Bear with me, if you will: before I review this book, I have to review this book. As in, the object made of paper and cardboard that can be held in your hands. I have amassed a lot of special editions and Special Editions over the last couple of years— I have an entire bookshelf where the books are arranged spine-in so that the pretty painted edges are visible, and yes, I can still tell you what damn near all of them are anyway.
I have two copies of Shen Tao’s The Poet Empress. One of them is a book-box special edition from Illumicrate. The other is, supposedly, the regular edition, the one you’ll get from Amazon or if you walk into a brick and mortar bookstore.
The regular edition may very well be the prettiest book I own.
If you love books at all as art objects in and of themselves, go grab this book right now before this printing sells out, because I doubt future editions are going to look like this first one. Don’t read another word; the story doesn’t matter, this book is that pretty and you want to own it so you can look at it. I am going to have to figure out a way to display this one front-facing. The endpapers are gorgeous, the edges are gilded beautifully, and the cover has this lovely sparkly texture on it that I can neither take nor find a decent picture of. It just doesn’t come through properly in photographs. Go buy this book, right now.
Oh, you want to read it? Yeah, you should do that too, because I know it’s only mid-February and things change but right now I feel like this is going to be high in the running for my favorite book of the year. I think the last time I was this impressed by a debut novel wasJade City. Which I think wasn’t actually Fonda Lee’s debut, but it was the first of her books I read. Close enough. It’s matching my enthusiasm for To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, which … I also compared to Jade City. Along with Scarlet Odyssey. And Iron Widow, so maybe I’m overusing this particular comparison, but the point is I really loved all of those books. This is up there with them.
It’s totally prettier than all of them, though.
Anyway, the story: the main character, Wei Yin, is a peasant girl living in the backwoods of a famine-ridden, crumbling empire controlled by the Azalea Dynasty. The empire is, more or less, Not China; roll with it. The emperor is dying, and has chosen his second son, Prince Terren, as his successor, and Prince Terren is seeking a bride. He has sent emissaries all over the country seeking out women who wish to compete for the honor of marrying him. Wei Yin manages to get herself selected, in hope that she will be able to marry the prince and use her influence to save her family and her village from the famine. Prince Terren, unfortunately, quickly turns out to be a horrible bastard.
Now, I’m gonna be honest: at first glance this doesn’tsound great. Does the phrase “enemies-to-lovers romantasy” mean anything to you? Because even the marketing for this book has been leaning into this, and you are just going to have to trust me that this book absolutely is not a romantasy and is far too intricate for such nonsense as “tropes.” Terren and Wei Yin are both impressively complex, layered characters, and … well, I’m not spoiling anything, but this is absolutely not an enemies-to-lovers book. Why is the book called The Poet Empress? Because much of this world’s magic is based on poetry, and when Wei Yin decides that her best bet is to murder Prince Terren, she realizes that the only way she’s going to be able to do it is to write a very particular kind of poem, one that requires her to know and understand the target on an immensely intimate level.
Oh, it’s illegal for women to be able to read, by the way. Which sorta complicates things.
I know, I know, some of you are shaking your heads. Of course she’s going to marry the prince. The damn book is called The Poet Empress, not The Peasant Girl Who Came In Twenty-Third and Got Her Head Chopped Off. I promise you no other aspect of this book is going to be predictable, and the “competition” is dispensed with much more quickly than you think it’s going to. And once that happens the book can get on with its actual goal, which is sinking its claws into you and slowly tearing your heart out. You will be fifteen pages from the end of the book and you will still not know how it’s going to turn out.
It’s also dark as hell, so be prepared for that; Terren is terrible, and Wei Yin is put through some absolutely terrible things as a result of being connected to him, much less actually married to him. On top of that, many of the women who didn’t win the competition are fairly powerful and well-connected in their own rights, and a number of them immediately decide to kill her. And then there’s the dowager empress, who is also unhappy with her son’s choice of bride. And the prince who got passed over in favor of his younger brother. Comparatively, dying of famine in a squalid village almost feels quaint.
This is brilliant fucking work, guys, and I cannot wait for more from Shen Tao. Go get this book right now. Even if you just look at it, it’s worth the money. The fact that there’s an amazing story in there is a bonus.
I’m genuinely tempted to make that the entire review, to be honest. This is the ninth Matt Dinniman book I’ve read, and the tenth is going to be out in March, and of the nine I’ve loved seven of them, thought the eighth (Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon) was okay, and … then there was this. I forced myself to buckle down and finish it over the course of last night and today, and to be honest I could have put it away after a hundred pages and been fine with it. It really feels like a manuscript that he had lying around and the publishing house was desperate to put something out that was trad-pubbed from the beginning, so he gave them this.
