I need at least one more hobby. I mean, I have reading, and being a huge nerd about reading, and collecting books. I need a fourth.
According to Goodreads, I read 189 books in 2025, at 87,775 pages. According to Storygraph, I read 189 books in 2025, at 88,360 pages. Let’s call it 88,000 pages, as I’m entirely uninterested in trying to reconcile the discrepancy between the two. At the beginning of this year I started a bunch of different book app accounts and said that I was going to eventually settle on one, and Goodreads and Storygraph scratch slightly different itches, so I spent the year keeping both updated. 88K pages works out to 241 pages a day. How? I read every single night for at least half an hour before going to bed, and on weekends and days off I generally get up between 6:00 and 8:00 and spend a few hours reading in my library. For the record, I’m not trying to get up that early to read; believe me, I’d kill to be able to sleep until noon again if I wanted to. This is one of my body’s ways of showing me I’ve gotten old, apparently, but it’s working out for my reading, I guess.
26 of the books I read were nonfiction, and Storygraph claims I read 5% of them digitally, although I’m not convinced I was especially vigilant about making sure that was recorded properly. I said last year I wanted to read six books about teaching, and didn’t pull that off, mostly because after reading the first one I decided books about teaching were dumb and I didn’t want to read any more of them. I still want to read more nonfiction next year; maybe I’ll shoot for 36 nonfiction books by the end of the year. I definitely want to read more books digitally because my shelves are groaning and I’m genuinely running out of places to store shit. My bookshelves can only get so efficient, y’all, and I don’t think my wife is going to agree to buy a new house.
Average page length was 464 pages, which is another reason I’m thinking about moving more to digital. I read a ton of doorstoppers– according to Storygraph, ten different books were over a thousand pages. That’s nuts.
I read books by 141 authors, 86 of whom were new to me this year. Authors I read more than one book by were:
8 Books: Matt Dinniman
7 Books: Brandon Sanderson
6 Books: Robert Jordan
4 Books: Samantha Shannon, Ryan Cahill
3 Books: Brian McClellan, Megan E. O’Keefe, Wesley Chu, Anthony Ryan, Nghi Vo
2 Books: Keith Ammann, Leigh Bardugo, S.A. Barnes, Suzanne Collins, Osamu Dazai, H.E. Edgmon, K.M. Enright, James Islington, Yume Kitasei, James Logan, John Scalzi, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Xiran Jay Zhao
I’m expecting Robert Jordan to be the big winner next year, as I expect to finish The Wheel of Time, unless it kills me, which it might. Actually, that’s not true, I’m going to finish them even if it does kill me. I’m gonna do it this time, God damn it. I promise. Naomi Novik and Robin Hobb are also going to get a lot of attention.
I didn’t make any particular effort to pay attention to race or gender this year; those repeat authors mean that in terms of raw number of books read I’m absolutely tilted toward white men, but a quick count shows 74 authors who at least immediately scan as female-presenting, which is slightly more than half of the 141 total. There are probably a handful of nonbinary people in there who might move those numbers a bit if I looked closer.
Next year … man, next year all I want to do is get my TBR under control. That’s it. I will probably not manage it.
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.
This is the twelfth post in this series that I have written; I spent some time thinking about doing a Best of the Best list and when I realized how many rereads that would require– believe it or not, when you read 100+ books a year it tends to hurt your recall a little bit, like, I’ve literally read well over a thousand books since writing the 2013 list– I abandoned the idea. I am back to 15 books this year because right now I’m at 181 books read for the year and since it is only the 29th I may very well be at 184 by New Year’s Eve; hopefully I don’t read anything too brilliant in the next couple of days because it’s gonna have to wait until next year.
As always, don’t take specific rankings all too seriously– this started as a shortlist of 31, then got cut down to 17, and going from 17 to 15 was really hard, and honestly anything in the top seven or so could have ended up at number one if I’d woken up in a different mood. Also, the asterisk up there means that these books were new to me in 2024; the oldest book on the list is from 1975. I’m pretty sure a majority of them are 2024 releases but it’s definitely not all of them.
15: Math in Drag, by Kyne Santos. One of my reading goals for 2025 is to read six books about math and/or teaching math, right? And one of the reasons it’s only six books is that books about teaching and books about math tend to be dry as hell, and despite wanting to improve my craft as a math teacher I like to enjoy what I’m reading.
Kyne Santos needs to write a lot more books about math, is what I’m saying here. Drag queens who post mostly about mathematics is somehow a subgenre on social media, and Santos is the most visible of the group (if you’re on TikTok, check out Carrie the One) and this book is a whole bunch of things at once– a memoir, a history of math, a math textbook, and a history of the drag movement– and it’s tremendous on all levels. I actually took one of the chapters about negative square roots and turned it into a warm-up activity for my 8th graders, and then ensured that they would all look up the book on their own by telling them that I could give them the author’s name but not the actual name of the book. Which, for the record, probably wasn’t true, but I teach in Indiana.
14. How to Say Babylon, by Safiya Sinclair. It’s at this point where I realize there’s more nonfiction or at least nonfiction-adjacent (you’ll see) books on this list than usual, as Sinclair’s book is also a memoir about growing up in Jamaica in the eighties and nineties. Her father was a hard-core Rastafarian and a reggae musician, and growing up smart and female in a very patriarchal religious structure is a big part of the book.
