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.