I don’t want to spend a ton of time shitting on this book, especially since it isn’t going to affect my enthusiasm for Dungeon Crawler Carl, but skippable is probably the perfect single-word review, and if I were to write a two-word review it would be half-baked. Nothing about it is particularly well thought-out, the main character is entirely indistinguishable from Carl, including his uncanny ability to come up with complicated plans on the fly, and I defy you to explain to me why the book (or the in-universe show the book is named after) is called Operation Bounce House. Everyone talks like they’re a teenager in 2020 even though the book is set hundreds of years in the future and on a planet Earth has colonized. I cannot emphasize enough how there has been no cultural change of any kind during all this time. I spent the whole book waiting for a twist where it turned out they had been on Earth the whole time and not actually in the future.
The plot: Oliver, who is Carl, is a farmer on a colony planet. The planet gets attacked by mechs being remotely piloted by, mostly, bored and wealthy teenagers on Earth who have spent lots of money to be part of a game show and may or may not realize they’re killing actual people. There’s lots of talk about how the showrunners are portraying everyone on the planet as terrorists. They fight back.
Why does this game show exist? Why are they killing people? No reason, really. Dungeon Crawler Carl earns a certain amount of “don’t think about it too hard.” This book very much does not. Nothing feels like it has been thought through.
It is not a LitRPG, by the way, even though the attackers are technically playing a game. There are no statistics or leveling up or unlocking abilities or anything of that sort; it’s more of a military sci-fi than anything else.
I have read worse books, to be sure— hell, I have read worse books in 2026— but I have no real reason to recommend that anyone else pick this up. Read Dungeon Crawler Carl, definitely. Ignore this one.
I promised that once the second Bobiverse book, For We Are Many, showed up I’d get it read quickly so I could follow up on whether there were any women in this one. Good news and bad news: the first time a woman speaks is a hundred pages in. She has one line, it is about her son, and she disappears for a while afterwards. But one of the more important secondary characters is female! In fact, she’s kind of important to one of the bigger themes of the book. Now, unfortunately, we’re nowhere near passing the Bechdel test or anything like that— to the best of my recollection there isn’t a scene with more than one woman talking at all, much less to each other— but this book represents an improvement, if not a huge one, over the first.
It is still good in all of the ways that the first one was good, and frankly it’s genuinely getting more interesting, so I’m kind of hoping that as time moves on a lot of the male secondary characters all have daughters and we can interact with them some more. All of the Bobs, of course, are immortal so long as they aren’t killed, so I would expect the secondary cast to change a lot.
Book Three comes out in the fancy new edition in March; I might cave and read it digitally before that. We’ll see.
I was not previously aware that printing the word “BOB” repeatedly on the edges of a book would cause me to impulse-buy it, but indeed, that’s what happened. Turns out the word “Bobiverse” is also a trigger; this is Book One of at least five, four of which have already been published as indie books. This is the tradpubbed edition; Book 2 will be out next week, and the next three are going to follow roughly bimonthly after that. My understanding is that #5 has only just been written, so that will be the first publication, but you can grab the first four right now if you want the indie versions.
This book was going to get some credit for originality, if nothing else; the idea is that Bob Johansson, the main (and virtually only) character, sells his tech company for Big Money at the beginning of the book, and more or less on a lark signs up for a cryogenics program. Once he dies his head gets lopped off and frozen, to await his eventual revival when technology catches up to fixing whatever killed him.
And then he dies, pretty much right away, rather ignominiously getting hit by a car. And he wakes up a hundred years later as an AI, a piece of property, and slated to be the controlling intelligence of a series of Von Neumann probes designed to find extraterrestrial planets suitable for humanity to move to. A Von Neumann probe, if you’re not aware, is a type of probe designed to be self-replicating; the idea is that it finds an asteroid or some other source of raw materials and creates another probe, which then flies off in a different direction, to create more probes, which then create more probes, which then create more probes, and on and on until something underpants-gnomey happens.
Bob is … less than thrilled by this development, and even less thrilled by the theocracy that America has turned into in the intervening hundred years (a bit on the nose there, Mr. Taylor) but he is an engineer and a software guy, so he’s able to hack his own programming so that once he escapes Earth’s direct control, he can more or less do whatever he wants. The interesting bit, of course, is that with every probe he creates, he has to effectively clone himself. He implements a rule where every successive Bob has to rename itself so that we don’t have a million characters with the same name running around, so one Bob is called Homer and another is Riker and so on (Bob is a big nerd) but they are all effectively him, if occasionally slightly tweaked from his base personality, so to speak.
The narrative fractures along with the Bobs, and by the end of the story we’re following, oh, three or four parallel stories, with a nice timeline in the front to help you keep everything straight: some of the Bobs have returned to Earth, now a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland, to help the remnants of humanity off of the planet; some of them, including Bob Prime, have found a planet with sentient life on it and are helping to nudge the inhabitants along against a competing species that finds them tasty, and others are hunting down the probes sent into space by Brazil, who immediately declare war upon the Bobs the first time they come across one another. There are a few other storylines that don’t get a ton of attention, but those are the big ones.