The other fascinating thing about this one is the language; the dialogue is mostly in Jamaican English, which isn’t quite far enough from American English to qualify as a patois (which is a whole other thing, to my understanding) but it means that things like pronouns aren’t going to work quite like you’re used to, and you are going to hear every word her father says whether you normally hear dialogue or not. Sinclair is an award-winning poet, and while I’m not likely to check out her poetry, if she writes any more prose works in the future I’ll be in line for them.
13. Shōgun, by James Clavell. I have never seen either of the miniseries that were based on this book, either the original one from the 1980s or the apparently far superior one Hulu did this year, but I swear that if I ever start watching television again, I’m gonna, dammit. I picked this up (for the record, it’s printed in two volumes because it’s 1500 pages long, but it’s one book) based on a bunch of people being very enthusiastic about the miniseries and the strength of the cover.
Okay, that’s a lie, I picked this up because of the precise shade of blue-green used on the new covers, which sounds ridiculous and I don’t care, it’s true. Luckily for me the book is really good, and a lot less racist than you might guess “book written in the 1970s by a white guy about Japan” might be. The main character, a navigator named Blackthorne, is just open-minded enough of a character to make it possible to get into his head, and the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century were a fascinating period of history both in Japan specifically and the world in general. This book is a heavy damn lift in more ways than one, but I really enjoyed it and I’m glad they didn’t reprint it with a boring cover.
12. King: A Life, by Jonathan Eig. The Civil Rights movement is my favorite period of American history, and easily the one I know the most about, so you can probably imagine that I have a bunch of books specifically about Martin Luther King, Jr. on my shelf, as well as a couple that aren’t officially about him but may as well be. What sets Eig’s version of his life apart from the rest is his focus on King as a human being and not as a man whose face would eventually be carved into marble as a national memorial. It isn’t quite a psychological biography, if that’s even a real thing, but it may not surprise you to learn that King struggled with depression and anxiety for his entire life as well as a healthy dose of imposter syndrome (the man was in his twenties during the Montgomery bus boycott, and was only 39 when he was murdered) and he doesn’t come out and say it, but it’s strongly suggested that his mental health struggles led to his well-known issues with adultery, drugs and alcohol.
What, you didn’t know Martin Luther King dabbled in drugs? Yeah. Sorry about that. But unlike, say, Ralph Abernathy’s book, there’s no sense of score-settling in King: A Life; Eig talks about these things because they were important, and he’s not trying to knock King off his pillar so much as talk about a guy who would have been deeply uncomfortable up there in the first place. When you’ve read as much about King as I have it takes a lot to write something new and impressive, and Eig has certainly delivered here.
11. Seal of the Worm, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This is the first of two books on this list that should be understood as endorsements of the entire series rather than the individual books I’m writing about, and in the case of Seal of the Worm I’m talking about his Shadows of the Apt books, a ten-book, 6000-page series, most of which I read in 2024.
That isn’t to say that Seal of the Worm isn’t the best book of the series, as even just from a technical level capping off that massive of a work in a satisfactory manner is an impressive achievement all on its own, but what if I told you that Seal of the Worm manages to introduce an entire new antagonist and kicks the legs out from underneath all nine previous books, something that has already happened once in the series? Tchaikovsky may be science fiction and fantasy’s most underrated author, and I still don’t know anyone else who has read this series, which is a Goddamned crime. They’re right there, and you can buy them. What are you waiting for, other than the time to read six thousand pages? Please, somebody, read this.
10. Light from Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki. Another mini-theme of this list that is going to start becoming more apparent is books that are batshit nuts, and … man, this book has a little bit of everything in it, and I think would wear a “batshit nuts” badge with absolute and undeniable pride.
I mean, check out how many whole entire books are superglued together here: Light from Uncommon Stars features 1) a young, transgender runaway who is 2) a world-class violinist who 3) meets a mentor who has made a deal with the Devil to 4) corrupt seven young violinists into also selling their souls to the devil and 5) is looking for number 7, and meanwhile 8) there are aliens who 9) are stuck on Earth and 10) running a donut shop while they’re stuck here. It is complete madness from the first page to the last, and I recommended it to one of my trans orchestra students during the last school year and I should really find out if they ever read it or not. Meanwhile, you should read it too.
9. The Phoenix Keeper, by S. A. MacLean. Slightly less nutty (but still pretty nutty) is this book about an autistic, anxiety-riddled zookeeper in a zoo filled with fantasy animals, the first and sole representative of what the kids are calling cozy fantasy on this list. I got sent this one by Illumicrate and it wouldn’t have really crossed my radar otherwise, but I read it more or less cover-to-cover during a car trip and it was exactly the book I needed at the time. I have read more romance books than I ever expected to this year, and am reaching the point where I am heartily tired of romantasy, which is a thing, but this isn’t that; there is a bit of a romance subplot but it’s not about that, so don’t pay attention to the blurb on the cover. No, this book is about a nerd who really really wants to be the best zookeeper in the world and wants to raise phoenixes, and it’s really obviously based on the efforts zoos went to to keep the California condor from going extinct, and I absolutely loved it. There are setbacks and obstacles to be overcome but, again, this is cozy fantasy and you know everything is going to work out just fine, and this book is more about relaxing into the details and the characters than the conflict. I like zoos. I like books set at zoos. Zoos with phoenixes are better than regular zoos. This is a great book.
8. Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography, by Staci Robinson. I am tempted to say “this exists and therefore you should read it,” but that’s kind of unfair to both the book and the author even if it’s more or less completely true. I’m listening to Kendrick Lamar while I write this post, and Kendrick is one of Pac’s more obvious spiritual successors in hiphop nowadays, but it’s impossible to overstate the impact this guy had on rap music and on two or three generations of kids and still counting. I think it’s probably fair to say that there’s not another musician from the nineties (or a whole bunch of other decades, for whatever that’s worth) that still has as much influence as Tupac does, and reading a book written by someone who knew him well and was handpicked by his mother to write the book was an absolute pleasure. The guy’s life was fascinating, and while books about musicians can sometimes become formulaic (“he released this, and then he released this, and then there were the drug problems, and then he released this,”) this manages to keep away from that. The one weakness is that it literally ends with the moment of his death; I feel like another chapter about the LAPD’s investigation reaction to his murder was probably warranted and we didn’t get it. Still, I’m glad to have read this.
7. The West Passage, by Jared Pechaček. I still don’t know how the hell to pronounce his last name, but this book is the first one on the list that, on a different day, I easily could have called the best book of the year, and if you want to draw a line between the first eight books and the last seven and ignore the ratings completely after that, it’s entirely reasonable. The West Passage is also the second representative of the Batshit Nuts genre, drawing inspiration from Gormenghast and Shadow of the Torturer and Through the Looking-Glass and China Miéville’s Bas-Lag series and coming up with something where characters will be talking about a beehive, and you’ll think to yourself okay, I know what bees are, and I know what a beehive is, and then the beehive will walk over to the characters on its legs and extend a urethra and piss out some honey for them. The crumbling castle this book is set in is one of the wildest settings I’ve ever encountered in fantasy literature, and God damn it did I seriously read six more books this year that I thought were better than this one? That shouldn’t be possible, because this book is incredible, but … well, keep reading.
6. Mornings in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa. I read several books this year by Palestinian authors, and two specifically by Abulhawa, whose Against the Loveless World was also on my shortlist, but Mornings in Jenin is the superior of those two books. This is not a memoir but feels like it (Abulhawa herself is Palestinian, but was born in 1970 in Kuwait, so she’s narrating events from before she was born, although I’m sure her own life experiences made their way into the book), and it begins with the creation of Israel and runs up to more or less the modern day, as it ends in 2002 or so, a few years before its release in 2006. This is easily the most important book on the list, and the main character, Amal, is a young girl at the beginning of the book and an old woman at the end of it, so you more or less get the entire history of the Palestine-Israeli conflict through her eyes. Go right ahead and make a list of all the content warnings you can think of, as this is a really hard book to read if you’re possessed of even a modicum of human empathy, but it’s something that I think most people and certainly most Americans definitely need to pick up.
5. Incidents Around the House, by Josh Malerman. I called this the scariest book I’d ever read when I wrote about it the first time (my post cannot, in any meaningful way, be called a “review”) and while I wasn’t able to stick by that– you’ll see in a minute, and frankly parts of Mornings in Jenin are horrifying in their own way as well– it’s certainly the scariest horror novel I have read, at least in a long, long time, time having worn the edges off of some of the other books that might belong on that list.
Incidents is about Bela, an eight-year-old, who lives with her mother and father in a nice, comfortable house. But there’s also Other Mommy, who no one else in the house can see, and who asks Bela every day if she can “go inside her heart.” Bela is smart enough to realize that this is probably a Bad Idea, possibly one of the Badder Ideas in the entire history of Bad Ideas, and … well, Other Mommy isn’t very happy about that.
Don’t read this book. You don’t need it in your head. I didn’t need it in mine, but it’s there now, and the book is still in the freezer, and I have to reward how fucking effective this book is in scaring the absolute shit out of a grown man who himself lives in a nice comfortable house even if I am never letting it out of the freezer ever again.
4. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty. I haven’t used the word delightful in this post yet because I feel like I overuse it lately, but I feel like there’s probably no way of getting through writing about this book, about a female ex-pirate captain who has retired and settled down to raise her daughter in a magical world full of djinn and treasures and adventures and her pain in the ass mom and awesome, but this was probably the most fun I had reading anything this year, and if you can look at that cover and not immediately want to read this than you and I probably can’t be friends. I’ve read several of Shannon Chakraborty’s books, and this is better than anything she’s written before– and those were all books I enjoyed! I want twelve thousand more books about Amina al-Sirafi and I want them right now. Have you ever noticed that when I get excited about things my sentences tend to get longer? Look at the first sentence of this entry. I read this book months ago. It still makes me that happy to talk about it. Go read it.
3. Blood over Bright Haven, by M.L. Wang. This is the fourth book in a row where you’re going to feel a particular emotion over and over again while reading it, and the second of the four where rage is going to be that emotion. Blood over Bright Haven has a bunch of very interesting tricks under its sleeve, and chief among them is the way it’s going to kind of blindside you partway through with what it is actually about and, even more amazingly, who its main character is. This is one of the angriest books I’ve ever read, and again, one of the books I just finished writing about is about a Palestinian refugee, so that’s a pretty high bar. I enjoyed Wang’s Sword of Kaigen but not nearly as much as I expected to, and this book sat on my shelf for a while before I got to it. It should be this book that people can’t stop talking about, not Kaigen, and the reason I’m not talking about the plot very much is that this is definitely one of those books where you need to go in knowing as little as possible. Just sit back and let it take you for a ride. And if you can, grab it soon while you can still get the cool red-stained edges. The first hardcover edition is sweet.
