It was a good year for fiction. You can find the highlights on the intro page to this project. I've not duplicated any of those comments here.
This was my first year post-Amazon, which changed my reading behaviour a bit. I ordered some print books from bookdelivery.com, which I found slow and expensive, and more from Indigo.ca, which is cheaper and faster but annoying as hell to deal with, to the extent that I gave up and made one Amazon purchase for a Christmas gift that I simply could not check out via Indigo. Pro-tip for capitalists: make it easy for your customers to give you money. If there is a failure at checkout, don't just show a rotating wheel for a few seconds and then refuse to proceed with no indication of what the problem is.
Ebooks via Kobo were my staple, although prior to discovering Fantasy-Faction they were very hit and miss. A lot of DNFs (Did Not Finish) or PSNHFs (Probably Should Not Have Finished).
Time travel stories--especially ones involving dinosaurs--seem to make authors think they have a "Get Out of Organizational Psychology Free Card", resulting in absurd institutional structures and far too many "So The Story Can Happen" bad choices by characters. Also, "time traveller messes up history and winds up fighting with other time travellers from even worse future he has created" has been done. Many, many times. It's really, really hard to say anything new or interesting about it, though I'm sure that won't stop people from trying. One or two of them might even succeed. Eventually. But overall, "Things could be worse" is an idea that's hard to do anything interesting with.
Also lots of derivative fantasy, which is fine, but life is short. And some derivative science fiction, and not just the time travel stuff.
I found very little pure science fiction that appealed, although I revisited some classics, including EE Doc Smith's "Triplanetary" and H. Beam Piper's "Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen", both of which have what James C. Scott would call "elements of authoritarian high modernism". They're OK stories up to a point, but Smith in particular describes a world in which the nominal police force has extralegal powers of arrest and execution, which is... not good.
One thing I learned almost by accident this year is that archive.org allows you to "borrow" books, which gives free access to a lot of classic SF and mysteries, so I read a couple of old Dick Francis novels there as well, which are fun stories well-told if you can get past how painfully class-ridden English society is. As someone who is not now, never was, and never will be "the right sort", I've found that increasingly irritating as I've gotten older. Project Gutenberg is also a good source of free older fiction, poetry, and everything else, which is where I got "Triplanetary".
It was a pretty good year for history, with Robert Harris looming large. I've still not read his Cicero trilogy, but "Conclave" [now a major motion picture, I guess?] and "An Officer and a Spy"--about the Dreyfus affair--were both good. "Second Sleep", "Fatherland", and "Act of Oblivion" all had their moments, but I wouldn't especially recommend them, as they're either unduly pessimistic or just depressing. Same with "The Fear Index."
"Babylonia" by Costanza Casati is the story of Semiramis, an Assyrian woman who rose from nothing to the pinnacle of power in humanity's first--and thankfully short-lived--empire. It's an excellent example of imaginative historical writing, and even though the characters are generally pretty terrible people, they are terrible in understandably humans ways, and they are above all else interesting.
I also read a history of the Assyrian empire, which the novel complemented nicely, although for the life of me I can't figure out where I ordered it from... maybe my local bookshop had it? In any case, it was "Assyria: Chronicling the rise and fall of the world’s first empire" by Eckart Frahm, and I found it generally informative and enjoyable. I know a fair bit about Sumerian and Babylonian history, but haven't read anything on Assyria before, and it filled in a lot of gaps between what I know about Mesopotamia and the Greco-Roman-Egyptian-Hebrew world of the ancient Mediterranean.
"Hild" by Nicola Griffith is extremely well-written but was a DNF for me: the pacing was too slow. There is an improv adage that child characters are hard to make interesting, and I found that here, as the book is told in the voice of a young girl, age ten or twelve. I kept on waiting for her to get older and it never happened. For all that, the prose is evocative and the characters well-drawn.
Also historical, "A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel" by K J Charles is a sort-of-sequel to "The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen", although it deals with mostly different characters, living on and about the marshlands of coastal Kent in the early eighteen-hundreds. I'm not a fan of "X but Y" books in general, as it's a formula that often masks a pedestrian story, and I want stories that stand on their own merits, not just on their social commentary chops. That said, in Charles' hands "Regency romance but gay" works extremely well, and you can skip the (moderately graphic) sexy bits if you're not that-way minded.
Guy Gavriel Kay's "Written on the Dark" I found very affecting. His work is hit or miss for me. I found "Under Heaven", set in Not-China during the Waring States period, very powerful. Some of his other books, set in Not-Italy, less so. "Written on the Dark" is another one set during the Not-Renaissance, and is about the power and fragility of poetry. I increasingly believe that poetry's nominal power is strongly conditioned on how it serves the powerful, so this was a nice ameliorative to that depressing view.
"Sorcery and Small Magics" by Maiga Doocy is the start of a series that I'm looking forward to reading more of. It's an odd couple story set at a magical university in a secondary world, where the main characters are driven together by their need to unravel an accidental curse. The stakes are high enough to matter, not so high that the Fate Of The Universe depends on it, which--like the Alex Verus books that I discuss in the highlights--I found a pleasant vacation from <<waves hands>> all this.
