Reading

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.

Friday Debris

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This is Tripod, named such for the fact that she is a three legged cat that comes to visit from time to time. Tripod does not realize we love her yet, and bolts at the sight of us… but we do our best to try and make sure she has food. She is one of a handful of neighborhood cats that occasionally visit our house and we were scared to death that she was no longer with us. We’ve had a cold snap and for a couple of weeks we had not managed to catch any sight of her on the front porch cam where we put out food every day. However several times this week we have seen her lurking around the backyard which was pretty much the highlight of the week. We are hoping she is still around during the spring and summer months and maybe just maybe we can teach her that we are friendly people while we are out and about in the back and front yard more often.

This Friday post is somewhat turning into a “things left on the cutting room floor” post about the week. The other day I talked about restarting Witcher 2 so that I could go down the path that was not taken, and I have now reached the first branch in the road… and more or less determined that I made the correct choice the first time. While I greatly enjoyed the “non-human” path, I gotta say I am not loving the blatant racism and bigotry of the “human” path right now. Additionally it is super weird to have as my companions, characters that I more or less learned to greatly dislike during the other play through. As a result my completion of this play through is pretty much in jeopardy. In many games the various path options are equally good and it is just a matter of taste, but for me at least there seems like a clear correct choice here and I made the wrong one on attempt two.

The other issue from which I am suffering is that I am staying up way the hell too late reading and it is starting to cut into my sleep schedule. It feels thoroughly odd to be saying this because I have not been a person to stay up late reading that often in my life. This is complicated by the fact that I read relatively slowly and that at least until my wife falls asleep she is pretty regularly making random comments while I attempt to follow the text. At this point I am roughly halfway through the second book in the Witcher series and I am looking forward to getting into the novels proper having focused on the two prequel short story collections first. The books have not really done much yet to improve my opinion of Yennefer, which is weird because I thought all of the loyalty fans have must have come from reading the books.

Another weird revelation is that there were a lot of moments in Witcher 3 that I mistook as me not knowing what was going on because I had not played the other games. Now I know I am completely incorrect in that assessment and instead the game is just deep diving into character relationships from the books without giving the player much of a heads up about it. Last night I read for example the story of Dudu Biberveldt, a character that I just assumed had showed up in the games before. However having played the second game and watched several synopsis videos of the first game… I am pretty certain that is not a thing and he just lives in the novels. I have to admit though it is this sort of thing that makes the setting so infectious for me, because the things that are constantly left unanswered make me want to go then dig for the answers. I have a feeling that it might have the opposite effect on some of my friends however.

Yesterday was a big reveal of the next expansion for Elder Scrolls Online, and we are going back to Skyrim. The expansion seems like it is going to center on the Solitude area and more importantly Blackreach, one of the coolest areas in Elder Scrolls V. I am all about Dwemer ruins, and supposedly Blackreach is going to make up roughly half of the playable content area in this expansion. They are once again doing a year long story that unfolds over the course of several updates, and considering that I didn’t play any of the “Year of the Dragon” content, I am wondering if this is time for me to update the client and go back into the game. I have most of Morrowind and all of the newer content to experience.

I realize this in some ways goes directly in the face of my whole desire to stop chasing the forever game, but for Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and Star Wars the Old Republic I play them more or less in a single player manner. I come back to the game after a large bundle of content has built up and then can happily binge the new story in an almost Netflix manner before leaving once again and going off and playing other things. I wish I could play World of Warcraft in the same sort of manner, but the way their patch content is released makes it a struggle to try and figure out what the hell is going on at any time if you were not around to see it doled out in small chunks. I am realizing that I find I greatly prefer content that is gated behind completing the previous content just for sake of making it easier to follow.