2. Nuclear War: A Scenario, by Annie Jacobsen. Remember a couple of books ago, where I called Incidents Around the House the scariest horror novel I’d ever read, and said that I’d explain in a minute? Yeah, that’s because Nuclear War: A Scenario isn’t a novel, and it is fucking terrifying on a deep, existential level that no fictional novel can really touch.
If you grew up in the eighties, you remember what living in fear every day of impending nuclear war felt like, and you might remember the occasional “hide under your desk and kiss your ass goodbye, because it’s not going to help” drill from school. Jacobsen’s book starts with North Korea detonating a one-megaton nuclear bomb over Washington DC, and ends seventy-one minutes later with more or less all of human life on Earth extinguished. It is probably best classified as near-future science fiction, as the events described have not, in fact, happened yet, but Jacobsen is repeatedly clear that the events of the book could happen tomorrow, and while there’s clearly some fictionalization happening here and there (she has to invent a US President and Vice-President, for example, and what happens with the president pro tempore of the Senate almost verges on comedy) I have shelved this with my nonfiction and history books, because all of the research that went into this puts it more firmly into the realm of those books than fiction.
I, uh, want to die in the first thirty seconds, preferably entirely unaware of what just killed me, if there’s a nuclear war. I’ve said this before about more fictional apocalypses– I also want to be patient zero if there’s ever a zombie outbreak– but it would be great if I was, say, in Chicago when the bombs hit, and if that first exchange involved more than the one bomb. I’d prefer not to die in a nuclear apocalypse, mind you, but if I’ve got to go that way, I really don’t want to see it coming.
1. Godsgrave, by Jay Kristoff, is my favorite book of the year, and my annual irritation with WordPress that it will not allow me to begin a paragraph with a one and a period without indenting it automatically or Performing Shenanigans to keep it from happening. I am capable of indenting things myself if I want to, or you should at least pay attention if you automatically indent something and I delete it, dammit! But yes: this is the second single-book-as-a-stand-in-for-an-entire-series, and Kristoff’s Nevernight Chronicles is one of the most amazing series I’ve ever read. In broad strokes, the series feels like something you’ve read repeatedly– a young girl who trains to be an assassin so she can seek revenge is not on the top 10 of most original scenarios– but once you get past that original setup and the series gets moving, you’re going to be surprised over and over and over and over by the story decisions Kristoff makes, and the reason I picked Godsgrave, the second book in the series (the first and last are Nevernight and Darkdawn, respectively) is that it ends on a cliffhanger so potent that I literally screamed when I finished the book, and if I had had to wait for Book Three to come out and hadn’t had it sitting on the shelf waiting for me (I read all three books in a single gulp) I might have had to move into his Goddamned house until he finished it.
I love so many things about this series. I love what an unapologetic asshole Mia Corvere is. I love that they make her an assassin and then don’t back away from all the killing that implies. I love that Kristoff sets up what feels like a bog-standard YA love triangle and then blows it to hell. I love how much of the worldbuilding is stuck into what feels like inappropriately snarky footnotes, and I love how the footnotes suddenly make sense at the end of the book. I love how meta the series gets, and I love how no one is safe, ever, and how Darkdawn keeps you on your toes for its entire length and keeps getting more and more batshit, at one point indicating a story development with margin changes, and God Damn I want to sit down and reread this whole series before starting the Stormlight reread in a few days.
The Nevernight Chronicles is the best series I read this year, and Godsgrave is the best book of The Nevernight Chronicles. Go forth.
Honorable Mention, in No Particular Order: A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Mark Dawidziak; The Honey Witch, by Sydney J. Shields; House of Hunger, by Alexis Henderson; The God and the Gumiho, by Sophie Kim; This is Why They Hate Us, by Aaron Acevedo; The Bone Ship Trilogy by R. J. Barker; Somewhere Beyond the Sea, by T.J. Klune; Blood at the Root, by LaDarrion Williams; The Vagrant Gods series, by David Dalglish; Morning Star, by Pierce Brown; Bookshops & Bonedust, by Travis Baldree, Moon of the Turning Leaves, by Waubgeshig Rice, and The Fury of the Gods, by John Gwynne.
I purchased– and yes, “purchased” is the right word– 72 albums in 2023. I am an Old, and I have never taken to streaming, and so I’m still paying for all this stuff, and the fact that I got handed $200 in Apple gift cards partway through the year definitely didn’t hurt. Obviously not all of that is 2023 music, and as usual, I’m going to talk about stuff that was new to me this year.
The usual caveat whenever I’m talking about music: I have no idea how to write coherently about music, and never have, and furthermore I still cannot understand other people when they write about music. I have seen a ton of “Best New Releases of 2023” types of lists in the last few weeks, and purchased some music based on them, and … I just don’t get it. I’m pretty convinced that you could take the actual review parts of this article, randomly swap the artist and albums’ names, and republish it, and no one would notice. So this isn’t a list of reviews, it’s not a Best Of, and it’s sure as hell not in any kind of order other than maybe reverse chronological order of when I bought them. These are just albums that I enjoyed in 2023. Maybe you’ll like them too.
