Note: If you are here solely for Fantastic Four content, you may want to skip this post. While this blog is almost all FF recaps these days, I occasionally still post things like this.

Last year was my sixth tracking the books I read. I again reached my goal of at least 24 (two a month) but the contours of my reading felt much different this year. I read more genre fiction, less non-fiction, and the total number of pages read declined to 7,908 from 8,986. There’s a few reasons for this. Probably the biggest is I had knee replacement surgery in March which meant I spent two months on serious painkillers which affected my concentration, leading me to read fewer weighty books. Also, for the first time in several years, I didn’t judge a business book contest, which meant I had less non-fiction. And I joined a fun science fiction and fantasy group on Facebook, which gave me a lot of ideas for new books and authors to read.

As is my practice, what follows are the books I read in the order I read them, with an image of the version I read (if I can find it). Apologies for any formatting wonkiness; WordPress is a frustrating platform in many ways.

1, The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin (1971), 144 pages
2, The Farthest Shore, Ursula K. Le Guin (1972) 197 pages

I began the year completing The Wizard of Earthsea trilogy I began in 2024 (and hadn’t read since I was teenager). While these books are slim, they are not slight. Le Guin is wonderful writer, combining lyrical prose with measured, nuanced storytelling that belie these books’ young adult marketing. They concern the further adventures of Ged, who was introduced as an impulsive young wizard in the first book and in these volumes matures into someone both wiser and more relatably human. Unlike in the first book, in these he isn’t the sole protagonist, and in Atuan, the story really belongs to Tenar, a young woman trapped in a priesthood. I have since learned Le Guin wrote two more Earthsea books, and I look forward to eventually reading them as well.

3, The Harvest, Robert Charles Wilson (1992), 394 pages

I’ve liked most of what I’ve read by Wilson, an underrated science fiction author, but this one was a dud. Some of that is due to the plot, about most of humanity joining a unified world-mind that promises immortality while a few stragglers resist. The story felt familiar, and echoes Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (and seems to anticipate TV’s Pluribus). But the bigger disappointment is the pacing, which drags, and Wilson’s attempts at profundity, which fall flat.

4, Nicked, M.T. Anderson (2024), 215 pages

This madcap, quasi-historical romp was a Christmas present, and a welcome one, because it’s unlikely I would have found this gem on my own. It concerns a medieval monk who gets roped into a scheme to steal the bones of St. Nicholas from Asia Minor and bring them to Bari, in present day Italy, where they will cure the plague (and bring power and prestige to the city). Along the way he encounters a dog-headed man, a gay romance and all sorts of hijinks. Anderson writes with brisk confidence and humor, making this book a short delight.

5, The Door into Summer, Robert Heinlein (1957), 291 pages

I loved Robert Heinlein’s juveniles as a kid, and his The Moon is a Harsh Mistress remains one of my favorite science fiction novels, so I’m always looking for a book of his that captures that spirit. Unfortunately, most of what I’ve read by him lately has been lacking and The Door Into Summer falls into that category. The premise is harmless — it’s basically a time-travel heist with some fun ideas. But the purported romance – between the protagonist and a woman he knew as a child and is now an adult — feels seriously inappropriate and and taints the whole book. I try not to judge books written decades ago by the standards of today but I don’t think grooming was OK in the 50s either.

6, Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card (1986), 382 pages

The best science fiction book I read last year and one of the best books, period. A sequel of sorts to Ender’s Game, Card had the idea for Speaker first, then wrote Ender’s to set up the moral and philosophical questions that Speaker wrestles with. It’s an astonishingly ambitious book that takes on the nuances of Catholicism and Brazilian culture (in the form of an extra-terrestrial colony), the consequences of genocide, the ethics of cultural anthropology, and what it means to confront truly alien civilizations. There’s so much going on in this book, and it’s so elegantly written, I can’t recommend it highly enough. I know Card has written and said some deplorable things since it was published, but that doesn’t discount the power of this work.

7, Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang (2002), 304 pages

I tend not to read short story collections, but I was happy to make this exception. This is another terrific science fiction book, with stories that display Chiang’s incredible range and depth. In these stories, Chiang’s demonstrates his fluency in fields ranging from Mesopotamian engineering to Victorian alchemy to higher-order mathematics. The title story is the basis of the movie Arrival (the film is much altered, although still wonderful) but my favorite is perhaps an account of the building the Tower of Babel, from the perspective of a stone mason.


8, The Second Sleep, Robert Harris (2019), 297 pages

I started reading Robert Harris a few years ago and he’s quickly become one of my favorite genre authors. Most of his books are grounded in historical events, making this an outlier. It appears set in medieval England, but without giving too much away, the plot veers into the realm of speculative fiction and out of Harris’s typical territory. I’m not sure it’s among his best works but I admire him for trying to do something different and it certainly kept my attention.

