2025 was a better year for reading than many a recent one. Though I didn’t get through as many as I’d have liked to, I think I have to accept that I literally never will! I did manage 24 novels or non-fiction. Not quite one-every-two-weeks but for fairly arbitrary reasons I didn’t include graphic novels. They’d have definitely bumped up my score.
I also read more books by women than men. This shouldn’t really feel like a massive achievement but I was surpised by how it did take a bit of effort - deliberately pushing a book to the front of the queue here and there.
The full list is available over here. What follows are a few of my favourite discoveries of the year. There were a few re-reads (JG Ballard’s Cocaine Nights, Susanna Clark’s Piranesi) which I love, but don’t feel the need to feature here. These are new-to-me books and authors that I really enjoyed.
I read The Perfect Golden Circle right at the start of the year and really enjoyed it, but Beastings was something else. It’s brutal, bleak, gruesome. Described as a frontier Western set in Cumbria, it’s an astonishing short book. You can almost feel the lashing rain and smell the animals. Fantastic.
Just about as close to the League of Gentlemen as a novel can get. Without the jokes. Deeply weird, gothic vibes and a tale of murder and suspicion. Would recommend to anyone.
It really was a year for the brooding and weird. In the same vein, this is a small and powerful story, of a creepy house and some creepy family. Full of gloom but with a real sense of humour too.
A zombie romp set around a drag club night in Brooklyn. It’s a well made, well paced one. Having been very into zombie films for a long time its a while since I’ve seen one, and this is knowing, funny and silly, but places the zombie element with sincerity.
There are some very funny set pieces, weapons you might not expect, and it’s all round a decent little zombie film. Nice.
A very Werner Herzog film. Is it about looking for elephants? Or about the very act of looking for things? Or about obsession? Or about mankind’s inability to live in harmony with nature? Or all of the above?
It’s a powerful film, with some jaw dropping scenery, some glorious wildlife, and a lot about the humans of the story - their different backgrounds, their hopes, their fears.
The journey itself sounds completely insane - 1000 miles across almost untrodden ground in pursuit of some very big elephants. They’re all quite mad, but I enjoyed watching their madness.
The wonderful Carmen Maura is a retired widow, living alone in the bustling city of Tangiers. Her daughter, keen to make money by selling the house, pushes her out and starts a sequence of events that are all about finding community and conversation and purpose.
It’s a small film in its way. But its an absolute joy to watch Maura pottering through the city, coming up with schemes and badmouthing those who wrong her to a silent nun.
An interesting counterpart to the Blue Trail which told a story of an older woman lead, muscled out of her routine by her daughter, forging her own path (in a very different way!).
Quite good fun. It’s basically Russian Doll meets Day of the Triffids. A Groundhog day scenario playing out over and over again, every time the character dies. And there are some giant plant monsters which do seem quite intent on making that happen.
It’s well put together, has some pretty cool scenes and builds the fairly familiar repeating day theme nicely.