And I can hear you already, going “Wait, Luther, there’s no way you didn’t have Diamonds and Pearls already!” And you’re correct! I bought it on release day when I was in high school. What came out this year is the Super Deluxe Edition of Diamonds and Pearls, by Prince and the New Power Generation, which, for all my love of Prince’s entire career, will always be my favorite iteration of him.
The physical version of this motherfucker is seven disks long. There are live versions and alternate takes and an entire concert and demos and remasters and I’m going to stop typing now because you’ve already clicked away to go spend money.
I discovered Ren in 2023; Freckled Angels is a 2016 release but Sick Boi came out this year. Sick Boi is absolutely a rap album; Freckled Angels is something else and I’m not even going to try to describe it. Ren is Irish and monumentally talented and even if you’re not generally into hiphop you might want to look into him. Good shit.
I think it might actually be illegal to write anything about music in 2023 without mentioning Guts, by Olivia Rodrigo, and, well … yeah, it deserves it. I am really proud of myself for never unleashing my feelings about Sour in this space; Rodrigo has been underage for most of her career and picking on an actual child for musical choices that most likely were made mostly by other people who didn’t have her best interests in mind (no goddammit I’m not gonna do it) is not a move I want to make. But Guts is a more mature and multidimensional piece of work in every imaginable way, and bad idea right? is a fucking banger and I no longer feel like she should be taken away from her parents. All good. We’re fine.
2023 is also the year Paramore finally clicked for me, and after spending weeks mainlining This is Whyevery time I got into my car I went back and picked up most of the rest of their backlist. I mean, Christ, the name of their album is half of the line this is why I don’t leave the house; it’s like it was written for me.
You may have seen Queen Omega freestyling her ass off over a Dr. Dre beat on TikTok; I did, over and over and over again, until I cracked and spent money. I don’t listen to a ton of reggae nowadays, and I listen to even less reggae that doesn’t have anyone named Marley involved with it, but Freedom Legacy was a great dip back into the genre, and I feel like I might explore what modern, hip-hop influenced reggae is doing more next year. This is a hell of a collection, though, and I’m glad I grabbed it up.
Six? Six sounds good. Here’s the rest of the list:
I am currently on book 137 for 2020, and depending on how much time I spend reading over the next several days I’ll likely be on 138 or maybe 139 by the time the year ends, but one of those is going to be a reread and the other is not super likely to set the world on fire, so it is officially Safe to Put the List Together, and write what has consistently been my favorite post of the year during the time I’ve been writing here. This is the second year I’ve gone to 15 books; it didn’t feel quite as necessary as last year but I figure honoring 11% of my favorite books at the end of the year instead of 7% isn’t going to end the world or anything.
As always, these are books that are New To Me, not necessarily new releases, although a lot of them did come out this year. Also, don’t take the rankings too seriously– if I did this again tomorrow they’d probably be in a slightly different order– and in particular the top five or so were tough. Basically, I know you got some gift cards for Christmas, hie thee to a local bookstore and pick something up; they’re all good.
15. THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES: A BIOGRAPHY OF CANCER, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. This is both the oldest of the books on the list, dating all the way back to the hoary days of 2010, and the first book on the list that I actually read. In fact, I started it in 2019, after last year’s list was written, but didn’t finish it until the first week of January. Siddhartha Mukherjee has shown up on this list before, with The Gene: An Intimate History coming in at #14 last year, and despite their relative positions I think Emperor is a stronger book. It is, as the title states, a history of cancer, or rather a history of cancers, as the book makes repeatedly clear that part of what makes this disease so difficult is that there are so many different types of cancer and it affects the body so differently depending on where and when it appears. It’s a fascinating piece of work; a little less technical (and thus a touch more accessible) than The Gene, which was already impressively accessible, and frankly everyone knows someone who has passed of cancer, so you’re going to feel a personal connection to this book while you’re reading it whether you want to or not.
14. DOCILE, by K.M. Szpara. There are a couple of books on this list that need to come with content warnings, and part of me kind of feels like Docile needs to come wrapped in brown paper with a big sticker on the back that says Are You Sure? on it. It’s a book about free will and brainwashing and capitalism and sex slavery, set in a future where debt has been made inheritable and people are literally signing decades of their lives (and sometimes their entire lives) over to the few remaining ultrarich to act as their servants in order to erase their family’s debts. They are given a drug that makes them into a Docile, which is basically a pliant, personality- and free-will-less drone who exists only to do the will of their masters. When they are released from their contracts, they remember nothing from their time as a Docile. And they don’t always come back right. The main character is Elisha, a young man who becomes a Docile but refuses to take Dociline, meaning that he is expected to perform exactly as the other Dociles but actually feels and remembers everything he is experiencing.
It’s a hard book to read, on a lot of levels, but this was another real early read in the year and it’s really stuck with me. I don’t know that I want a sequel or anything but I’m definitely in for whatever Szpara comes up with next.
