What are you reading in 2025?

[Sacrosanct]

Finished re-reading the original Dragonlance Chronicles along with the Lost Chronicles trilogy. The first two books was pretty easy, as they took place in between Dragons of Summer Flame and Dragons of Winter Night respectively. But the third (Dragons of the Hourglass Mage) took place at the same time as Dragons of Spring Dawning, so there was a lot of back and forth between the two.

Now I'm on to something completely different: I'm reading several Agatha Christie books on my slate.

 

[Jahydin]

Finally finished Don Quixote, just under the wire for 2025.

Awesome! I have three for this year: Paradise Lost (my favorite book, but can't seem to finish it...), LotR (movies were so good, I've put off reading the actual book), and Alien Clay (my first sci-fi book!).

A lot of pop culture needs to be audience tested less, but this is one where in addition to an editor, someone needed to sit down and ask Cervantes whether he wanted the audience to like Don Quixote or not, because Cervantes is all over the place on this. I think modern audiences would mostly be on Quixote's side, in the way that we like the well-meaning but at times delusional characters on Parks & Rec.

I liked that it was left up to the reader to decide if aimless heroism is admirable. For me, it certainly makes me pause and evaluate if I am "charging at windmills" whenever I go on a tear.

As I finished it, though, I realized there's probably enough stuff in the implied setting that Don Quixote believes in to add up to a slim Shadowdark zine, so I might do that. Obviously, it's a job better handled by a Castilian speaker, creating something similar to Brancalonia, but hopefully me cranking out six to eight pages of Quixote-inspired stuff won't offend the native speakers too badly.

Cool idea. Hope you share it here when you're done!

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I'm reading The Waves at Genji's Door: Japan Through Its Cinema by Joan Mellen. My son found it at a used bookstore and got it for me as a Christmas gift, knowing I love samurai movies (and kaiju movies, but this book doesn't address those). So far it's a little dry, but I'll give it a chance - at worst, I'll just skim until I hit the samurai movie bits.

Johnathan

Oh, I like books on Japanese Cinema, or at least, it's an area I'd like to read more about. Any other recommendations?

 

[Richards]

Alas, this is my first book on Japanese cinema as a whole. If you're into kaiju movies, last year my boys got me Godzilla FAQ by Brian Solomon - that was a pretty good read. And i can recommend The Official Godzilla Compendium by J. D. Lee and Marc Cerasini.

Johnathan

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Just finished Tales from Earthsea, which only looks like an anthology. It's actually telling a pretty coherent story about how the School at Roke came to be and how wizard culture got so screwed up (it was screwed up almost from the start, but like the Jedi Council, everyone insisted all was fine until it was too late to pretend otherwise). It also absolutely tees up The Other Wind.

I've got no idea what LeGuin has in mind for the last novel of Earthsea (beyond the stuff set up in Tehanu and continued here), but I'm excited to finally read it in the new year.

I regret sleeping on the final three Earthsea books so long. These are as great as any fantasy novels ever.

 

[jian]

Moderation by Elaine Castillo is a lovely book; I didn't think I would really like it, but I do, and not just because it's the book that pushed me across the 300 line for this year (I didn't think I'd make it). It starts with our protagonist Girlie, a hard-as-nails Filipina-American who's one of not-Facebook's best moderators who does a very tough job as well as possible to pay off her family's gigantic property-related debt after 2009. So far, so grim. But the story takes a sci-fi and romantic turn when she's headhunted to moderate not-Meta's newest venture, a VR theme park run by not-Le-Puy-du-Fou using software developed by William, a Chinese-English guy who's clever, hot, and anxious.

I learned a fair bit about various things from Moderation - Filipino-American culture, the scanty evidence that VR can have some neuroplasticity effects (the VR in the book is of course much more advanced than in our world and is much more effective in this regard, and it seems likely that not-Le-Puy-du-Fou is interested in the brainwashing applications), social media moderation, Goldilocks Bake Shop, and of course Le Puy du Fou - and it's clever and charming throughout. It does have a satisfyingly mushy ending, too. Highly recommended.

(For those who don't know - Le Puy du Fou is France's third most popular theme park and is focused on history and European nationalism. It's got a franchise in Spain and planning to have one in England built by 2029. The company has ties to Rassemblement National, of course.)