It’s a lot of fun, and I’ve got the rest of the series preordered, so I’ll get Bobiverse 2 next week and the rest of them as they come out. There’s only one real problem, and for right now, I’m cutting the series some slack, and we’ll see how he handles said issue in the future: at the beginning of the book, flesh-Bob is celebrating his windfall with a few friends, all of whom he’s cut in on the deal and who are also quite rich now, if not quite as flush as Bob is. They don’t have cryogenics money, is what I’m saying. One of those friends is female.
After Bob gets hit by the car, another woman does not have a single line for over two hundred pages.
All of the Bobs are male, of course, but even a large majority of the secondary characters are male. There are a few world leaders back on Earth, the intelligence controlling the Brazilian probes, a couple of doctors who Bob deals with before leaving the planet, and a couple of named members of the species Bob discovers. All but maybe two or three of those are male, and most of the females don’t really get a whole lot of time on the page, sometimes just a line or two before they disappear. A female descendant of Bob’s sister shows up and gets less than a paragraph before she’s whisked offstage, for example. Now, again, Dennis Taylor has gone to some lengths to make it clear that the Bobs aren’t exact replicas of one another, but they’re all versions of his personality, one way or another; I find myself wondering if Bob is going to find a way to create female clones of himself in the next book. Inside the story logic, I’m not completely convinced it matters, as Bob doesn’t actually have a flesh body any longer; he’s a space ship. But he’s certainly culturally male even if he doesn’t have a gendered body any longer, and, I dunno, maybe the smart bat-pig alien could have been a girl?
Again, I enjoyed the book, and Bob’s hardly a hypermasculine alpha male, so it’s not as if the book is dripping with testosterone or anything. The Wheel of Time has a ton of female characters and is somehow a much more gender-essentialist, masculinist series, for example, and Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty also started off very man-heavy and corrected it completely in the second book. But I’ve got an eyebrow up, and I hope this gets addressed in future books. So consider this a three-quarters thumbs up, if that makes any sense, and I’ll try and get For We Are Many read quickly when it shows up so that I can report back.
This is the second year in a row where I’ve deliberately decided to increase the number of nonfiction books I read. Last year I read a decent number of broad survey types of histories; books called The Assyrians, or A History of Japan, or maybe just India. And, while I can’t really claim this was a new realization, it became clear pretty quickly that that type of history is hard to do well, especially in a way that is accessible to non-specialists. I read a lot of biography and a lot of histories about specific events or smaller chunks of history; World War II, for an obvious example, is a pretty broad topic, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to write a single-volume history of that than an entire country or ethnic group over hundreds of years, right? Those types of histories are a lot easier to write, or at the very least I’ve read a lot more good ones.
Children of Ash and Elm, as a broad survey history of an ethnic group over a few hundred years, definitely felt kinda risky, despite the fact that Vikings are automatically interesting. A few hundred years of history, minimum, of a group of people that, to put it mildly, moved around a lot. I was going to save my two favorite anecdotes from this book for the end, but they’re relevant now: there is evidence that the Vikings raided both Constantinople and Alexandria, and remember, that was by boat, meaning that they had to sail around the entirety of Europe and through the entire Mediterranean to get there. In addition, they’ve found a Viking burial site in Greenland, dating to roughly 1000 CE, which in and of itself isn’t especially surprising. What was surprising? The corpse was wearing a cloak made of buffalo hide.
That’s mind-blowing, even if the most reasonable explanation is that the hide was traded a time or two on its way from the American Great Plains all the way up to, what, Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, then presumably bought or looted by the Viking, who eventually made his way back to Greenland and died, to be buried in what surely had to be his favorite cloak. I doubt there were ever any Vikings out meeting with the Comanche a thousand years ago, but hell, who knows?
Point is, this could have been much drier than it was. Children of Ash and Elm dodges every pitfall of this type of broad history and remains engaging and lively throughout; this was a great, fast read, and I plowed through its 500 pages in just a couple of days. I know you’re used to me saying that about big books, but history usually takes a bit longer, and I was fully expecting this book to take me a week. History doesn’t often keep me up late. This book cost me some sleep– sleep I was happy to spend, but nonetheless. And as I can’t claim any particular depth of knowledge in pre-Christian Scandinavia, I’m comfortable saying that the author did a great job of making the book accessible to non-historians. If you have any interest in the subject matter at all– and it’s the bloody Vikings, who doesn’t think they’re interesting?– definitely grab this one.
Before you read this review, which is of the second book in the Blood at the Root series, I’d like you to read my review of the first book, Blood at the Root. Why? Because it’s kind of fascinating just how cleanly my reading experience of Bones paralleled my reading of Blood:
I definitely and absolutely have had Malik in my classroom before. Even more so in this book than in the previous one, honestly; Williams calls Malik “messy” in his Author’s Foreword to this book, and I feel like Malik’s messiness, and to be more specific, his temper, maybe hurts him more in this book than it does in Blood. This is a kid who has been handed a raw deal by life on a ton of different levels (the magic kinda makes it better, I imagine) but one way or another he doesn’t handle it like a grown-up. Why? He’s not one.
Watching Malik navigate romantic relationships? Also super familiar.