13. ANGER IS A GIFT, by Mark Oshiro. I read two different books by Mark Oshiro this year, this and Each Of Us a Desert, and I went back and forth several times on which one deserved to be on this list more. I feel like Desert is a better book on a technical level, so to speak, but Anger is a Gift affected me emotionally far more than Desert did, so it gets the nod. This is another book that’s going to kind of beat the hell out of you while you read it; it’s the story of Moss Jefferies, a young man from Oakland, California who lost his father to police violence six years before the events of the book begin, and is still struggling with panic attacks and PTSD from the aftereffects of his dad’s murder. Now a high school sophomore, Moss is forced to deal with the increasing militarization of his urban high school and, as he finds himself drawn further into demonstrations and protests, has to reckon with police violence again. There is a sequence in this book that made me so angry I nearly tossed the book across the room, and it was harder to read it as a teacher than I think it might be for most people, because I spent a substantial amount of time very, very angry with the adults who are supposed to be protecting the kids in this school. This book is technically YA, the first of several on this list (I read a lot of YA this year) and it’s probably the most adult-feeling of the books on the list. I’m greatly looking forward to seeing what he comes up with next.
(Disclaimer: Mark read, and enjoyed, The Benevolence Archives: Vol. 1 for his Mark Reads Stuff series on YouTube. I wasn’t familiar with him before this happened– someone else got him to read my book– and while I’m not going to lie and pretend that that series wasn’t the reason I picked up Anger in the first place, it’s not the reason Anger is on the list.)
12. YOU SHOULD SEE ME IN A CROWN, by Leah Johnson. So, uh, compared to the rest of the books on the list, this one is maybe going to stand out a little bit? Y’all know me. I like speculative fiction, stuff with dragons and wizards and ghosts and unspeakable evils and laser guns and exotic alien worlds. Even when something is set in the “real world,” I like to see a tinge of the supernatural here and there.
You Should See Me in a Crown is basically a Disney movie set to prose. It’s the story of Liz Lighty, who ought to be a superhero, a young nerdy Black girl attending an ultra-rich Indianapolis high school. She has her entire life planned out– the college, the extracurricular activities, the careers afterwards– and then critical financial aid falls through and throws the whole thing into doubt.
So she decides to run for prom queen, which for some reason comes with a massive scholarship award at her high school, and she and her friends basically Voltron up to marshal the forces of all the not-traditionally-popular kids at the school and make Liz the prom queen.
It’s fucking delightful. Like, this book ought to have a giant blinking NOT FOR LUTHER sign on it, and it was bloody delightful. I loved Liz, I loved her fumbling, tender relationship with Mack, her girlfriend, and I even managed to buy into the high school being a real place by the end of the book. (Every so often I wonder if my high school was really weird or if every other portrayal of high school is nonsense. I was on the prom committee in high school. The “popular kids” were largely also the geeks and the nerds. It was a weird place.)
11. THE WEIGHT OF INK, by Rachel Kadish. Now, this book, on the other hand, should have come with a giant blinking FOR LUTHER sign on it. I was a Jewish Studies and Religious Studies major in a previous life, and have a Master’s Degree in Hebrew Bible, so if you hand me a book that’s basically about a couple of historians digging through a recently-discovered treasure trove of documents written by a female Jewish scholar and philosopher in London in the 1660s, I’m going to be halfway done with the damn thing before you actually get finished handing it to me. The book bounces back and forth between the two historians reading the documents in the modern day and the blind rabbi and the woman who is scribing for him (and, later on, writing her own treatises and corresponding with the likes of Spinoza) in the seventeenth century, and it’s probably the densest read on the list but Damn is it rewarding. This was recommended to me after a post where I complained about not really appreciating Literature, and this is the closest to Literature of everything I read this year, but don’t hold that against it. If you’re into history or really any kind of scholasticism at all this book will have something for you in it. Beautifully done.
10. THE VANISHING HALF, by Brit Bennett. We’re on a bit of a roll here, as both this book and the next one could probably be termed Literatures as well, but don’t hold that against any of them. The Vanishing Half is a multigenerational family saga, the story of a pair of inexplicably light-skinned Black twin sisters, born in a Southern town so small that it doesn’t appear on any maps.
On their sixteenth birthday the twins flee their home together, heading to New Orleans, and several years later one of them abandons her sister and runs again– to marry a white man who has no idea of her race or her background, and to disappear into wealthy white society. The other sister marries the darkest-skinned man she can find and eventually ends up back at home again.. Both women have daughters, and their daughters’ lives interact at various points throughout the story, neither of them having any idea who the other is or even that they have any cousins in the first place. The book starts in the Deep South and as it moves from the 1950s to the 1990s it widens its scope across the country. Bennett’s writing is lovely, and her characters feel like real people even when they’re placed into a setting that can at times feel a little metaphorical.
9. CONJURE WOMEN, by Afia Atakora. This book is a great example of something I was talking about earlier, a book that is mostly rooted in the real world and classy enough to be a Literature but works in just enough of the supernatural to keep weirdos like me interested. I read Conjure Women and The Vanishing Half pretty close to back-to-back, and they have a lot of similarities– both are family sagas to one extent or another, although this one doesn’t have literal twins in it, setting the relationship between an enslaved woman, her daughter, and their master’s daughter as the relationship it explores. The mother is a midwife and a healer, and her daughter Rue is reluctant about following in her footsteps, and is assigned as a playmate to the master’s daughter, Varina. Then the Civil War hits, and … well, things get interesting.
Take a close look at the cover, there, which isn’t initially as striking as some of the covers to books I enjoyed this year (random note: 2020 was a great year for book covers!) but is probably among the best covers of the year once you read the book and realize what you’re looking at. This and Vanishing Half are definitely an example of a situation where if I put the list together tomorrow they might flip places on the list. If you liked one, you’ll likely enjoy the other so get ’em both with that gift card I know you have.
