What are you reading in 2025?

[Richards]

I'm now reading Chuck Grossart's novel, The Gemini Effect. A mutated virus had gotten loose in Kansas City, and now mutated rats have slaughtered pretty much everyone in the vicinity, either slaying them and eating them or passing along the virus, which had proven its ability to leap across species and turn people into slavering monsters as well. Now it's up to the military to contain the infection, and a young scientist assigned for her expertise in nuclear/biological/chemical warfare might have the key to stopping the ongoing viral plague.

So far so good - even the chapters detailing the US President and his war cabinet trying to figure out what's happening and how to put an end to it are pretty compelling.

Johnathan

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Really digging it so far. I was a little worried at first that it would feel too sci-fi and not cyberpunk enough, but it's got grit and grime in spades.

Best use of cockroaches in any work of fiction, ever (not a spoiler, really - it's world-building)

 

[Retros_x]

I think there's a fine line between details that bring the world to life and just faffing around. Yeah, there are some phonebook novels that I love - Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell springs to mind.

I think when the faffing around is actually the point, like in Jonathan Strange, its fine (but still a matter of taste of course). The faffing around is fun in itself in these books. But if its done like in Stormlight Archive where its just meandering thoughts and dialogues that are just boring repetitions...

I was in Porto on vacation a few weeks ago, wanted an easy vacation read, and it was the obvious choice given that Rowling started work on it while she lived there, and there are all kinds of nods to the books throughout the city.

omg, I didn't knew that, but I remember when I was there so many young people running around in hogwarts outfits thinking there was a Harry Potter convention somewhere. This explains A LOT haha.

I was on vacation too and read two books by John le Carre, "A Murder for Quality" and "The Spy who came in from the Cold".
The former was a disappointment after the really intriguing first Smiley novel "Call for the Dead". I think the author described the book humble in his reflections 50 years later something like " a bad mystery with decent satire about the English school system. I think that is a fair assessment. The best part of the book is the author dunking on the school system in this afterword once again, this time as an old man in modern times. Its great.

"The Spy..." was absolutely fantastic! It increased the already bleak and oppressing atmosphere of the first Smily book and it delivers such a great narrative about the start of institutional bureacratic manipulation, betrayal of morality, muddling of ideologies in the early cold war. I loved the disillusioned main character Leamas and his personal revenge. I also absolutely loved the brutal and dark twist and the ambigous ending. There are hints and implications about the truth of Smileys last words and the last events happening but it is nowhere stated explicitly. Smiley is only a background character behind the scenes here, but he got sooooo intriguing as a character to me. The prose is great too, brief and precise but stimulating and evocative at the same time. The characterization is subtle and masterful. This is 100% my jam and I am so excited now for the rest of le Carres bibliography.

I've also read "Sixth of Crows" due to my SO recommending it 100x times to me - and I think I found it! I finally found the first YA-novel I actually liked. I tried several hyped YA books and basically did not finished a single one of them, but this one was actually good. Its a fantasy heist novel and it actually delivers on the heist (looking at you Sanderson...). The prose was simple, but sometimes a bit confusing - there were several times where I needed to read sentences multiple times because I did not understand the scene and what was happening especially in ways of spatial information. In general the plot is fun though and you don't need to read the Shadow and Bone books to understand what is happening (my SO said that these are not so good). The true strength IMO are the characters and their dynamics. They all have One Piece style tragic backstories, but have so fun interactions and dynamics, its just very entertaining to read and sometimes actually funny. I just enjoyed that a lot, good simple vacation read and I am definitely looking forward to the sequel.

And last but not least, thanks to this thread I bought and started "The Raven Scholar". While I don't found the tons of exposition as elegant as other people I was definitely very intrigued after one specific early chapter - readers probably know which one I mean. I like the writing apart from some unnecessary explanations that seem to be unavoidable in fantasy nowadays. I am very interested in the setting and the characters and really look forward reading this now.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think when the faffing around is actually the point, like in Jonathan Strange, its fine (but still a matter of taste of course). The faffing around is fun in itself in these books. But if its done like in Stormlight Archive where its just meandering thoughts and dialogues that are just boring repetitions...

Yeah I think there's a pretty huge difference between intentionally telling a long and meandering story, especially when it suits the personality of the age itself that it is about (as per Jonathan Strange), or the general vibe (as per Imajica), and just blathering on endlessly about basically nothing - and yes, worse, often repeating yourself (a flaw I share but like, I'm an idiot posting on the internet, I'm not a successful author with an editor). Stormlight could trivially be cut down by like 20-30% just be normal, sane editing, removal of pointless repetitions, and so on. More harshly you could probably condense the entire story down to about 30% as many words total, losing nothing plot, lore and character-wise and probably actually gaining a lot of emotional heft, if you were just a better, braver, more trusting of their audience and more precise writer than Sanderson is.

 

[jian]

Just read Sarah Beth Durst’s cosy fantasy The Enchanted Greenhouse, set in the same world as The Spellshop, and it’s a beautifully written and personal story about anxiety, fear, and overcoming them to do what’s right. The Spellshop was one of my favourite books last year and The Enchanted Greenhouse is a very worthy successor.

They’re also both very good models of how to do fantasy RPG campaigns with very little combat but a lot of adventure, which is great.

