Reading List - 2025
A list of books I read in 2025| Date | Title | Author | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-01-02 | Artemis | Andy Weir | The usual Andy Weir style. Pretty good, although a bit below The Martian & Project Hail Mary imo. |
| 2025-01-09 | The Mysterious Case Of The Alperton Angels | Janice Hallett | Hallett has a pretty good gimmick going with her telling stories through emails and text messages to and from the characters. In this book a true crime author revisits an old crime for a new book only to uncover facts that point to a miscarriage of justice, and everyone who’s ever looked into the case ends up dying mysteriously. Meanwhile someone from her past is digging into the same story. Everyone involved has secrets they wish to keep hidden. |
| 2025-01-10 | The Sins Of The Fathers | Lawrence Block | I’m a fan of Block’s Keller and Bernie Rhodenbarr books, but never got into his Matt Scudder stories. I picked this one up while waiting for some of my holds to shake loose. This is more hard-edged than the other series. I think I prefer the others due to their humor and humanity, but I can see the appeal of these if that’s your thing. |
| 2025-03-10 | Dark Matter | Blake Crouch | Picked this up on Libby and finished in a day. I find books with a similar theme to this often get too clever for their own good, but this was tight and well written. The inevitable paradox 'gotchas' served the story well. Pacing was excellent and the story was original. Highly recommended. (ps. I hope Amanda's okay) |
| 2025-04-06 | Cosmic Conflicts | Robert Jeschonek | Short story collection from Libby while waiting for some of my hold to come free. A few interesting ideas that would have benefited from better implementation. It killed some time but nothing special. |
| 2025-04-14 | The Tombs Of Atuan | Ursula K. LeGuin | Book 2 in the Earthsea series. Interesting expansion to the world. Solid fantasy world building and exploring a female character’s place in it. Added book #3 to my “to read” list. |
| 2025-04-29 | Run | Blake Crouch | This was one of Crouch’s earlier books. I picked it up because I liked ‘Dark Matter’ so much. It’s a pretty compelling story as an end-of-the-world apocalyptic thriller. Although it was a bit less polished than ‘Dark Matter,’ it was still an enjoyable read. I will definitely be reading more of his books in the future. |
| 2025-05-15 | Abandon | Blake Crouch | Parallel stories from the 1890s and current day of the search for cursed gold in a Colorado ghost town. Not a single likeable character in either story. Should have come with trigger warnings, tbh. I enjoy a dark twist as much as the next guy, but… damn. This was cold. |
| 2025-05-22 | The Mercy Of Gods | James S. A. Corey | An interesting second world story of a group of humans taken captive by an alien race at war with the rest of the galaxy and forced to prove their value in order to be deemed worthy of survival. Second world space opera isn’t my favourite sub-genre but this one is quite good at exploring the interpersonal interactions of people under extreme stress. I hope it continues. |
| 2025-05-27 | Onyx Storm | Rebecca Yarros | Third book in the Empyreum series. Similar to its predecessors. Glad to have finished up the series and nice to see it end without the “happily ever after” ending I expected, but I’m ready to move on. |
| 2025-06-03 | The Goblin Emperor | Katherine Addison | Fantasy novel about a 4th son of an emperor who becomes emperor of an eleven kingdom when his father and three older brothers all die in an accident. As an unwanted half-goblin prince whose education was neglected, his sudden appearance on the scene of the emperor’s court causes plenty of intrigue and plotting. Story has a good pace and relatable protagonist who is in over his head. Recommended if you like court intrigues and political maneuvering. |
| 2025-06-09 | Ten Planets | Yuri Herrera | A collection of short stories and micro-fiction translated from the original Spanish. Very creative and imaginative. I was impressed by the creative concepts but a couple of the stories admittedly went over my head. |
| 2025-06-10 | How To Stop Time | Matt Haig | Haig never fails to write relatable characters for me, not in their specific situations but in their humanity and the ways they deal with (or don’t) their circumstances. In this case the protagonist is a 439 year old human, forced to deal with the passage of time that robs him of everyone he loves, and also with a secret organization trying to keep the knowledge of people like him away from the public. Very enjoyable read. |
| 2025-06-21 | A Short History Of Nearly Everything | Bill Bryson | A fascinating easy read of the history of science. Bryson has a talent for making complicated subject matter accessible to people like me. I’ve added a few of his other books to my “to-be-read” list as well. |
| 2025-06-29 | A Walk In The Woods | Bill Bryson | Bryson' style is enjoyable and easy to read. In this book he details how he decided to undertake a trek over the length of the Appalachian Trail with a former school friend and how it ended up being more than either of them could handle. All in all a fairly light summer read. |
| 2025-07-02 | The Mother Tongue | Bill Bryson | Bryson’s take on the history (and status) of the English language. Still an engaging writer, but the subject seemed to run out of steam a bit. |
| 2025-07-11 | The Farthest Shore | Ursula K. Le Guin | Third book in the Earthsea series. Sparrowhawk takes on a young apprentice and journeys to the realm of the dead to learn why magic is disappearing from the world. I know this is a classic series, but three books in I’m still not sure what all the hype is about. Stories are solid but I just don’t find them engaging in the way some newer books are. |