9, Earthlight, Arthur C. Clarke (1955), 177 pages

Along with Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, Clare is regarded as one of the three grand masters of science fiction, and as with Heinlein, I feel I’m reading Clarke to chase the thrill I got after reading his books as a teenager. Unlike Heinlein, Clarke’s books tend to be more predictable in their quality, and Earthlight is a typically solid example of his early work. Basically a spy thriller set on the moon, the story is a bit of a slow boil before reaching an impressive and memorable climax. It suffers from a lot of the same dated qualities of most sci-fi from this era (everyone is white and male) but it’s not as egregious as many.

10, The Prize, Daniel Yergin (1992), 790 pages

One of two big non-fiction books I read last year, I picked it up years ago at my local library’s book sale but began it in January when I interviewed for an energy editor job (reader, I didn’t get it). It’s an exhaustive and fascinating history of the global oil industry, starting in Western Pennsylvania in the 1800s and traveling from Texas to Baku to Romania to Indonesia to Iran to Alaska. In many ways it’s a history of the 20th century (it ends with the Gulf War) and it’s startling to see the role oil played in so many major events, from Pearl Harbor to the Suez Crisis to every conflict in the Middle East. And of course, the U.S. recent adventures in Venezuela makes understanding the history of oil exploration and exploitation all the more urgent.

11, The Leopard, Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958), 230 pages

Arguably the best book I read last year, it’s another one that sat on my shelves for years before I finally picked it up. Set primarily in Sicily in the 1860s, against the backdrop of Garilabldi’s unification of Italy, it’s ostensibly the story of the Prince of Sicily (his family crest bears a Leopard) and his family. But it’s really a lyrical elegy for a vanishing way of life, as modernity creeps across Sicily and the aristocracy struggles to adapt. It’s beautifully written with a wry sympathy by an author who understand the inevitability of change but wants to take the time to remember the silly, elegant world that has vanished. The coda, set in the early 20th century, is heart breaking.

12, Bel Canto, Ann Patchett (2001), 318 pages

Another candidate for best book I read last year, and another book I picked up more-or-less at random at a library book sale. I’ve admired Ann Patchett’s writing since I encountered it in The New Yorker years ago, and this novel — probably her breakout book — is amazing. Telling the story of an American opera singer taken hostage in a South American country, it’s an ingenious exploration of the power of art and beauty within the framework of an engrossing narrative. By the end, we feel part of the community she has created.

13, The Songs of Distant Earth, Arthur C. Clarke (1986), 319 pages

My second Clarke book of the year, this was written 30 years later and while more ambitious, it was less satisfying. Set on a remote, oceanic colony of Earth, the story is set in motion when a spaceship carrying the last refugees from Earth arrive. There’s a lot going on and Clarke has interesting ideas but the characters never feel very compelling and ultimately it’s less than the sum of its parts.

14, Archangel, Robert Harris (1998), 421 pages

Another book by Robert harris, this one is more in line with the historic fiction I associate with him and represents Harris at the peak of his powers. A thriller set in Russia in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it follows a dissolute English academic in Moscow who gets sucked into a revanchist plot by former Soviet officers. The book is at its best when ties the horrors of Stalinism to the evils of the present. The ending is a bit baroque but it’s a fun, engrossing read.

15, Pronto, Elmore Leonard (1993), 373 pages

I read a few Elmore Leonard crime thrillers as a teenager but didn’t really get the appeal. But a enthusiastic reappraisal of Leonard’s oeuvre by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker this summer piqued by interest and I read a few more I pulled from my father’s book shelf. In a word, they’re terrific. Leonard is a gifted stylist, writing with clipped economy while managing to convey both color and character. There’s a tone of bemusement under it all, even as he created page-turning tension. This book introduces Raylan Givens, a sneakily smart U.S. Marshall who pursues a fugitive to Italy. Givens becomes a recurring Leonard character and the basis of the TV show Justified. It’s a fun story with a satisfying payoff.

16, Unknown Man #89, Elmore Leonard (1977), 264 pages

More Leonard. This one, written a decade before Pronto, is grittier and set in in Leonard’s native Detroit. The protagonist is a street-wise process server who gets sucked into a morass of dead criminals, jovial murderers and tarnished dames. The noir oozes off the pages and stains your fingers. Anther fun read.

17, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (1884), 325 pages

Yes, I had never read Huck Finn until this year and yes, this was a source of some embarrassment. But I decided to rectify this after reading the glowing review for James, the retelling of the book from the perspective of Jim by Percival Everett, and deciding I needed to read the source material first. Given how significant this book is in the American canon, I doubt I have much original to add, but it seems pretty clear Twain is trying to do two things at once. On the surface, the book is very much a story about a clever child on a big adventure. But beneath that surface, it’s a sly commentary on the social conventions of the American South and a stinging critique of slavery. The book is at its best when Jim takes the stage and we feel the weight of his bondage. Unfortunately, those scenes are too few, and the books is dominated by the shenanigans of Huck and the characters he encounters on the Mississippi. Those vignettes can be fun, but especially by the last few chapters — a long and painful sequence involving Tom Sawyer — they can feel very tedious.

