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2024 & 2025 in books
I return to work in an hour and a half (I'm not running late... yet), which is the real cutoff for New Year's navel-gazing, an activity I look forward to with relish. I've spent time with Year Compass, done my tarot spreads, etc and now I look back on the year in books, as well as the year ahead.
(I also made a playlist collecting some of my favourite music releases of 2024, which you may stream here.)
For an end-of-year social media meme that I never answered on the relevant platforms, I present NINE BOOKS I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO READING IN 2025 – determined by whether I already own them and where they're sitting in my TBR pile based on no rationale in particular:
- This World is Not Yours by Kemi Ashing-Giwa
- Saint Death's Daughter by C. S. E. Cooney
- Dehiscent by Ashley Deng
- The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
- Remnants of Filth vol. 5 by Meatbun
- Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
- The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei
- Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt
- You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue
I'm very much in the genre fiction headspace lately and my reading list reflects that. No doubt my actual reading trajectory will look different; so it goes.
I didn't review most of what I read last year, but some highlights:
- Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson: new-to-me Jackson; the strangest of her works I've read in terms of the disjunction between what I expected and what I got; this is my Secret History. The last ~30 pages haunt me.
- The Iron Children by Rebecca Fraimow: doing "cyborg nuns in space" with grace and gravitas that makes me ashamed to sum it up in such terms. A novella that takes on neither too much nor too little for its scope. It handles the dilemma of how to end proto-revolutionary SFF narratives without falling into Great Woman Of History traps (either played straight or deconstructed) in a deeply satisfying way; Frank Herbert who?
- The Imperial Uncle by Da Feng Gua Guo: while rife with danmei-typical issues (ambient background anti-Central Asian racism; dear god the treatment of female characters; some other, more nuanced and spoilery stuff), I rec The Imperial Uncle even to people who aren't "into danmei." I rarely feel a webnovel is expertly structured, despite other strengths a work may have, but within its <500 pages I was sent into jealous fits about the acrobatic feats DFGG performed in order to avoid giving the reader what they want. The final tableau is a cousin to the “Life is a series of closing doors, isn’t it?” scene from Bojack Horseman, with the aesthetic trappings of Mary Renault. Everything about it is made funnier by the fact that, unbeknownst to me until after I'd finished the book, it's a spinoff about a side character from The Mystery of Zhang Gong, the novel from which the drama A League of Nobleman is adapted. Prince Huai, the man that you are. CLEARLY I SHOULD JUST WRITE A REVIEW.
- The Lizard Club by Steve Abbott: a gift from a friend who knows my taste well; a trip through 1980s gay San Francisco inhabited by underground cabals of cannibalistic lizards in human form, published following Abbott's death from AIDS. I've already started lifting its structural moves for my own work.
- Transcending: Trans Buddhist Voices ed. Kevin Manders & Elizabeth Marston: a wide-ranging collection including writers born into Buddhist traditions, converts, and people who have since left the sangha. Notably more Chicken Soup for the Soul-adjacent than anything else on this list, but I cried enough times reading this that it has earned its place.
There's also the whole... relationship... I've had with Remnants of Filth, a webnovel that has taken up way too much mental real estate considering I cannot in good conscience recommend it, but I'm withholding judgement until the whole thing has been published.
Additional shoutout to Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, my first read of 2025, which I devoured. It's my first of Novik's published fiction I've read, and I'm not particularly drawn to her other titles, but this hit a spot for me, with that craving being a flavour of socially-awkward-immortal/epic-human-woman romance that ought to be easier to satisfy than it is. The prose is lovely. What quibbles I had with the novel were largely resolved by finding out after I'd already read it that it's YA, rather than adult fantasy. (Largely. Still annoyed at the treatment of the one [1] textually queer character in the story!)
Have you read anything on my TBR list? Do you have opinions? Share them!
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I really need to get my ass in gear and read The Iron Children, and I've just added The Lizard Club to my list, so thank you for that rec. <3
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Yup, sounds about right. On the topic of Orientalism, The Lizard Club has moments of white-leftist-author-doing-pomo-ironic-racism that I did not like, but are relatively marginal and pretty in kind with a lot of work of the era/milieu.
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On the other hand, there are some hints that perhaps they are deeply affected and the POV of the novel just doesn't allow that to be present. It's an interesting book, but it's also a little too... something. Can't quite put my finger on it, or at least, everything that occurs to me to say is perhaps too unkind, and I'm not quite sure enough of myself to be that mean.
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Hmmm. Good to know! I will keep my expectations calibrated accordingly. I don't ONLY like edgelord stuff, despite my online brand, but that kind of tonal mismatching has the potential to be a pet peeve, for sure. I look forward to comparing notes.
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I have not! Should I?
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I did not fact-check the claim that Spinning Silver is YA, just saw it in a random review somewhere and took it at face value because of confirmation bias. If it's in fact adult fantasy (which was my understanding while reading it) then I feel less generous about some of my criticisms, like that certain passages felt pat and twee and at odds with the rest of the novel's tone. Ditto with certain character relationships--and in fairness, there were a lot of balls to juggle there!--where I would have appreciated more chewy or nuanced dynamics than what we got.
Also, not to be That Person but I wanted the heat dial turned up a BIT. Like, not every story needs to be About Sex and I didn't expect E-rated ~spice~ but it felt notably tame in that regard for adult fantasy? Which I then interpreted as "oh, well, I guess it's to be expected from YA", but perhaps not...
All that said, I really did enjoy it and would recommend it. I've never been crazy about her fic (it's resoundingly... Competent!) so I was expecting to like it less than I did. (But this is also part of why I was kind of ??? about how demure it was wrt sex. Girl, I've seen your oeuvre! I know you have it in you!)
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I did have the thought while reading that I really need to get around to Sacha Lamb's work ASAP! I'll go add them to my ebook sales tracker...
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I also really loved The Imperial Uncle last year, and I think it was between you and one or two other people mentioning it, and the peach flower house closing sale, that put me onto it. But oh my god that side-character thing is really funny and I wouldn't have known if not for reading it here.
Also planning to start Remnants of Filth sometime in the near future, which is to say I've gone out of my way to get a hold of it and it's in my TBR pile. I've also had reservations based on my understanding of Meatbun's body of work, but the people who like it really make it sound good, but also also I've kept up with some of what you've said about it so. I guess I'll see for myself!
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