrong, and eldritch horror in the other two novels. Alex Easton is an immediately likeable protagonist, and the books are just enjoyable. Well worth your time if you enjoy unknowable horrors.

Cerulean Chronicles

At least for me, as I have found out what a regressive shitbag that J.K. Rowling has turned out to be… I struggle with the Harry Potter series. I will always love the characters because those books meant so much to me as I was reading them, but I want zero of my dollars to ever go toward supporting her quite frankly evil causes. I’ve read that TJ Klune set out to write the Cerulean Sea series as an unabashedly clear wizarding tale, and one of love and warmth and acceptance. They succeeded in this and the two books are a joy to read. I happened to be turned onto this series just as the sequel was coming out, so I was able to read them back to back. The first novel is really tight and clearly focused, but the second one takes a little bit to get started but has a rousing finish. If you crave some intentionally queer friendly wizarding worlds… I suggest you also dive into this series.

You can always see the full list of everything that I read in 2025 over on my Bookwyrm goals page, as that is probably the easiest and most concise way to see it. You can also follow me on Storygraph to see what I am actively reading there. I occasionally write reviews there, but fairly rarely as most of my content ends up here on the blog. What were some of your favorite books that you read in 2025? Would love to hear of anything that you think I should read so I can add it to my 2026 list.

A Legacy Reforged

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the launch of Guild Wars Reforged, a client refresh for the aging original Guild Wars game. The thing is, this was one of those things where it mostly just happened automatically. if you already had the game installed it patched the client up to Reforged. If you downloaded the client the same downloader worked the same, and since I was on a brand new box… I had to download everything. Side note for anyone who does not know this, you can tag -image into the shortcut properties to force the game to download all of the files instead of just streaming them each time you load into a new area. This took forever because the game servers were getting hit pretty freaking hard, but as of this morning the 139KBs turned into something more akin to 1300KBs, which allowed me to zip through the updates that happened over night. Cool thing is if you ever owned any version of Guild Wars 1, you now own all three parallel content releases. You can also purchase the game on Steam if you so choose, but really you need to stick to the same ecosystem for linking accounts if you also play Guild Wars 2.

Reforged is mostly a facelift, with updated textures and updated graphical settings designed for more modern systems. It has been wild just how active the starter areas of the game are now. I logged in for a bit to play a baby ranger that I had yet to choose a subclass on, and am planning on going elementalist just for the weapon buffs. I figured it had been so long since I had really played through prophecies, the original release that I would make my way through that before venturing forth into either Factions or Nightfall. I still hate that I cannot jump with my characters, but that is probably always going to be a thing with the original Guild Wars. The world is definitely much easier on the eyes, even though the polygon count of the models is still woefully early 2000s. I did not play a ton last night because I was finishing up a book, but plan on diving into it more over the weekend.

In other news we got a new character drop in Destiny Rising this morning, and I managed to get him within 20 pulls that I had saved up. Up until this point we have not really had a good feeling Hand Cannon character, as Attal never really did much for me other than vaguely looking like Princess Leia because her helmet sort of has the Cinnamon Bun thing going on. Jaren is a proper Hand Cannon character with what feels like a much faster reload animation, and a kit of abilities that play nicely with this sort of run and gun gunslinger gameplay. Essentially one ability is a movement similar to Ning Fei’s but instead of cloaking he throws out a blind grenade and targets characters weak points dealing critical damage for a short period of time. Then there is an AOE ability that fires out a burst of six rounds that targets anything in the near vicinity also dealing critical damage. Lastly he has a take on Golden Gun from Destiny, but he fires multiple shots at once allowing for a really powerful burst super.

With him also came The Last Word, which is one of my favorite exotic hand cannons from both Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. Its big claim to fame is that you benefited from hip firing the weapon and got some bonus body shot damage. So this means you can very rapidly fire it without aiming down sights and still be effective. This all blends in nicely to the style of character that Jaren is, and makes the entire package feel really good. Will he replace Maru, Estela, or Helhest as my favorites? Probably not. However it does give me a character of the Hand Cannon archetype that I actually like playing. That said I am not sure when I would take him over other characters, but he is if nothing else an interesting option for speed running strikes, because he can move every bit as fast as Ning Fei can.

I managed to get him up to 56k light and will push him up a bit higher once I am no longer bottlenecked. Once again I need to farm up a stupid amount of elemental fruit, but am holding off on doing so because Ace and I have plans to do some calamity ops tonight and I don’t want to spend down my pinnacle rewards until we have already done that. I am probably going to spend some of the rare resources I got from the last round of Calamity Ops to push up his levels a bit. I also need to spend some time farming artifacts because right now the load out is less than optimal. I am pretty happy with the character overall and honestly way happier with it than I thought I would be.

