Books 2025

Created/Modified: 2025-12-09/2025-12-15

I've done a review of my readings most years for the past decade, although not always on this site, which I'm in the process of revivifying.

This one is a bit different as I've split fiction and non-fiction and created this header page for the whole thing. Part of the revivification process is to support larger, multi-page, projects--including a long series on Bayesian epistemology that will have its own home on the front page--so this is a step in that direction.

This year was lighter on fiction and heavier on non-fiction than usual, which is supposed to be something that happens as you get older, which apparently I am. I'm starting to feel qualitatively different, as I approach the nominal age of retirement. There are changes of mindset that come with age that can be divided up in various ways. In my early 40s a friend around the same age pointed out that he had recently realized there was a separate category of "young man", who was clearly not a youth, but also clearly not like him. I passed through the same transition, and am now starting to see the category of, well, "junior" appear. After all, if I'm a senior, what does that make everyone who isn't?

The best thing that happened to me this year, reading-wise, was joining the "Fantasy-Faction" Facebook group. I've only been staying on FB to post pro-clean-air and anti-fascist content, but stumbled on this group and found it's one of the places where social media still actually works: a quarter of a million people, who knows how many hard-working mods and admins, and a fantastic resource for good science fiction and fantasy recommendations.

For people who just want the highlights of my reading year, here they are. I've restricted myself to three top picks each in fiction and nonfiction--plus a bonus pick that I can't resist adding--and in the case of fiction focused on series or universes rather than individual books.

Fiction: Top Three

By far the biggest prize so far has been discovering Victoria Goddard's work, which is easily the best secondary world story since Gandalf got mixed up with the hobbits. I've not read everything she's written yet, but managed the Lays of the Hearthfire, including "The Hands of the Emperor" and its direct sequels "The Return of Fitzroy Angursell"and "At the Feet of the Sun", as well as a bunch of novellas that fill in the backstories of some of the characters. Beyond that, I read the first three "Greenwing and Dart" books, which are set in the same universe but only slightly overlapping characters.

The universe is rich, complex, and never fully explained. It just kind of grows on you. If you don't worry too much about the grand structure of the world your knowledge of it will unfold naturally, without the author ever sitting you down and saying, "Look, here's how it all works..." Although I'm pretty sure she does know how it all works: there's no way to put together such complex interlocking narratives otherwise.

The story-telling, particularly in the Greenwing and Dart books, can get ridiculously discursive, to the point where I've described them as "like Tristam Shandy if it actually had a plot." The first book is almost a picaresque, but they ultimately add up to a fully-fleshed out story.

The "world" of these books spans multiple actual worlds inhabited by gods and humans and fey, although I've not yet seen much of the latter. Five of the nine (known?) worlds were spanned by an empire that collapsed in the relatively recent past, although how recent depends on where you were, because time itself came loose in the Fall, which was sudden and complete, as the magic that bound the Empire together failed.

The Lays of the Hearthfire books are mostly from the perspective of Kip Mdang, a senior bureaucrat in the fallen administration of the Last Emperor, who is now merely the lord of one world, although he is working to reassemble or heal the magic that so many lives once depended on. Kip is a character I appreciate: an outsider from an island culture whose greatest achievement is sailing the wide seas in a boat of his own making, who has risen to the pinnacle of power and influence and still can't quite get his family to understand why anything he does is important.

The stories are about striving, and community, and meaning, and friendship between men who know and respect each other professionally and slowly learn about each other personally. It's quite beautiful and I found it deeply moving.

All these books are available at her website via at very reasonable prices.

Then there's Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman books, of which I read "The Outskirter's Secret", "The Language of Power", and "The Lost Steersman". Although they read like fantasy, these are among the very small genus of science fiction books that are actually about science, in that I recognize myself and what I do as a scientist in them, which is fantastically rare. Want to learn what living your life as a scientist is really like? Start here. These books build on a century of science fiction, from Stanley G. Weinbaum to Roger Zelazney and beyond, and while they burn slowly they burn very, very hot, capturing the pathological relentlessness and discipline that doing science well requires.

The purer end of fantasy included the first bunch of Benedict Jakta's Alex Verus novels, which is a well-realized urban fantasy series with an engaging narrator who faces hard choices in a world where the good guys are vaguely law-like--so long as the law is protecting them, at least--and the bad guys are pure might-makes-right. There is no glamour on either side, just human beings doing the best--or at times worst--they can. Verus feels the draw to raw unbridled power that the dark wizards embody, but he's been on the receiving end of it and unlike practically everyone reading this, has the moral strength to say no to it, even while he remains standoffish with respect to the "law for me but not for thee" Council.