| 2025-07-12 | Embassytown | China Mieville | It took me 3 tries to get to the end of this book, which came highly recommended. An interesting look at how language shapes perspectives as the interactions between humans interact with an alien race that is literally incapable of lying. There's more to the story, and it's an interesting thought-experiment type of experience, but it seems to be way over-hyped for what it actually delivers. The story took forever to get going before anything interesting happened. Plenty of people like it, so if it sounds like your thing, give it a shot but it really wasn't my cup of tea. |
| 2025-07-15 | One Summer - America 1927 | Bill Bryson | Bryson takes a deep dive into some of the things that happened during the year 1927 in his trademark folksy, engaging style. I was vaguely familiar with much of what he writes about here, but I hadn't realized that it was all taking place more of simultaneously. Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, Herbert Hoover, the Great Mississippi Flood Of 1927 and plenty more gets the Bryson treatment, which is to say it's engagingly written, but often a bit light on sources. Still, a nice easy summer read while you're... oh, I don't know... driving across the second largest country on the planet, maybe? |
| 2025-07-30 | The Thursday Murder Club | Richard Osman | For the life of me, I can't remember how this ended up on my 'To Be Read" list, but in any event... Here's a bit of a formulaic "amateur sleuths solve murder" thing that seems to be super popular lately. In this one, the amateur sleuths are all residents of a senior's home who have a lot of time on their hands. When a local shady character buys up the land around the home and starts upending everyone's lives in an effort to turn a quick buck... (or pound, in this case), he ends up murdered, along with his former business partner, and everyone seems to have a motive, including the amateur sleuths. When their investigation turns up another body from decades earlier, the case gets even more complicated. |
| 2025-08-06 | At Home | Bill Bryson | I didn't mean to read this many Bill Bryson books in quick succession, really. It's just that I added them to my hold list on Libby and they came available in this order. Anyway, in this book Bryson takes us on a deep dive into the history of the western European home, using his then-home in the UK, a former parsonage. Each chapter centres around one room of the home: the salon, the kitchen, the bedroom, etc. and Bryson leads us on a deep dive into the history of how those rooms came to look the way they do. As always, Bryson's style is engaging and readable, which pairs well with the subject which is lightweight and, to be honest, fairly trivial. If you're looking for some light summer reading, you could do worse. |
| 2025-08-10 | When The Moon Hits Your Eye | John Scalzi | Scalzi was my favourite author for quite a while, mostly on the strength of the first 3 or 4 books of the Old Man's War series. I had hoped that he might take up the mantle of the military sci-fi stories I grew up with, like The Forever War, and Footfall. Heck, I would have settled for picking up where series like The Heechee Saga left off. Unfortunately, it looks like he's not going to get there. His last 3 books have all been on the "silly" side of sci-fi, if there is such a thing. Redshirts was enjoyable despite it's light subject matter, because it seemed to be an homage to the campy TV sci-fi of my youth. I read it, noted it was nothing like I'd come to expect from Scalzi, but because it was enjoyable I wrote it off as a one-off. Sometimes you just have to write what you feel like (ask me how I know). Since then, though, he's followed that up with Starter Villain and now When The Moon Hits Your Eye, neither of which is going to go down as a great bit of science fiction writing. In When The Moon Hits Your Eye, Scalzi spins a yarn about what might happen if we woke up one morning to find the moon had turned to cheese. Yeah, you heard me. I'm not sure how that pitch meeting went, but the end result is as frivolous and un-serious as you'd expect. I wouldn't feel bad about missing out on this one if I'd skipped it. On the plus side, Scalzi did post on Bluesky recently that he plans to return to science fiction for his next book, so I'll probably try that one, as long as the premise looks reasonable. Otherwise I'm at the point where Scalzi is quickly falling off my "read whatever he writes" list. Here's hoping he can get back on track. |
| 2025-09-01 | Upgrade | Blake Crouch | If Scalzi is no longer my favourite author, it's possible that Blake Crouch may have displaced him. Fast Paced and scientifically grounded, Upgrade is consistent with Crouch's previous work. In a future devastated by climate change, Logan Ramsay is a federal agent tasked with tracking down criminals who are experimenting with editing genomes, something extremely illegal. However, Logan is the son of the most brilliant genetic scientist of her generation, a woman who was responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths when one of her experiments got out of control. When an investigation goes wrong, Logan becomes infected with a virus that starts to upgrade him, from a normal human being to one with super-human abilities, exactly the kind of thing that the government wants to prevent. With his former employer now after him, he needs to find out who set him up, and why. |
You can see my 2024 reading list here.