What are you reading in 2025?

[Autumnal]

Grover Gardener’s reading of The Stand is really, really good. Among other things, he does the whole spread of accents from East Texas to California to Nebraska to Maine. He’s equally good at the spread of emotions from tremendous joy to consuming fear and despair. Short of something like the full-cast audio version of World War Z, this really is about as good as a dramatic presentation of a work of fiction gets.

The Stand

Check out this great listen on Audible.com. This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of...

www.audible.com

Anyone else want to recommend some audio excellence?

 

[jian]

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin is beautifully written and is spot on about how being an immigrant can feel - like a ghost in your new home, knowing that nobody knows who you are here or cares, not knowing why you’re here at all - but it’s also from the POV of the most passive and unthinking protagonist I’ve ever encountered. It’s a weird combination but I’m told the sequel is better.

 

[Elodan]

Realized I haven't posted since Jan 1. Here's what I've read so far this year.

Konosuba: Light Novels 1 and 2, Manga Vol 1
- Loved the anime and loving the novels and manga. Each give a different and fun angle to the story.

Eminence in Shadow through Vol 12.
- Fun series. The premise and main character crack me up.

Solo Leveling through Vol 12.
- Volume 13 (the final) on its way. Would have liked more character development.

Thieves' World Books 7 - 12; various
- As with all anthologies, stories were pretty hit or miss. I did think the series came back after a book 6 that has me almost give up on the series. Ended was more hopeful than I expected.

Invincible through Vol 10.
- Great series.

Candle and Crow (Ink & Sigil series), Kevin Hearne
- Good ended to a decent series.

A Tide of Black Steel, Anthony Ryan
- One of my current favorite fantasy authors.

Running with the Deity (Pip and Flinx series), Alan Dean Foster
Trouble Magnet (Pip and Flinx series), Alan Dean Foster
- Fun series. Stories are getting a little repetitive.

Stories of the American Revolution, Thomas Fleming

Five Broken Blades, Mai Corland
- Enjoyed, going to pick up the next in the series.

Left-Handed Booksellers of London, Garth Nix
Sinister Booksellers of Bath, Garth Nix
- Didn't realize this was a YA series when I picked it up. Enjoyable.

Memories Legion, James S A Corey
- Expanse short stories. Good stuff.

Children of Dune, Frank Herbert
- Things are starting to get weird.

The Holy Terrors, Simon R Green
- Simon has a template for his series now. Characters and story were interesting.

Foundation and Earth, Isaac Asimov
- I enjoyed the character interactions.

Game Wizards, Jon Peterson
- Great history on the early history of D&D and TSR. Peterson tries to get to clever with his writing.

The Icarus Twin, Timothy Zhan
- Enjoyable. Will continue the series.

Eye of the World, Robert Jordan
- I typically pass on novels over 500 pages as I feel most get too meandering. I'm not a purple prose fan. Good story in a book that feels like the 800 pages it takes up. Most likely going to pick up the next book. Iffy on the series.

Empire of Silence, Christopher Ruocchio
- Another 800 pager. Never felt like like a long book as the story kept me hooked. When I was done, I realized I kept reading in the hopes something interesting was going to happen. Not going to pick up the next one.

All Fun and Games (Case Files of Henri Davenforth series), Honor Raconteur
- One of my guilty pleasure series. An FBI detective is kidnapped by a witch and brought to a world when magic is real. She ends up working with a magical examiner at a local police station. A combo of Sherlock Holmes and a romance.

The Infernus Gate (The Seven Swords series), Anthony Ryan
- Good conclusion to the series, seven novellas in total.

Rapport, Martha Wells
- Somewhat disappointing. No Murderbot but rather a side adventure with Peri the sentient ship.

Currently reading Harbinger of Justice (Shadowbinders series) by Andrew Watson.
- Good start to the series.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

After having it in my library for many years, I'm finally digging into Gibson's Neuromancer.

 

[prabe]

I've read his Kane stories, but have slept on his horror works until now.

Somewhere I have "Sticks" anthologized. Find that and read it. (I can poke around and find out where I have it, if you need.)

 

[Mistwell]

Just finished reading Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson. Great old fantasy book that was direct inspiration for some of what ended up in AD&D 1e. Trolls, Nixies, Law vs Chaos, bunch of other stuff pulled directly from this book. A fun, older read similar to Vance.

 

[gban007]

Just started reading the Fifth Season by N.K.Jemison, been on my to read list for a while but also found out been mixing it up with A Memory Called Empire, so another one I'll have to read at some point too.

 

[overgeeked]

I started reading Perry Rhodan #1 for the third or fourth time. The English translations only go up to #150 or so. Here's to hoping my German dramatically improves in the next few years or someone decides to buy the English rights to the...checks notes...about 3341 novels published so far...just for the main series.

I just finished this. It only took me 1.6 hours to read. It also took me almost a week to get that 1.6 hours. Man I hate my brain sometimes.

Great yarn. Very 1950s or 1960s pulp sci-fi. The fancy new US spaceship crashes on the moon. The crew meets the decedent descendants of an alien empire who’ve lost the will to innovate. They spend all day staring at screens and listening to music instead of living. The US commander, Perry Rhodan, hatches a plan to save the aliens, save the Earth, and get the crew home.

It’s very early sci-fi and German. Lots of focus on square-jawed heroes and technical details. In all a great yarn to start the longest-running sci-fi franchise in history.

 

[Autumnal]

I’ve never read any of those. Adding it to my long-term list. Sometimes I’m really up for that kind of retro.

 

[jian]

Finished The Payback by Kashana Cauley, which is a pleasantly intense book set in an alternate dystopian US (LA, really) where rather than ICE randomly beating up and detaining immigrants, you have debt police randomly beating up and detaining people in debt (mainly educational debt). There’s a lot of good stuff there, not least the observation that black women are the group most likely to have significant educational debt in the US (and thus to get regularly and legally brutalised by debt police “as a warning”in this setting), and that our society uses debt to make extortion a moral issue. It does feel slightly overtaken by real world events in the dystopia stakes, though.

Currently reading Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell and enjoying it greatly. It’s crossing wires in my head about a Legend & Lore focused OSR-style game I’ve been thinking of where the PCs end up beating the Tartarus out of Zeus. Though my game idea also has the complication that Zeus has secretly replaced Odin and Thor (nailing up both Norse gods on a mountain somewhere) in order to postpone Ragnarok.