It's also an example of fantasy that deals with the question of, "Suppose you can only do one thing, but you can do it really well?" In the case of "Sorcery and Small Magics", the protagonist can work charms--small magics--but not major spells. In the case of T. Kingfisher's "A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking" the protag's power is enchanting dough, which she thinks is pretty useless... but one of the lessons of the modern world is that simple machines can be put together to do remarkable things. A computer is in principle nothing but a collection of NAND gates: a NAND gate is a component that takes two inputs and has an output of zero if both of the inputs are one, and one otherwise.
Sometimes really good enchanted cookies are all you need to save the world.
These simple-but-powerful magic systems are quite a contrast to the complex system of monster-derived, potion-based powers that drive the action in "A Drop of Corruption", the second entry in Robert Jackson Bennett's Ana and Din mysteries. I thought it was very solid, although pretty much everyone I've talked to about it likes it more than I do. It won the Hugo, though, so what do I know? I will say that the focus on legal defence of a society under peril is something I'd like to see more of in fiction, and it contrasts nicely with the fascist-leaning police-state of EE Doc Smith's Lensman universe as depicted in "Triplanetary".
Caitlin Rozakis' "Dreadful" opens with a trope I hate: someone who wakes up not knowing who they are. I quite liked it. It isn't close to Pratchett in execution--because really, what is?--but it has hopeful hints of the same sensibility. Rozakis is definitely an author to watch.
And rounding out e-books, Cassandra Clare's "The Ragpicker King" is a solid sequel to "Sword Catcher", with much skulduggery and romance.
That just about covers it for fiction I want to remember from 2025, I think... but wait, there's more! Those are e-books. A quick review of various shelves scattered around the house also reveals an eclectic mix of fiction, culled partly from a local annual charity book-sale, partly from my local independent book store, and partly from stuff people leave out on the side of the road.
"The Book of Air and Shadows" by Michael Gruber, is a literary mystery about a lost Shakespearean manuscript from the point of view of an intellectual property lawyer and inveterate womanizer. This was a re-read for me, and it's a solid turn-of-the-millennium piece.
Matt Dinniman's "Dungeon Crawler Carl" is as good as "lit-RPG" gets, I think. Not really my thing, but definitely a good thing of its kind. Great fun, but I'll likely not read the rest of the series.
There are still classics I've never read, but "Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is no longer one of them. Published in the Soviet Union back when there was still a Soviet Union, it's a fresh take on the human cost of encounters with the unknown. Unlike some of the ideas I've whined about here, this is a theme that never seems to go stale. Algis Budrys covered it in "Rogue Moon". Heinlein in "Goldfish Bowl". Stanislaw Lem all over the place, from "Solaris" to "His Master's Voice". The Sturgatsky brothers do a good job of showing the struggles of ordinary humanity in the face of how weird the universe is.
"Post Office" and "Ham on Rye", both by Charles Bukowski I picked up from a box of books someone left at the end of their driveway. I live in that kind of place. The set also included "Women", which I DNF'd, hard. The other two I made it through, just, but Bukowski, for all that his poetry has some moments, is just an asshole. And sure, his upbringing--which he describes at length in "Ham on Rye"--gives him some excuse, but he clearly has the self-awareness to rise above it, if he made the effort, which he doesn't. Someone posted a bunch of pictures online of a used copy of one of Bukowski's poetry books, full of marginalia from a previous owner pointing out how he continued to fail to have a clue about himself, women, or the world, and I've got a lot of sympathy for that anonymous commentator.
M L Rio's "If We Were Villains" is an audacious book simply because it will inevitably invite comparisons with Donna Tartt's "The Secret History", which it cannot possibly live up to. It's still a decent read, though.
After a very long wait, Welsh satirist and fantasy author Jasper Fforde published the sequel to "Shades of Grey" this year: "Red Side Story". The first book suffered from coming out around the same time that a famous piece of "Twilight" fan-fic with a similar name took off, which is a shame because it's easily Fforde's best work. "Red Side Story" gives us most of the explanation as to what The Thing That Happened actually was, and who the people inhabiting this place actually are. I'm really looking forward to the final instalment in the promised trilogy.
As a Canadian, I'm legally obliged to read at least one book of Canadian fiction per year, and while Guy Gavriel Kay is Canadian, his books are largely decoupled from the experience of being Canadian. Jane Urquhart, on the other hand, is writing literature for Canadians. "In Winter I Get Up At Night" is a desperately lonely story that captures a real emptiness of this country as it existed almost a century ago. Subtle, understated, and quietly penetrating, I found it deeply unsettling. This was the world my parents grew up in, and I can see it mirrored in my memories of them.
Almost finally: Phillip Kerr's "Metropolis" is the last of the Bernie Gunter books, as Kerr sadly passed away shortly before its publication in 2019, but it takes us back to the beginning, when Bernie is still learning the ropes as a cop in Berlin in 1928, before the March Violets blossom, and as Fritz Lang is making his science fiction masterpiece about work rebellions and robotic women in the city of the future. It's a satisfying, if bittersweet, end to one of the deftest series of historical novels I've ever read.
Actually finally, Jason Lutes' "City of Light" is the last volume of his "Berlin" trilogy of graphic novels, and I cannot recommend them enough. The final pages had me in tears, both because of how the story ends, and what happens after, which will bring you hope.
I've writen a separate post for non-fiction, as apparently I covered over a dozen books in the course of the year, and this has already gone on far too long. If you've made it this far, well done!
My fiction reading seems to have come in at around fifty, including a handful I've not mentioned here, and not counting any DNFs or novellas.
Not bad for an old guy.