I would say the moment where Williams absolutely stomps on the accelerator is closer to the 2/3 mark of the book than the halfway point, but while Blood came close to making me cry a couple of times– something that, let me repeat, almost never happens while I’m reading– page 368 absolutely 100% got me. Like, a literal gasp, and a well of pride, and I’m not going to pretend I was sobbing or anything but there were actual real tears.
I am not enough of a nerd that I’m going to figure out exactly what percentage of the book was finished at page 368, and you can’t make me.
NO.
It’s 67.6%, so my estimate was right on the money, fuck you.
Anyway, I referenced “twists and turns and betrayals” in the first review, and … YEAH. Along with some major reveals and some major shake-ups of what you thought you knew from the first book.
And then the Goddamned thing ends on a cliffhanger, and … remember when I was reading Godsgrave, a million years ago, and I said that I’d never been happier to have the sequel of a book on hand before finishing it? The sequel to Bones at the Crossroads hasn’t even got a release date yet, so LaDarrion Williams is about to acquire a new, and very impatient, roommate.
I will ding the book a tiny bit for dragging occasionally before that pedal-to-the-metal moment that carries through the rest of the story, and it doesn’t mean a whole lot to say this is the best book I’ve read so far this year on January 7th, but this was real real good and if you haven’t read Blood at the Root, go pick that up, and read slowly, and maybe by the time you finish Bones the end of the trilogy will be available.
I started a book the other day, a big doorstoppy, mouse-killer of a book, one I’d been really looking forward to reading, and I made it six percent of the way through the book before deciding I could not tolerate another second of it and put it down.
Then I looked at the reviews online, because I’m dumb like that, and they’re rapturous. And I’m gaslighting myself because, come on, this is objectively not a good book. There are errors of word choice and tense and the dialogue is abominable and the main character is way way way too into ogling high school girls for someone about to exit college. Today I thought about writing a review of the book, because I can’t believe people think this book is as good as they’re saying it is and I need the world to stop gaslighting me. So I went through on my Kindle, reread the first 6%, and annotated it.
Yes, I’m exactly that petty.
The problem is there were over sixty annotations– which, on one hand, I said the book was awful, but on the other hand, properly fisking this mess has become a lot of work, especially since when you export Kindle notes all it gives you is the note; it doesn’t include the bit you highlighted for the note. And, sure, I can do a bunch of screenshots, or copy and paste, and I probably don’t have to include all sixty of the notes, but that felt like a lot of work.
So what I’m going to do instead is just paste in my notes, obscuring the author’s name when necessary (although you’ll recognize the book, if you’ve read it) and y’all can tell me if you think this is worth the extra work. I will make this sacrifice for my people if you want me to. Obviously some of these are going to be obscure since you don’t see what I’m referring to, but … well, there are gonna be some patterns.
Anyway, enjoy:
Note – One > Page 3 · Location 1045 Much like the House of Lannister.
Note – One > Page 3 · Location 1046 Dumb
Note – One > Page 3 · Location 1050 Eew.
Note – One > Page 4 · Location 1063 Definitely start by sexualizing the first teenage girl in the book.
Note – One > Page 4 · Location 1064 She’s literally just glancing at her own shirt.
Note – One > Page 4 · Location 1071 Is this a thing sisters do? Grope each other?
Note – One > Page 5 · Location 1085 Note, for now, that AUTHOR is willing to spell out “dyke.”
Note – One > Page 5 · Location 1092 The hoodie is going to turn into a zip-up later.
Note – One > Page 6 · Location 1096 No one talks like this. Also, there’s no universe where Steven Biko can be mistaken for Eddie Murphy.
Note – One > Page 6 · Location 1098 Again, no one talks like this.
Note – One > Page 6 · Location 1099 As opposed to the other guard.
Note – One > Page 6 · Location 1104 Makes no sense for her to be upset.
Note – Two > Page 7 · Location 1114 “gangly” means “long-limbed”; no reason to use both words.
Note – Two > Page 8 · Location 1125 No one talks like this.
Note – Two > Page 8 · Location 1139 No one talks like this.
Note – Two > Page 9 · Location 1152 No one talks like this.
Note – Two > Page 9 · Location 1157 No one talks like this.
Note – Two > Page 10 · Location 1168 Biko is on the *back* of the hoodie, which is now a sweatshirt.
Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1181 Definitely something you yell at your daughter in jail.
Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1184 Just weirdly phrased.
Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1190 Try and imagine this scenario for a second. Like, physically do it with your body. This is not a possible thing.
Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1191 In the previous paragraph, she fell backwards over a chair and … landed on her nose? How?
Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1194 No one talks like this.
Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1195 Weird word choice.
Note – Two > Page 12 · Location 1200 No reason for the word “own” here.
Note – Two > Page 12 · Location 1203 No one talks like this.
Note – Two > Page 12 · Location 1205 It’s a hoodie again.
Note – Three > Page 13 · Location 1215 Weird.
Note – Three > Page 13 · Location 1218 No one talks like this.
Note – Three > Page 15 · Location 1246 Colin could use a pronoun.