18, Powers and Thrones, Dan Jones (2021), 639 pages

This is the big work on non-fiction I read last year. I have an amateur historian’s fascination of the early Middle Ages and this book grabbed my attention a few years ago at Dussman’s in Berlin (one of the world’s great book stores imho). Jones, the kind of English historian who hosts shows on the BBC, has written a number of popular histories and this is probably his most ambitious, spanning 1,000 years from the fall to Rome to the discovery of the New World. Jones breaks it up thematically, with each chapter focusing on a segment of medieval society, such as monks, merchants and Crusaders. Some of it felt familiar but a lot of it was new and Jones has a breezy style that make it all easily digestible. It’s so good I can forgive the nakedly transparent Games of Thrones marketing ploy


19, Shoot at The Moon, William Temple (1966), 238 pages

I took a flier on this book after seeing it at a bookstore. I never heard of the author but the British Library’s imprimatur suggested it was worth my time. Unfortunately, it fell short. While it contained some interesting ideas and a colorful scoundrel of a protagonist, it was too hard to set aside its very dated ideas about how space travel would be organized (in this book it’s something like a Victorian polar expedition) and the dynamics between men and women. I still think there are hidden gems in mid-century sci-fi but I concede they are getting harder to find.

20, City Primeval, Elmore Leonard (1980), 222 pages

My third and last Elmore Leonard book of the year. This is another fun one set in Detroit. The hero is a beleaguered cop who gets drawn into a twisty story involving corrupt judges and a violent gunman from Oklahoma. It feels like peak Leonard, and maybe for that reason serves as the basis of the TV show Justified: City Primeval, in which Raylan Givens is inserted into the plot but otherwise is pretty faithful to the book.

21, Coffin Moon, Keith Rosson (2025), 305 pages

Coffin Moon was a selection of my local book store’s book club, and a departure for me a in few ways. It’s a new release, which I almost never read, I bought it in hardback (ditto) and it’s a horror novel, a genre I generally skip past. All that said, it was a very fun book and I’m glad I took the plunge. Stephen King’s influence is clearly present, but that’s not a bad thing (if you’re going to steal, steal from the best) and Rosson injects it with his own flavor, particularly in the protagonist, a Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD who crosses paths with a nasty vampire.

22, The Nice House on the Lake, James Tynion and Alvaro Martinez Bueno (2021)

I debated whether to include this graphic novel on this list, in part because I read a digital version, but I’ve included a comic collection every year since I started this project, and of all the comics I read last year, this felt the most novelistic. Ironically, after declaring I don’t read much horror, this is also a horror story, although of a very different nature than Coffin Moon. Twelve young adults are invited to a weekend at a luxurious Wisconsin lake house by Walter, their common friend. His secret purpose was to shield them from the end of the world, and as they remain trapped at the house, it’s soon revealed he is not who they thought he was. Each of the 12 chapters (which were release as individual issues) focuses on one of the characters and their complicated relationships with Walter and each other. Much of it is told in flashback to their times in high school and college, and Tynion has a deft touch writing about young people navigating friendships, resentments and LGBTQ identities. A sequel, A Nice House by the Sea, about another 12 people in a similar circumstance, began in 2024 but to my knowledge hasn’t been completed.

23, Old Man’s War, John Scalzi (2005), 303 pages

I really wanted to like his book more than I did. Described as a modern science fiction classic in the Facebook group I joined, it felt like a deliberate homage to earlier space-military books I loved like Heinlein’s Starship Troopers or Joe Haldeman’s Forever War. The wrinkle in this book is that senior citizens are recruited to fight in space, where their consciousness is transferred into younger bodies. The premise was fun, but the characters were flat and lifeless and the big twist was telegraphed mile away. The is Scalzis first book and I may pick up something he wrote later to see if he improved with age.

24, The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri (2003), 291 pages

Another contender for best book I read last year. This was an achingly beautiful novel, written about an ordinary family living an ordinary live but whose stories become extraordinary in Lahiri’s telling. The focus is on Gogol, a young Indian-American named after the Russian author (hence the title), and his life as the son of immigrants who remain deeply tied to their home country. Lahiri writes with incredible empathy and you can’t help caring for all the characters, even those who are later revealed to be less than trustworthy.

25, Storm Front, Jim Butcher, (2001), 355 pages

Another Facebook group find. This is the first in a long and apparently beloved series about Harry Dresden, a wizard who works as a Chicago private investigator. Butcher is very clearly playing with the hard-boiled pulp style of Chandler, and it was fun reading this after all the Elmore Leonard. There’s nothing deep about this book, but it’s well-crafted genre fiction and a nice departure after the Lahiri.

26, The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin (1976) 113 pages

Technically a novella, I was able to sneak this one last book in in the last days of the year. I’m glad I did, as it’s a great story. Le Guin intended this a parable about Vietnam, set on a colony planet where blundering humans terrorize a population of natives who then rise up and fight back. But it’s much richer than just an allegory, and she infuses her imagined world and its inhabitants with vivid details that bring it all alive. It’s a masterclass in economy and simplicity of story telling, and much more memorable than many books far longer. Le Guin is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors.


A final note: This year I tried, and failed, to read The Vorhh by B. Catling. Hailed as a landmark book of modern fantasy, I found it impenetrable and gave up after 100 pages. Oh well.