Every book I read in 2025, with notes on the really good ones
That title is pretty self-explanatory, really, isn’t it? Let’s crack on.
First, stats
How did I read this year?
Total: 33 books
(2024 - 40)Breakdown: fiction 25, nonfiction 8
(2024 - 30:11)Formats:
Audiobook - 18%
(2024 - 25%)eBook - 48%
(2024 - 45%)Treebook - 33%
(2024 - 30%)
Audio is down, paper is up, but not by as much as it felt like. Most of my audiobooks (6 this year) are nonfiction at the gym, and the new series of Articles of Interest probably put a dent in that.
Only three rereads (constant with 2024, but therefore a higher percentage), fewer comics, and only one abandoned.
There was the usual seasonal skew towards Christmas and summer holidays, with a real lull in March and April that I put down to: a) starting a new job, and : b) not being so traumatised by the old one that I needed the escape.
So, what did I read this year, and how was it?
The best
Ten I loved, presented in the order I read them, with no promises about spoilers.
The Bookshop, the Draper, the Candlestick Maker - Annie Gray (2025)
A social history of the high street and how shopping and what we shop for has evolved over the last five hundred years or so. Shot through with Annie Gray's delightful coy asides, I was glad I did this on audio as she narrates it beautifully. It's fascinating that we've been handwringing about the death (and cultural place) of the high street for as long as we've had one.
Unstable Orbits - Anthony Camber (2025)
"I think Sauron's a top, babes"
A horny teen drama with physics jokes, feelings, and some storming one-liners from a deliciously mean twink.
The author is (full disclosure) a friend and was kind enough to send me an early review copy, but I'm not blowing smoke up his ass when I put it on my favourites list - it’s the best YA novel I read this year.
The Power Fantasy (vol.1) - Kieron Gillen (writer), Caspar Wijngaard (artist) (2025)
I know I'm super late to the party on this but it's super good.
One of the only "yeah, but what if superpowers were really real?" examinations to add much post Watchmen, and the art is gorgeous.
For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain - Victoria Mackenzie (2023)
Julian of Norwich meets Margery Kempe!
Look, if you're in the tiny Venn diagram overlap of people who know what that means without googling, AND haven't read this already, just get a copy. Both voices are beautifully realised.
If you don’t know WTF I’m talking about, well, it imagines the meeting between two absolute prize fucking weirdos, an anchorite nun and a borderline-heretical charismatic mystic, both of whom experienced divine visions, in fourteenth century Norfolk. Margery & Julian are the MVPs of your undergrad medieval literature module, and this sketches their characters so richly.
How the Railways Will Fix the Future - Gareth Dennis (2024)
Trains are objectively cool. Here's a well-reasoned argument for making them even cooler. It's tremendous fun having an expert explain something that genuinely excites them, and this is that.
Bonus points for teaching me the term “gadgetbahn”, describing Elon Musk as “the world’s most divorced man”, and really laying into both Hyperloop, and some of the more absurd public transport proposals floated for Cambridge.
I finished it wanting to mail a copy to the DfT with a covering note saying “just fucking do this”.
The Heart-Shaped Tin - Bee Wilson (2025)
"These spoons are shields not swords, and when I hold my mother's I feel I can take on the world"
A genuinely fascinating examination of how people relate to objects, layered around a central conceit that would have been monstrously self-indulgent in the hands of someone less thoughtful.
Instead of being the glibly reheated therapy work that it opens smelling like, it serves up a vast buffet of history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, grief, and healing. It made me cry in the gym, and that wasn't even the section on the holocaust.
This year’s surprise hit.
Troll: A Love Story - Johana Sinisalo (2024)
Laced through this story of a Finnish photographer finding and trying to care for the baby troll that upends his life are excerpts from the folklore, anthropology, and natural history books he reads while trying to understand the creature. This gives it a densely immersive anthology feel, a librarianish counterpoint to the fact that he really, really fucks. It’s sweaty and sensual with an air of chaotic menace to the point where I felt awkward reading it next to that sweet little old lady on the plane to Glasgow.
Pity - Andrew McMillan (2024)
A drag queen prepares for a show about Thatcher in a former pit town, while a sociology research team fail to understand its former miners, secrets and feelings compressed underground with the dead. A beautiful, taut little novel. I read this in a sitting, in a cottage in the Welsh countryside while rain lashed the windows and it was perfect.
There’s a lot packed in to about 250 pages. Little prose-poetic vignettes of memory as miners throng streets, using repeat rhythm to build toward the book’s emotional climaxes. Angles on identity. A negotiation of not just what place means, but how and for who. Cottaging in a thwarted shopping centre. Performance as identity as imposture as performance.