8. THE GIRL FROM THE WELL, by Rin Chupeco. LOL, this one is about an angry murder ghost in case you thought I’d forgotten what kinds of books I usually read. You might look at the cover to this and think to yourself wait, isn’t that the girl from The Ring? And, well (heh), you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, as the ghost in The Ring and the ghost in The Girl from the Well are both based on the same Japanese myth. This book wins the Can I Eat This Author’s Brain and Claim Their Powers award for this year, as it’s the book I’d most like to have written myself of everything on the list. It’s actually told from the perspective of the angry murder ghost, and Chupeco’s prose is creepy and alien in a really remarkable way; the ghost really doesn’t feel human at any point in the book, and that’s something that I feel could get out of control and ruin the book really easily if the author isn’t careful and skilled enough. I also read the sequel to this this year, The Suffering, which does have the ghost as a main character but is told through the perspective of another (human) character from this book. I enjoyed it quite a bit but it didn’t floor me as effectively as this one; Chupeco’s voice in this book is outstandingly well-done, and this was easily the scariest thing I read all year.
7. THE BURNING GOD, by R.F. Kuang. Right about here is where it started getting really difficult to rank the books, by the way, and if anything this book got downrated a little bit by being the third book in a trilogy, making it a little tricky to recommend on its own. I loved the first book in the trilogy, The Poppy War, and had some trouble with the second, The Dragon Republic, at least in part because I didn’t remember the events of the first book as well as I should have. So I reread the first two books before reading this one, and … damn, y’all.
This series is another one that could stand for a trigger warning or two. One of the central events in the first book is modeled on the Rape of Nanking, and it’s absolutely horrible, and none of the characters are ever the same afterwards. The first book ends with a literal genocide, as an entire nation is set aflame. PTSD, rape and drug abuse and addiction are major themes of the series. But, my God, R.F. Kuang, who is somehow only in her early twenties, is a hell of a writer, and if you’re not someone who feels like they will suffer lasting psychological effects from reading this kind of book, in the final evaluation it’s one of the finest fantasy trilogies I’ve ever read. I didn’t give Dragon Republic enough credit when I first read it– which was exactly why I did the reread– and while placing seventh on this list might seem like a drop-off in quality when The Poppy War was third the year it came out … like I said, don’t read too much into the specific rankings. But read the books. Definitely read the books.
6. SPLIT TOOTH, by Tanya Tagaq. Okay, I promise after this one I won’t use the phrase “trigger warning” again, and I won’t make fun of myself for being bad at Literature again either, but I’ve gotta do both for this book. Tanya Tagaq is a Canadian Indigenous author, and I read an interview with her where she describes this book, set in Nunavut in the 1970s, as a “mythobiography,” and that’s as good of a description of it as I can imagine. It’s not precisely a memoir, and it’s not precisely an autobiography either– I don’t imagine that Tagaq thinks she was impregnated by the Northern Lights, which happens to the protagonist in this book– but the mythical and supernatural elements of the book somehow manipulate the “real” events of the book into being more shocking than they might have been otherwise. This book is beautifully written– the prose is among the best I’ve ever encountered and probably 15-20% of the wordcount is actually poetry and I loved the hell out of it anyway. Growing up poor and indigenous in Nunavut in the 1970s was no picnic, and this is another one to be careful with, as child abuse and neglect and sexual assault are definitely themes, but this is an amazing book and among the best surprises of 2020, as I effectively bought it blind when I realized I hadn’t read anything by indigenous women yet in my #52booksbywomenofcolor project and more or less grabbed it at random. I love it when that works out.
5. SAVAGE LEGION, by Matt Wallace. We are about to enter into a series of “first books of fantasy series,” as four of my top five books this year are Volume 1 of what will turn out to be at least trilogies if not, in some cases, longer. I just took a break for lunch, as I’ve been working on this post for three hours, and I swear to you that I sat back down and again considered rearranging the next set of books, so call all of them the best book of the year if you want. I won’t tell anybody.
At any rate, Matt Wallace’s Savage Legion is a hell of a book, and what was the most fascinating thing about it for me was the way it somehow manages to simultaneously absolutely bathe itself in tropes and cliches of the genre and come off as something fresh and new, and frankly that’s a hell of a trick to have pulled off. Legion employs the rotating-third-person-POV construct that’s become popular since Game of Thrones came out, but the really interesting thing about it is that you don’t figure out that several of the characters you’re reading about are the bad guys until everything starts slowly knitting itself together at the end. His characters are definitely modern, as he manages to knit together an interesting, diverse cast of POVs without succumbing to The Nation To The South Is Like This and The Dwarves Are Like That sorts of tropes. Also worth pointing out: one of the POV characters is in a wheelchair, which I think is the first time I’ve seen that in a fantasy novel. Generally when fantasy interacts with disability it’s to cut off a limb in combat or sometimes to have a character who is Blind But Not Blind, and I swear I wrote that before realizing that GoT does both. This is not that, and this book deserves a lot more attention than it got.