Lastly the reason why I really did not play much Guild Wars last night is that I finished up The Shattering Peace. This is maybe my favorite book in this series. I always liked the character of Gretchen Trujillo in the other books, and I especially like the adult that she turned into. The way things wrap up are really freaking interesting, and I am hoping that we get more books in this universe given the world shifting changes at the end of this book. I am probably going to hold off a bit getting into the next book so that I can spend some nights playing Guild Wars 1, which requires me to read. I cannot read text and listen to audiobooks at the same time. It is like the narrative side of my brain can only process on input stream at a time. So for a little bit I am going to be devoting that processing power to questing in GW1.

Climbing Back on the Wagon

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Good Morning Folks! One of the things that I have talked about before is how much of a happy place it is for me to be playing a mechanically interesting game… that is devoid of narrative, so that I can sit there and listen to an audiobook while I play. I seem to forget how much I enjoy this from time to time. I was doing really good this week until March… when I completely fell apart when it came to books. Then I picked back up a bit after the passing of my wife, because I needed anything to take my mind off what I was going through, but again paused in August for a bit. Then recently Brigands and Breadknives was released by Travis Baldree and I felt bad for not having read it yet, so I chained through a bunch of books that I had gathered up waiting for me to give them attention. I am back in the swing of things and over the course of the last week and a half or so I have gone through three books and am chipping away at a fourth, with a fifth absolutely prepped and waiting. I figured this morning I would talk a bit about each of them.

First up we have Brigands & Breadknives which is the third book in a series of books centered around the universe first created in Legend & Lattes. Though technically this book is much more of a direct sequel to Bookshops & Bonedust, which itself serves as a bit of a prequel to Legends & Lattes. It centers around the character of Fern, a bookseller from a seaside town that has recently accepted an offer from Viv the central character of the first book to move operations to the city of Thune and next door to her Coffee shop. However Fern suffers a midlife crisis and a totally different sort of adventure ensues. I love this series of books and I love its characters… and this book introduces yet more characters that I have fallen in love with like Zyll the Goblin fugitive and Asteryx the Elven bounty hunter. This book is phenomenal… right up until the end… when it sort of goes off the rails. The ending Fern receives is not the ending I expected… nor even an ending I even feel comfortable with. Ace is re-reading the book to see if they feel any different about the ending knowing where things are going… but I somehow doubt that will be the case. There are essentially multiple paths laid out in front of Fern, and she chooses the most boring option. What I want now however is a book centered on Zyll, because she absolutely deserves a prequel treatment like Bookshops & Bonedust was for Fern.

In 2023, on a complete lark, I read The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna, and fell in love with it. I have no recollection of HOW this book crossed my eyeballs, but I am very glad it did. From that point forward I had been waiting for a sequel and thought I had one when A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping was released earlier this year. It is not a sequel, nor is it even set in the same broader world… but thematically it very much fits the same sort of pattern that the first book did. This is the point where I have realized that I actually quite enjoy a romance novel so long as the romance elements are not the central plot point, and the book in general has some sort of fantasy or science fiction setting. They are really nice cozy reads, and I highly enjoyed this one. I do wish that Sangu were building some sort of broader universe with all of these individual vignettes, but I am not going to hold that against them. The main reason why I can tell they are absolutely NOT connected is that the hierarchy of magical societies in the books are wildly different. It was well worth the read though, especially if you enjoyed the Harry Potter series before we realized how much of a harmful person the author is.

Another series I have deeply come to love is the Sworn Soldier series by T. Kingfisher. I’ve not read anything else from them, and admittedly was originally drawn to this series by the striking cover art. Then I found out Ace was reading them and also loved them, so that sealed them deal when it came to me giving them a read as well. Essentially this whole series is in the vein of gaslight horror, similar to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The first book in the series, What Moves the Dead, is somewhat of a re-imagining of Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher. From there each of the book dives into almost cosmic horror elements in different settings, and What Stalks the Deep specifically centers around an inherited coal mine in West Virginia and a series of disappearances. I love the character of the Gallacian Sworn Soldier Alex Easton and their companion Angus and the various misadventures that they get involved in within the course of the books. Each of the books is pretty short and more novella than novel, so similar to the Murderbot Diaries you can rip through them in pretty short measure. I HIGHLY suggest this series if you like gaslight era horror or cosmic horror themes.