Note – Three > Page 15 · Location 1257 No one talks like this.
Note – Four > Page 16 · Location 1268 These girls will never be mentioned again.
Note – Four > Page 17 · Location 1276 No one talks like this.
Note – Four > Page 18 · Location 1296 And now it’s a zipup. It’s been a regular hoodie and a sweatshirt and now it’s a zipup.
Note – Four > Page 18 · Location 1302 … is her skin moldy?
Note – Four > Page 18 · Location 1304 Why? Who randomly starts eating a sandwich in front of people? Why didn’t he eat before he went to get the hoodie, which he thought was just in a car?
Note – Four > Page 19 · Location 1311 This is the weirdest goddamn way to threaten somebody. Burned? Is it a plastic spoon?
Note – Four > Page 19 · Location 1317 Her face is in her pillow but the “shiv” is below her eye? How did they get these photos smuggled out of the prison?
Note – Four > Page 20 · Location 1343 No one talks like this.
Note – Four > Page 21 · Location 1361 I feel like burning sixty grand worth of PCP in a woodstove would at least create a noticeable smell, maybe one cops might notice, but I dunno.
Note – Four > Page 22 · Location 1370 It’s 1989. Pre-Internet. These idiots do not have contacts to sell rare manuscripts. No.
Note – Four > Page 22 · Location 1377 No one talks like this.
Note – Four > Page 23 · Location 1384 No one talks like this.
Note – Four > Page 23 · Location 1386 Glad that everyone has time to appreciate the “satisfying” sound of broken glass during this extortion attempt.
Note – Four > Page 23 · Location 1390 Unnecessary.
Note – Five > Page 24 · Location 1400 Twenty-foot doors are very large doors.
Note – Five > Page 25 · Location 1422 Again, to who?
Note – Five > Page 27 · Location 1452 All of this was in the newspaper article? Including the dialogue, with censored profanities? Has AUTHOR ever read a newspaper article?
Note – Six > Page 30 · Location 1498 I like that no one answers this question.
Note – Six > Page 30 · Location 1502 This is the second time Arthur, a college student, has ogled a teenager.
Note – Six > Page 31 · Location 1507 When does he get close enough to her to read the clue over her shoulder? And who the fuck talks like this? For either of them?
Note – Six > Page 31 · Location 1510 AUTHOR is obsessed with windows.
Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1523 She is not nine years old. This is a grown person acting like this.
Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1528 No one talks like this.
Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1529 This is what you say BEFORE you open the cabinet and start rummaging through shit.
Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1535 NO ONE TALKS LIKE THIS.
Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1538 Donna is a complete asshole.
Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1538 And this is where I stopped reading.
I’m currently trying to clear as many short books as I can off of my Unread Shelf before taking that picture tomorrow, but I’m willing to take it on faith that none of them are going to blow me away, and if they do, well, under the “My Blog, My Rules” rule, I can include them next year if I have to. This is the thirteenth year I’ve done this list, and the fifth time I expanded the list to 15– the shortlist was 28, and the first cull took it down to 15, then I took that down to 10 and then thought about it some more and decided to do 15 anyway. I surprised myself with a couple of these books, honestly; we’ll see what y’all think.
As always, “new” means “new to me,” not “released in 2025,” although the majority of at least the fiction books were 2025 releases and at least one of the nonfiction releases was as well. The oldest book on the list is from 1999.
Also as always, don’t read too much into specific placements. I spend a lot more time thinking about whether books should be on the list at all than where they should be on the list, and if I put this together again tomorrow without looking at it I doubt they’d be in the exact same order.
15: The Stationery Shop, by Marjan Kamali. I went back and forth several times about whether this book or Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! were going to be #15, nearly expanded the list to 16 books, then decided that I remembered The Stationery Shop a lot better and that should make the difference. You’re going to see a theme reading through this list; the quality of the book matters to getting on the shortlist, but going from the shortlist to the final 15 really depends on how much recall of the book I have, which isn’t always perfectly correlated with how much I enjoyed the book when I first read it. At any rate, this is a historical fiction and a love story and it borders on hated litratcher, beginning in Tehran in the 1950s just before the coup that installed Mohammed Reza as leader of Iran. The main character is a young woman whose engagement to a revolutionary is derailed by the coup, and the book bounces back and forth between various periods in her life as she eventually moves to America for college and marries another man. This will hit you in the gut if you ever feel like you lost anyone; the emotional bleed-through from Roya’s grief and loss over the course of the story is intense.
14: Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World, by Emma Southon. I wanted to read more nonfiction this year, and I read a lot of good history in particular this year. Agrippina succeeds on several levels; Roman history can be excruciatingly complicated and dense (Southon riffs on their penchant for reusing names repeatedly) and a lot of the histories I’ve read of the Empire ended up really dry even if they didn’t want to be. This book is both a good biography of one of the more well-attested women in the ancient world and a good general history of Rome, and Southon’s salty sense of humor easily carries the book through what be a significantly trickier read in lesser hands. My only regret is that the book lost its original title in transition to paperback; it was originally subtitled Emperor, Exile, Hustler, Whore, but the publishers apparently rebelled after the hardcover edition came out and forced a name change. If you ever spot the original book in a used bookstore or anything like that for less than $75, please grab one for me. I’ve seen them listed for up to $300, but I don’t want it that much.