 

[Voadam]

I've also read "Sixth of Crows" due to my SO recommending it 100x times to me - and I think I found it! I finally found the first YA-novel I actually liked. I tried several hyped YA books and basically did not finished a single one of them, but this one was actually good. Its a fantasy heist novel and it actually delivers on the heist (looking at you Sanderson...). The prose was simple, but sometimes a bit confusing - there were several times where I needed to read sentences multiple times because I did not understand the scene and what was happening especially in ways of spatial information. In general the plot is fun though and you don't need to read the Shadow and Bone books to understand what is happening (my SO said that these are not so good). The true strength IMO are the characters and their dynamics. They all have One Piece style tragic backstories, but have so fun interactions and dynamics, its just very entertaining to read and sometimes actually funny. I just enjoyed that a lot, good simple vacation read and I am definitely looking forward to the sequel.

The fantasy heists was my favorite part of the netflix series.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Best use of cockroaches in any work of fiction, ever (not a spoiler, really - it's world-building)

Yeah, they're so gross, but their place completely fits in the worldbuilding.

I think when the faffing around is actually the point, like in Jonathan Strange, its fine (but still a matter of taste of course). The faffing around is fun in itself in these books. But if its done like in Stormlight Archive where its just meandering thoughts and dialogues that are just boring repetitions...

Huh. That's pretty darn accurate. When those details are the plot, that's one thing. When they distract and delay, that's when you start running into problems.

 

[Autumnal]

Random Catch-up Time! I’m at 31/100 for a read-what-you-own challenge and am enjoying it.

Ronald Malfi: been meaning to get to him for years, and now I’ve read two of his, Black Mouth and Bone White. Both were superb. More of his work is in the queue. Wow. He’s got an amazing specificity in his descriptions that makes everything feel familiar even though it isn’t. I especially liked Bone White, in which a man comes from back. east to see if one of the victims of a self-confessing serial killer in Alaska might be his missing twin brother. Complications ensue, mostly ones I didn’t expect at all, and it’s hard to really surprise a hardcore horror junkie coming up on 60.

Horus Heresy #1-5. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m having fun so far. I’ll stop, or rather skip very selectively, when I don’t.

Rhetorics of Fantasy, by Farah Mendelssohn. I wanted so much to like this. But it leaves at least one major term undefined - “I’m using this in John Clute’s sense” isn’t enough. (And I know who Clute is and have read a bunch of his stuff, just not the relevant essay.) and it makes some distinctions I find hard to interpret as actually meaning anything that the author like these stories more than those. I’ve read enough of that from S.T. Joshi and others. So I stopped.

The Rebel, by Albert Camus. I’ve read parts of this several times, but not all at once. Edoardo Ballerini reads the audio version, and he’s just amazing. Camus didn’t sound like this when reading his own material, but he could have. The voice is smooth and collected, yet capable of great passion when it’s called for. This is a book about rebellion in the face of human and cosmic injustice, and is really, really relevant. Fantastic stuff.

Current reading:

Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire, by Peter H. Wilson. As advertised. It’s interesting to read about a path of social and political development that left basically no contemporary legacy. (Though there is some fascinating discussion of possible lessons from the Empire for the European Union.) it’s easy to take common features of a system as innate, but the Empire reminds me that relatively recently, people did something that was very different than nation-states for their politics, and that worked for quite a while. (And arguably fell for reasons nothing like fundamental to their political configuration.) Someday someone’s going to write a fantasy continent with its version of the Empire, and I’ll be glad.

To Turn Back Time, by S.M. Stirling. This is practically perfect nerd-nip. Four American grad students and a professor, all specialists in Roman history, are zapped without preparation from a slightly alternate 2032 to the spot that will become Vienna but in AD 165 is Roman frontier. They also have a literal ton of supplies, but the local who recruited them died in transit - they left literally the same second a fusion bomb went off over Vienna as part of a global thermonuclear war breaking out. So here they are.

What’s great is that they are all nerds. They read Lest Darkness Falls when younger; they’ve seen Gladiator and Conan movies from a 2029 adaptation of Stirling’s Blood of the Serpent back to Arnie’s movie take. They have good values and make sensible plans, and run into interesting complications and failures. They find the past in accordance with a bunch of cool scholarship, and fun differences between the realities and the best guesses. This is a book about my people and I am glad. It’s the first of a trilogy and I expect to enjoy them all.

 

[Retros_x]

Stormlight could trivially be cut down by like 20-30% just be normal, sane editing, removal of pointless repetitions, and so on. More harshly you could probably condense the entire story down to about 30% as many words total, losing nothing plot, lore and character-wise and probably actually gaining a lot of emotional heft, if you were just a better, braver, more trusting of their audience and more precise writer than Sanderson is.

I think Sanderson have become too successful to edit. He either doesn't listen/trust his editors or they don't dare too much and/or are yes-men. Because these weaknesses are common critique of his books a lot of people seen this, every experienced editor has seen these weaknesses, I am 100% sure of that.

I am really curious how bad "Wind and Truth" will be, appereantly even many diehard fans critique this book as too long and having too much padding. But I will read the complete series anyway. Its on the one hand an sort of academic curiosity - he is one of the most successful fantasy writers at the moment. But I also still enjoy his books besides the glaring weaknesses. There is still a great plot, exciting action, nice character moments etc. There are just padded so much. I think what makes me most mad is the missed potential. With better editing these could've been so good.

 

[TheSword]

I decided to go back to my childhood and re-read the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett. I had forgotten how formative they were about my concept of fantasy. I finished Colour of Magic and Light fantastic and now onto Equal Rites which is so funny and provocative. It also introduces Granny Esmeralda Weatherwax one of the best characters in any fantasy series.