Another book that I had been holding onto, but had not started was The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi. Firstly I love Scalzi and pretty much everything I have read from him. In 2023 I ripped through the entire Old Man’s War series, so it has taken me a little bit to reactivate the pathways in my brain that remember what the final events of The End of All Things were. This book specifically is told from the perspective of Gretchen Trujillo, best friend to Zoe Boutin Perry, and a former member of the ill fated Roanoke Colony. Twenty years have passed since the events of the Roanoke colony and now Gretchin is in the diplomatic corp, and called forth to assist in another series of pivotal events centered around a colony that has up and disappeared. So far it has been a fun ride, but like I said I am having to active memberberries for where things left off in the previous books since a few years have passed since I read them. I am enjoying it quite a bit and also finding it hard to stop at a reasonable hour. Last night I had multiple cats reminding me that it was well past my bedtime and I should really come to bed.

So that is where I am currently with my reading. I am hoping I can stay on the wagon a bit longer because I have several books that I want to consume. Once I wrap up Shattering Peace, I am likely rolling into Fury of the Gods by John Gwynne which is the third book in another series I really have enjoyed, that I got turned onto by my friend Cuppy. What have you been reading? Is there anything that you think I would enjoy based on the assortment of books that I talked about here? Drop me a line below.

Witchers, Heroes, and Zanthimum

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Good Morning Folks. I am slowly climbing out of the abyss that is whatever the hell crud I ended up getting. What is remaining is a cough and congestion. I started taking some over the counter fake dayquil to help with some of the symptoms and that has improved my general quality of life. I am hoping between today and tomorrow I will have kicked it enough to feel comfortable trying to be around folks for Thanksgiving. Which will probably just mean that I catch something else… but that is the life of someone without much of an immune system. I still have no clue what exactly I have had since it came on Thursday afternoon, and still has held on with a vengeance all weekend long and into this week. Since I tested negative for Covid and Flu, I am guessing just some sort of a random viral infection.

Since I was pretty out of it, and honestly continue to be… I spent a good chunk of yesterday watching some shows. I burned through all of Season 4 of the Witcher and it was “fine”. The storyline continues to be a complete and fucking mess, at least compared to either the books or the games… but the characters are mostly on point and I have to just treat this as its own thing. Liam Hemsworth honestly might be doing a better job of Geralt of Rivia than Henry Cavill did, which is probably a good thing considering I personally gave some major stinkeye at this actor swap given how invested Cavill was in the show. I think he was fundamentally pissed at how much they strayed from the material, and Hemsworth is doing an adequate job of being properly Geralt-ish. It feels like they are attempting to tell the storyline leading up to the second game, more or less, but a lot of the scenes differ wildly from either the book interpretation or the game interpretation, which are themselves two different things. Its fine… and was very watchable, but you have to put that lore accurate side of your brain asleep when dealing with this project.

I also started To Be Hero X, which is a Chinese Anime that I had heard really good things about. Essentially it is a world where everyone has something akin to the social credit score and if this gets high enough, you start to develop super powers. However those super powers are directly influenced by the way that people feel about you. If effectively social media feels that you are super handsome, you will legitimately keep getting more and more handsome. Its a weird concept but the art style is freaking amazing. It flows between at least three drastically different art styles as it tells various stories centered around effectively normal folks who were thrust into the life of a hero. I am not sure how far I am from the end of the series but there definitely have been set up a bunch of interesting background elements and I am curious how some of the plot threads are going to wrap up.

Over in Path of Exile I am still alternating between mapping on my Ice Trapper and then Delving on my RF Chieftain. I thought I would take a moment and talk through what I am running for Scarabs. The goal is just to add additional mobs to the map, which makes my Ice Trapper level faster and also provides for a bunch of potential drops. I am running Alch and go copies of Tropical Island which I am oversustaining, but recently swapped all of my favorite slots to Strand with the goal of eventually flipping between those two maps. Wide open layouts really favor the area of effect of the ice trap lifestyle. Then I add in Two Scarab of Monstrous Lineage, Two Scarab of Adversaries, and One Scarab of Hunted Traitors to add a bunch of extra mobs to the map, while running with my Niko/Betrayal/Beyond atlas. All the while I am running blue altars with support on the tree so I can knock out that 100 maps achievement, and then I will probably swap up what tree I am using and go with something that can do red altar support so I can knock out another one.

One thing that I have been doing that I think I am going to stop doing… is running the 10,000 Blue Zanthemum strategy. I’ve been sending it with 250k dust and occasionally this produces divine orbs, but it does not feel like it does so often enough to make it worth my time. I am probably instead just going to save up enough materials for one of the multi-million shipments and see if I can get mirror shards instead. I’ve not touched mappers, but I have heard they are producing a lot of good stuff this league, however the gold cost is just outrageous. I am not mining at all because mining generlaly produces gear, and at this stage in the game… especially with the addition of the tree tree… I have no interest in random gear. Basically my last few days have been super chill mapping while watching something on the television, and that is about as much activity as I can really take.

Tonight I plan on doing some Grandmaster activities with Ace in Destiny Rising so hopefully I will remember to take some screenshots of our shenaningans.