13: The Enchanted Greenhouse, by Sarah Beth Durst. This will be the first and only appearance of the phrase cozy fantasy on the list and the first but probably not the last appearance of the word delightful. This is the second of Sarah Beth Durst’s books that I’ve read, and while it’s notprecisely a sequel to The Spellshop, it’s set in the same world and alludes to a lot of the same events– in fact, the book begins when the main character brings a spider plant to sentience, and said talking spider plant was one of the main characters in Spellshop. It may not surprise you to learn that the book is about an enchanted greenhouse, and that the main plot of the book involves threats to the plants in said greenhouse. This is cozy fantasy! The stakes are not high. The worst thing that could happen in this book is that a bunch of plants might die, and spoiler alert: the plants are not going to die. Terlu Perna is not much of a botanist and not much of an enchanter, however, and watching her and the hunky greenhouse guy she’s found herself inadvertently imposing upon (it’s a long story) try to figure out why the greenhouse is failing and how to fix it is a lot of fun. I’m going to keep reading this series as long as Sarah Beth Durst keeps writing them.
12: His Face is the Sun, by Michelle Jabès Corpora. When I reviewed this in July– brief pause to be surprised it was only July— I called it “#1 with a bullet” on my shortlist. So why is it all the way down at #12? To be honest, I had to stare at the cover for a minute to remember much about it. This feels unfair to the book, because I remember saying that, and it’s not like I’m not rereading my own reviews in preparing this list, but other than “Man, I really liked this book,” and a vague idea that it was set in Not Egypt, I couldn’t remember a damned thing about it. I’m definitely rereading it when the sequel comes out, because I’m not about to let my shitty recall screw up future books. This is a multi-POV book with characters ranging from child of Pharaoh to a farmer’s daughter to a young priestess who sees visions, and the characters interact with each other fascinatingly, popping in and out of each other’s lives over the course of the story. In my defense, even July was a hundred damn books ago. It’s possible that I read too much. Oh, and there’s a cat who sort of serves as a frame character to the entire book. I liked the cat an awful lot. The cat had better be in Book 2.
11: Capitana, by Cassandra James. Man, Goodreads really doesn’t like this book– the average review over there is 3.28, which in Goodreads terms may as well be a zero. Why? Apparently Cassandra James said some stuff, and I’m deliberately not going to find out What Kind of Stuff She Said because that would violate my Don’t Want None Won’t Be None rule. If I hadn’t noticed the low score and decided to wander through a couple of the reviews over there I wouldn’t be aware that the author is Considered Problematic, so I’m not going to worry about it and just tell you that this book is about a pirate hunter who turns pirate, and really, that’s generally all I’m going to need to enjoy a book? I like books about pirates. There’s a romantasy element to it, but it’s not overwhelming, and main character Ximena really does need a few things beaten into her head a couple of times before she actually believes them, but she’s also supposed to be seventeen, and … well. I’m well accustomed to the idea that sometimes teenagers have to be told things or be exposed to certain ideas multiple times before they sink in. Feel free to look into James if you’re worried about supporting whatever kind of person she’s going to turn out to be; Illumicrate sent me this one blind, and I enjoyed it, and now it’s on the list.
10: Hammajang Luck, by Makana Yamamoto. Speaking of “books Illumicrate sent me,” this one also would never have crossed my radar if I didn’t have a subscription to that service, and speaking of “you had me at the premise,” it’s a Hawaiian-inflected cyberpunk lesbian heist novel set on a space station, and what that means is that if I’d encountered it on my own it would have been an instant buy regardless. There are shifting loyalties and betrayals and an ending that took me completely by surprise and I had an enormous amount of fun reading this. I’m still not sure if this is a one-shot or if there are more planned, but Makana Yamamoto went directly onto my “buy immediately” list after reading this. “Hammajang,” by the way, is Hawaiian Pidgin for “messy” or “chaotic” or maybe “fucked-up” if you’re feeling salty; there’s going to be a decent amount of unfamiliar vocabulary sprinkled throughout this one, if I remember correctly, so be prepared for that. Future Space Station Hawai’i isn’t as nice a place as the original, but it’s awesome to read about.
9: The Bone Raiders, by Jackson Ford. This one was originally not on my shortlist, and I looked at my shortlist and thought “Where the hell is The Bone Raiders?” and added it and then it ended up in the top 10. I will reiterate what I said in my original review: please judge this book by its cover. Five badass women of color with a dragon. Okay, it’s not a dragon, but it might as well be a dragon. It’s dragon-adjacent. You are absolutely getting the book you think you are getting from looking at this cover, and I don’t want to beat the phrase “right up my alley” to death in this piece, but … yeah. The band of titular Raiders are called the Rakata, and Genghis Khan isn’t the bad guy but close enough, and damn near every POV character in the book is a woman. This one is definitely book one of a trilogy; the final chapter leads directly into the next book. This book also has the distinction of being more concerned about animal husbandry than anything else on the list. It turns out that’s a plus. I’d never really considered “does this book involve animal husbandry?” before choosing to read something before, but I’m definitely starting now.