4. LEGENDBORN, by Tracy Deonn. Let us first take a moment to appreciate that cover, please.
Legendborn is not only the first of a series, it’s author Tracy Deonn’s debut as well, and … man, I loved it. I loved it. Much like Wallace’s Savage Legion and Kuang’s Poppy War, this book starts off feeling very familiar and very tropey. YA can get away with that to a slightly larger degree than books that are supposedly aimed at adults, but it’s still there nonetheless. The main character is not quite off at college, as she’s in high school, but she’s participating in a program that is located at a college and she lives in a dorm. And she’s off at a party and she Witnesses Something She Shouldn’t Have Seen, and then there are Secret Powers that Must Be Hidden, and there’s a Secret Society, and then like thirty pages into the book Tracy Deonn starts pinpointing exactly what you think is going to happen and gleefully curb-stomping the hell out of all of it, and yes eventually there’s a Powerful Boyfriend and a Smolderingly Sexy Antagonist who is the Boyfriend’s protector and best friend but hates the main character because of Secret Reasons, and this is one of those books that is difficult to describe properly because it sounds so clichéd but you just have to trust me that Tracy Deonn knows exactly what she’s doing and everything is going to be delightfully subverted by the end, and there’s even a Big Twist at the very end that I absolutely did not see coming and led to a fun bit of self-examination where I had to decide if I’d missed it because I’m white.
This is the third YA book to appear on this list, and as I’ve already said I read a lot of YA this year, but you absolutely should not let that get in the way of your reading this. Go get it and put it in your head now, please.
3. LEONARDO DA VINCI, by Walter Isaacson. There’s always at least a couple of nonfiction books on this list, but Leonardo da Vinci was the first one that was in serious contention for the top spot. This book is a combination of a biography of Leonardo himself and a book about art history, and it is filled with pictures of his artwork and detailed analyses of his paintings. This is the second book of Isaacson’s I’ve read, his first being a biography of Benjamin Franklin, and I will likely read his biography of Einstein sometime this year. Isaacson’s thing is that he really likes writing about geniuses, and the most notable thing about this book, above and beyond the fact that Leonardo himself is endlessly fascinating, is the sheer enthusiasm that Isaacson brings to discussing his subject. Art history is one of those things that I don’t personally know a whole lot about, but I love listening to and reading people who do know a lot about art talk about it, and both parts of the book were done exceptionally well. Descriptions of art can slide into the sort of half-gibberish that music reviews can turn into if the author isn’t careful, and I have to admit that a lot of the time I’m taking his word for it when he does things like describe facial expressions of the various subjects of a painting and such, but this is an amazing book about an amazing person and I very strongly recommend it even if you don’t necessarily think Leonardo is someone you want to spend 600 pages with. Because, seriously, you don’t want to read about Leonardo da Vinci? Quit being weird and go pick this up.
(Also, one more thing: this book wins for the best book as a physical artifact for the year. The paper is creamy and thick and the book feels great, and since it’s full of artwork that is begging for analysis the print itself is of a really high quality. I only spent like $12 on it brand new, and that’s ludicrous.)
2. BLACK SUN, by Rebecca Roanhorse. We’re back to Volume One of A Fantasy Series territory here, and Rebecca Roanhorse has become one of my favorite authors over the last several years, someone whose books get bought on release day and leapfrogged over whatever else happens to be in the queue at the time.
Anyway, let’s stare at the cover for a moment.
Black Sun is second-world fantasy, heavily influenced by Mesoamerican history and culture in much the same way that The Burning God is influenced by Japanese and Chinese culture. And you’re about to see another theme between this and the book that ended up being my favorite of the year, because the thing I loved the most about both books was the worldbuilding. I don’t know how many books are planned for this series but I hope it’s a million, because I could read about this world forever. It’s also one of those books where the ending kind of upends the status quo that’s been set up throughout the book, so we’ll see where Roanhorse goes with the second volume, which hopefully will be out really soon.
1. SCARLET ODYSSEY, by C.T. Rwizi. This has been the frontrunner for most of the year, and I did go back and forth a couple of times on whether I was going to have it or Black Sun as the top book of the year, but in the end it won out. And, well, there are some definite similarities between the two: second-world fantasy inspired by a culture that you typically don’t see a lot of in fantasy literature, this time being Central Africa rather than Mesoamerica, and absolutely outstanding worldbuilding. What ended up giving Odyssey the edge was slightly stronger characters and a more detailed (and math-based!) magic system, existing alongside multiple detailed religious systems and a complicated politics to boot. This book also features rotating 3rd person POVs, although it’s clear that 18-year-old Musalodi, a mystic who achieves a place of power and influence among his people and is immediately sent forth on an Important Quest, the actual purpose of which is to get rid of him, because men aren’t supposed to be Mystics and no one in his home really wants to deal with him. Genderflipping traditional roles is kind of a thing throughout this book, and Salo’s journey and the people he encounters along the way are all fascinating. There are also hints at another culture, possibly much more technologically adept, sort of on the outside of the events of the story but watching closely, and I can’t wait for the sequel, Requiem Moon, which comes out in March and which I’ve already pre-ordered. It is the best book I read in a year full of good books, and you need to read it.
HONORABLE MENTION, in no particular order: TERRA NULLIUS, by Claire G. Coleman, A SONG OF WRAITHS AND RUIN, by Roseanne A. Brown, THE VANISHED QUEEN, by Lisbeth Campbell, MOON OF THE CRUSTED SNOW, by Waubgeshig Rice, THE FIVE: THE UNTOLD LIVES OF THE WOMEN KILLED BY JACK THE RIPPER, by Hallie Rubenhold, SPIDERLIGHT, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, THE YEAR OF THE WITCHING, by Alexis Henderson, and DEATHLESS DIVIDE, by Justina Ireland.
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