Fiction Bonus Pick

Michael Duff, whom I've known slightly online for decades now, published the second volume in the Taltorak Saga this year. "The Hero Business" is a well-paced super-hero story that follows hard on the heels of "Timothy's Demon" and gives us a deeper view into the supernatural backstory of the world Tim Kovak inhabits, as well as a broader sense of the forces at work in it. "Timothy's Demon" was a personal struggle against the forces of Hell. We're starting to see the shadowy outline of the much darker forces of humanity that stand behind the curtains of the world. The third volume is in the works and I'm really looking forward to it. These books are deservedly rising rapidly on the Amazon best-seller's lists, but you still have time to say, "I was into the Taltorak Saga before it was cool!"

The rest of my non-fiction reading is just a click away.

Non-Fiction

"The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz" was one of two books by Eric Larson that I read this year, the other being "Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania".

This one was better: it's an account of Churchill's first year at war, and in some ways is kind of an "extended cut" of John Lukacs' "Five Days in London: May 1940", which details the desperate decision-making that took place during Churchill's first week in office.

Churchill was an extremely strange man, even by the eccentric standards of the time. He was far more Victorian than a man of the modern era, and in some ways that suited him to lead where others couldn't. He genuinely believed in God and Country in way that is alien to modern sensibilities. He genuinely believed a lot of racist nonsense, as well, obviously: one could hardly be a Victorian without it. This understandably upsets people, but you can't say "absurdly racist man plays critical role in defeating NAZI Germany" without saying "man plays critical role in defeating NAZI Germany."

Larson's book is a look into Churchill's family life, including the group of close advisors and aides that he gathered around him. For all the strangeness and frequent repugnance of his way of living and leading, he was also intensely functional: he taught subordinates how to summarize, how to prioritize, and how to think clearly, even when he often didn't do so himself. His family must have been long-suffering beyond words, and yet: he was there when the nation needed him most, and he Did The Job.

Larson's book is strongest when it gives us the most intimate view of it's subject, and "Maria Antoinette: The Journey" by Antonia Fraser is also as close as one can come to an intimate view of the long-dead French queen, who was a younger daughter of the Austrian Hapsburgs, a living example of the famous meme: "She said she wanted to be treated like a princess so I married her off to a total stranger to strengthen my alliance with France."

The first half of the book, especially, is an extended examination of, "Well, how did that work out for you?" and the answer is: not all that well, really. The marriage took forever to consummate, took even longer to produce living children, and was never very functional, either as an act of statecraft or matrimony.

Lady Antonia Fraser is, as an upper-class Englishwoman--more sympathetic to Antoinette than I am, giving her the benefit of most doubts.

The second half of the book is more focused on the post-Revolutionary period, where the royal family's situation becomes increasingly precarious as the leaders of the Revolution find out that, no, in fact, simply eating the rich will not solve all the problems of governance. Who could have possibly predicted that???

And the end, of course, is unpleasant, with signs of more unpleasantness to come.

But overall a useful look at the state of Europe just before the wheels come off, from the perspective of one of the more notable lug-nuts.

In a more modern vein, "Saving the City: The Challenge of Transforming a Modern Metropolis" by Daniel Sanger is a fascinating look at the beginnings, growth, and eventual electoral success of "Projet Montreal", a political movement started by an advocate for urban trams that eventually wound up forming the city government.

If all politics is local, municipal politics is the most local politics of all, and this careful tour of the various people and policies involved was a useful reminder of why I have so rarely been involved in it (I helped manage a friend's successful campaign for a city council position, once.) But for all that, despite being watered down and taken off course by a bunch of feckless left-entryists (leftists who glom onto and inevitably ruin any political movement that attempts to do anything interesting or useful for anyone) Projet Montreal did in fact make a difference to the city, at least for a while.

Nonfiction Bonus Pick

"Assyria: Chronicling the rise and fall of the world’s first empire" by Eckart Frahm filled a gap in my knowledge of the ancient Middle East. I'm modestly well-versed in Sumerian and Babylonian history, and aware that the general trend of development over some thousands of years in the region was, "More northerly, more militaristic, more violent" but had never gotten around to learning about the end state of that process, which was the Assyrian Empire.

Government is a technology for imposing collective organization on populations for the purpose of extracting surplus value that the governing class can use for their own ends.

Since people never want to have collective organization imposed upon them or to give up their surplus value, finding technologies--systems of government--that do this sustainably and well is a hard problem, and for thousands of years people were not very good at it. Not because they were stupid, but because they had to invent everything for the first time as they went, and what would work and what wouldn't work was not obvious. After all, in the absence of actually trying stuff out, all they had to go on was their imagination, and can you really think of a worse tool for predicting how things are going to work than your imagination? I can't.

So Sumerian cities and city-states rose and fell and rose again as they tried to work out governing technologies that would work for more than a generation or so. Their Babylonian heirs did the same, growing in power and scope as they learned. And then the Assyrians took it to the next level, and conquered a wide and diverse enough area encompassing enough different languages and cultures to call it an empire.

It did not last.

Then again, what does?

Conclusion

Those are the highlights. Go to the full fiction or nonfiction pages for the full range. I've not talked at all about books I thought were bad, except in general terms. Life is too short. Go read something.