8: Mark Twain, by Ron Chernow. Here’s where we enter the And now, for something completely different phase of the list: Ron Chernow is a known quantity around here; I have read his biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, and I keep getting surprised by the fact that I haven’t read his biography of Ulysses S Grant. He writes giant doorstops — Twain is 1200 pages — and despite that his books are still quick, propulsive reads. I have to admit that I came away from this book with a slightly lower opinion of Mark Twain as a person than I did going into it, but the book itself is magnificently well-done. I didn’t review the book after I read it, but I did review Mark Twain himself, who gets 3/5 stars as a human being. Writing biographies of authors can be really tricky, as authors don’t necessarily tend to do a whole lot beyond, y’know, writing stuff, but Twain was enough of a world traveler and general hob-knobber of famous people that the book never devolves into “he wrote this, and then he wrote that,” and instead can focus on things like his absolutely absurd number of failed business ventures and his odd obsession with young girls. Which … yeah. Three out of five for Twain. At best.
7: The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century, by Joel F. Harrington. This one is a biography-but-not-really, of a Nuremberg executioner named Frantz Schmidt. Schmidt left a priceless historical record behind: he carefully wrote down forty-five years of details about the three hundred and sixty-one people he put to death and hundreds more who he tortured or disfigured as an agent of the Imperial City of Nuremberg. He also had a medical practice, as it turns out public executioner wasn’t enough to pay the bills even in the late 1500s. The reason I can’t really call it a biography is that the journal itself didn’t have a ton of details about Schmidt himself, so the book tells us what it can and then pivots to being a history of sixteenth-century Nuremberg and the profession of executioner in general, dipping its toe into Renaissance-era legal theory and criminal justice. The book is chock full of little details that will surprise you– did you know that most executions with swords were carried out with the victim sitting in a chair, for example? — and as I don’t know a ton about the Renaissance era in general, particularly in what would eventually become Germany, so there was a lot to learn here.
6: Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love, by Dava Sobel. Hey, look, a theme! Galileo’s Daughter is also a history from the fifteenth century drawn mostly from the writings of its main character, and is also a book that isn’t quite a biography of the person it’s supposedly named after. Perhaps a third of this book is concerned with Suor Maria Celeste, the second of Galileo’s three illegitimate children and the one he had the closest relationship with. Suor Maria was sent to a convent by her father at a young age, but stayed near him for most of his life and exchanged an enormous corpus of letters, from which this book is drawn. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the book is mostly actually about Galileo through the eyes of his immensely intelligent and doting daughter; you get the feeling that had Suor Maria been born four hundred years later she’d have been a famous intellectual giant on her own terms. Much like The Faithful Executioner, you also get a lot of information about the Italian Renaissance, and again, European history isn’t one of my strong points, so Sobel’s deft hand with her topic was greatly appreciated. This book got recommended to me enthusiastically a couple of years before I finally got around to it; I shouldn’t have waited so long.
5: The Reformatory, by Tananarive Due. I need to treat Tananarive Due with more respect; I keep being surprised by how much I enjoy her books, and then forgetting how much I enjoyed them later. Well, damn it, The Reformatory is awesome, and I can imagine a world where I put it higher in the top five than it is right now. It’s a historical fiction and a horror story; set in 1950 in Florida, the main character is Robert Stephens Jr, a 12-year-old Black boy who kicks an older white boy who is harassing his sister and is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys, a so-called “reform school” run by an absolute monster of a human being. His sentence is supposedly six months, but everyone knows that anyone sent to Gracetown isn’t getting out before their 21st birthday if they ever get out at all; they will simply find excuses to keep the kids imprisoned for as long as they want them there. This is already a horror story before you get to the ghosts, is what I’m saying, and … well, you can probably imagine that any ghosts sticking around at a reform school are not going to be the happy friendly type. The book bounces back and forth in POV between Robert and his sister, who is doing her best to get him away from Gracetown and is stymied at every opportunity. There are a ton of twists and turns and I enjoyed this one enormously.
4: Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers our Lives, by Siddharth Kara. This book wasn’t precisely recommended to me; I found it lying on a countertop at my brother’s house and picked it up and before I knew it there was another copy on its way to my house. The Reformatory started what’s going to be four horror books in a row; Cobalt Red is the scariest, by a long shot, as it’s nonfiction and everything discussed in it is absolutely terrible. So, it turns out that cobalt is essential to every lithium-ion battery on the planet, right? And 75% of the world’s supply of cobalt comes from the Congo. And unfortunately you will probably not be surprised to learn that said cobalt is mined under fucking awful conditions, largely by hand and frequently by children, and that very little of the wealth generated by the Congo’s cobalt actually makes its way back to the Congolese. If you’ve ever read Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, you can consider this book an unofficial sequel to it, as the way modern companies and multinational corporations are strip-mining the Congo and enslaving the Congolese to do it is not especially different from the way Belgian colonizers were exploiting the Congo for its rubber and other natural resources a century and a half ago. This book will make you feel awful, and then you won’t do anything about it, and that will make it worse. Read it.