The best thing I read this year.
The Incandescent - Emily Tesh (2025)
"Blood! shrieked the photocopier. No representation without exsanguination!"
Yeah, I'm all in. Possessed office equipment, greater demons, Ofsted inspections, and office romance plague the Director of Magic at a fancy boarding school for wizards. It’s witty and charming, throws ideas around at eleventy billion kilometres per hour, and absolutely nails the malaise of waking up and realising you're stuck in midlife middle management after a feted youth. Not that I - look over there!
While there absolutely was a gap in the market for a book about a magical school, written by someone who doesn't think any woman failing to look like a nineteen fifties housewife should be branded a rapist and hounded from society, it's reductive to treat this as a breezy middle finger to Gender Karen. But golly, inasmuch as it is, it’s a good one.
The Tainted Cup - Robert Jackson Bennett (2024)
You can sort of picture Bennett chewing a pen, staring out of the window, musing over the outline for a promising alchemical (biopunk?) fantasy murder mystery, and drifting to "Ok, but what if Godzilla was there?"
And so it came to pass that the most fun thing I've read this year is a mystery caper, coyly winking to Holmes, set in a mystical empire built as a bulwark against the annual rainy season Kaiju attacks. Yes, that is a lot.
The sequel is good too, and I will absolutely read the third.
The rest
Not bad - although a couple of them, yikes 😬 - just not getting special mentions:
English Food - Diane Purkiss
Voyage of the Damned - Frances White
The Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman
Salt - Mark Kurlansky
The Boy and the Sea - Kirsty Gunn
Young Men in Love: New Romance - Anthology, ed. Joe Glass
The Restaurant at the End of the World - Oliver Gerlach (writer) Kelsi Jo Silva (artist) published in the US as Off Menu
Christopher Chaos (vol.1) - Tate Brombal (writer), Isaac Goodhart (artist), James Tynion (concept/creator)
The Premonition - Banana Yoshimoto
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
Butter - Asako Yuzuki
The Man Who Died Seven Times - Yasuhiko Nishizawa
Vianne - Joanne Harris
Whatever: or how junior year became totally f$@cked - S. J. Goslee
A Drop of Corruption - Robert Jackson Bennett
Shopping all the Way to the Woods - Rachel S Gross
Have You Eaten Yet - Cheuk Kwan
We Could Be Heroes - PJ Ellis
Katabasis - RF Kuang
Stone and Sky - Ben Aaronovitch
A Death on Location - The Reverend Richard Coles
Everything Not Saved - NMJ Coveney
In the Lives of Puppets - TJ Klune
I generally don’t include cookbooks, because I tend not to cover-to-cover them, but a shout out for Jay Rayner’s Nights out At Home, which is beautifully dip-in anecdotal alongside the recipes.
I’m not going to pick out the worst because it seems mean, but I am going to throw just a little shade:
The Late Buffy Award for Precipitous Franchise Decline goes to… Stone and Sky.
Still entertaining, and I’ll keep reading them if he keeps writing them, but I’m not sure that ensemble cast is quite landing and the attempt to replace Peter’s incredulous excitement in the first few with Abigail doing a sassier version of the same feels like it’s trying uncomfortably hard.Collecting the Ok, And All the Fuss Was About What, Exactly? Prize is… Katabasis.
It’s fine. Great moments. Beautiful imaginative engineering. Grabs your pen and highlights its own metaphors while looking you dead in the eye. Simultaneously too long and too short, given the way its attention is distributed. It is quite smart and complex, but it is first and foremost aesthetically quite smart and complex.Voted 2025’s Book Most Likely To Have Been Written As A Dare To See How Many Brexiters You Can Upset, it’s… Voyage of the Damned.
A full-spectrum progress flag cast in a murder mystery about how borders are an injustice that flow from oppressive racist and classists power structures, where the tubby kid learns to love himself along the way, and it’s fundamentally kind and really fun? Bravo. Tens! Tens across the board! Nearly made my pick of the year, tbh.
So that’s books. I’d like to have read more this year, but sometimes the brain just doesn’t brain real good. I’d have to really go some to beat 2021’s count of 52. Although since four of those were the Timewyrm arc of the Doctor Who New Adventures, for a podcast that didn’t ultimately happen, I’m not going to feel too bad.
Next year, I’m excited for: the third of the Bennett kaiju empire mystery capers, Daniel Aleman’s I Might Be in Trouble which I just didn’t get to this year, Harold McGee’s Nose Dive (same issue, also it’s massive), and whatever I snaffle at Thought Bubble, which I’ve promised myself I’ll go back to. I have given up hoping for a publication date for Alecto the Ninth.