3: The Eyes are the Best Part, by Monika Kim. This excellent little horror debut was another book box find– not Illumicrate this time, but Aardvark, although once I’d read it I discovered that Illumicrate had their own edition of it and immediately ordered that one too. I called this “deliciously, delightfully fucked-up” in my review, and I absolutely stand by it. Eyes is about a college-aged Korean-American woman named Ji-Won, who lives at home with her family. Early in the book her father abruptly deserts his wife after having an affair, and the rest of the book is equal parts psychological horror, body horror and political indictment of a certain kind of white fetishism about Asian women, as both Ji-Won and her mother attract the attention of men who are terrible in related but different ways and Ji-Won herself suffers a mental break and basically becomes a serial killer. The eyes referred to in the title are fish eyes; there’s a deeply squicky bit at the beginning where her mother waxes poetic about how delicious fish eyes are and Ji-Won, born in the States, isn’t able to bring herself to try them. It, uh, doesn’t last. You’ll need a strong stomach to get through this one, I think, but it’s well worth it.
2: You Weren’t Meant to be Human, by Andrew Joseph White. It is possible that if you’re a regular reader and have a decent memory that this one is surprising, as my initial review of this book wasn’t wholly positive. But remember earlier, two thousand or so words ago, where I said that how a book sticks around for me is almost as important as what I think when I first read it? Because You Weren’t Meant to be Human has crawled into my brain and lives there permanently now. I’ve recapped my own reviews repeatedly through this piece but I’m going to directly quote myself here:
Y’all, I’m okay with it if I never read another body horror again. I’m good. I’m happy with naming this book the pinnacle of the genre and then never touching it again. This is one of the most brutal and harrowing books I’ve ever read and has one of the most shocking and grotesque endings I’ve ever seen … and I did not enjoy one single second of reading it.
That’s still one hundred percent true. You should absolutely go read my original review before you pick this one up if you’re curious, because it needs every single one of the trigger warnings before you read it, and I do not blame you one bit if you read my review and decide it’s not for you. I’m not even sure it’s for me, and this is also a book where I got a special edition right after reading my Aardvark copy, although in this case it was part of the regular subscription and not one I picked on my own.
This book is fucked up, and it’ll fuck you up, and it fucked me up, and as I’ve gotten farther away from it I’ve lost a little bit of my original “God, no” reaction to it and just come to appreciate the sheer amount of craft necessary to write it in the first place. It’s simultaneously one of the best books I read this year and easily the least enjoyable. Do with that what you will.
And finally …
1: Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman.
Oh, shut up.
I’m cheating here a little bit. The Dungeon Crawler Carl series is currently on Book Seven, with Book 8 due out next year and at least two more planned to follow after that. I read all seven of them in 2025, and of the seven, the last three all made the shortlist. I suppose if you put a gun to my head I could put This Inevitable Ruin here and not the first book, but we’re going to go with using the first book as a stand-in for the entire series. My blog, my rules, dammit.
I understand the people who have resisted this series, I genuinely do. The idea that there are seven books and probably at least six thousand pages about some random dude and his talking cat who get sucked into an intergalactic role-playing game after Earth is invaded and mostly destroyed, with leveling and magic and weapons and ability scores, and that their job is to fight through successive levels of an actual dungeon cobbled together from the ruins of Earth for the televised enjoyment of the rest of the sentient species of the universe, is so fundamentally ridiculous that I cannot blame anyone who refuses to go near it. But not only does the Dungeon Crawler Carl series overcome its own absurdity, it’s a giant fantasy mega-series that is somehow getting better as it goes on. And it’s not just me! Damn near everyone I know who has read these books agrees! They start good and they keep getting better. My wife is not a huge fan of fantasy, and she picked up the first book begrudgingly, on my recommendation (much as I picked it up begrudgingly, on the Internet’s recommendation) and she read all seven books back to back. That is not a thing she does!
These books are amazing, and Matt Dinniman is some sort of evil genius, and it is entirely possible that I will read the entire series again before Book 8 comes out, and it would be utterly absurd for me to pick anything else as the best thing I read this year.
HONORABLE MENTION, in NO PARTICULAR ORDER: The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates; The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore; Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar; The Bones Beneath My Skin, by TJ Klune; A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett; Revelator, by Daryl Gregory, It Rhymes with Takei, by George Takei, Harmony Becker & Steven Scott; Advocate, by Daniel M. Ford; The Blighted Stars, by Megan O’Keefe, A Promise of Blood, by Brian McClellan; An African History of Africa, by Zeinab Badawi, Shadows Upon Time, by Christopher Ruocchio, and The Silverblood Promise and The Blackfire Blade, by James Logan.
