Reading List 2025

Straight stats (j/k there were barely any straight books on this list) 

Total (physical) books: 20 

Total audiobooks: 135 

Total graphic novels: 10 

Total picture books: 3 

Altogether now: 168 

Hours listened: 1,375 aka 57 days (try that 1.25 speed, you might like it) 

Pages read: 7,483 

Biggest reading month: March, with 19 books. 

Tied for least reading, July and October. July was too hot, and October I had just started a new job. 

Big Genres: Mystery (47), Horror (25), Nonfiction (17), LGBTQ (11), Thriller (10)

Horror with a bullet, since 13 out of my 23 5-star books (and my fiction honorable mention!) are all horror. 

Even though they led with pure numbers only 4 mystery books ended up with 5 star from me, and three were from the same series.  I absolutely love the Karma series by Jonathan Ames, A Man Named Doll, Wheel of Doll, and Karma Doll. The other mysteries were mostly popcorn, crunchy, fun, forgettable. The 4th 5 star mystery will soon be a major motion picture, so check the header "Most likely to be ruined as a major motion picture" below to read more about that one. 

Notable authors 2025: 

Stephen Graham Jones - this brilliant human. He made me care about slasher movies, something I don’t understand or have any knowledge of. His horror is cerebral, full of building dread and at the same time literal visceral horror like when someone falls into a charnal pit filled with rotting animal offal. Surprisingly funny, too, like when a disgusting animal-man tries to scramble up on a couch, but it’s little legs are are too short. Maybe this one hits home because I often see Jelly try to scramble up onto the too-tall-for-her bedframe and while it makes me laugh, but also feel a pang for the pathos of the act. All the things we try and fail to do in this life. Get that metaphor a set of doggy stairs so it can get on the bed easier. 

Christopher Buehlman - the only author I have maybe ever read who gained a 1 star and a 5 star from me this year or maybe ever. I read Those Across the River first, it was disturbing, and probably not in the wishfully edgelord ways he wanted it to be. Set in the 20s or 30s, some good supernatural elements and a thick layer of the racism that felt contextually appropriate, but the author lingered on it in a way that made me feel voyeuristic and gross. Historical accuracy can feel like watching a car wreck, or an important and timely reminder of what bigotry leaves in its wake. This just felt ugly, and it was hard not to feel like the author was being rather casual about it. This was his first novel, so my guess is that he had an idea and not the ability to treat it with any nuance. There was this vampire book he wrote that had been recommended I think in the afterword of Buffalo Hunter, Hunter, and my respect for Stephen Graham Jones means I gave him a second chance). 

That second chance was The Lesser Dead - 5 stars! The grungy, sticky, loathsome unlives of a nest of vampires in scuzzy 1970s NYC. Visceral, you could feel the stink and the dank. Disgusting but believable details, like the vampires have bugs that crawl into their mouths and noses when they sleep during the day, because they are nice private little niches to live in. So, if you hide underground as a vampire you have to blow ants out of your nose every evening when you rise. So much for that glamorous and sparkly life. 

Shirley Jackson - this is hardly surprising and I am not breaking any new ground here. She’s awesome. I reread We Have Always Lived in the Castle and the Haunting of Hill House for my podcast, and need to get ahold of some of her other stuff, like Hangsaman this year. 

Hate reads is such an ugly term. Pest reads? 

When you know you're going to be mad about the thing, or annoyed, but you have to read it anyway. Looking at my friend who reads the ACOTAR books and has a group chat devoted to the things that exasperate her as she reads. Nothing so notable in this category as last years carcrash of an open marriage memoir, More, by Molly Roden Winter. That one still takes the cake for sighs-per-page ratio.

The only books that kind of hang out in this category are those written by Grady Hendrix. I still get an uneasy feeling that he hates his characters and wants them to suffer, because sometimes things go pointlessly badly for them. Maybe he just experiences empathy towards fictitious people in a drastically different way than I do. I know he has a podcast, so I'm somewhat tempted to listen to him talk and see if he's less... terrible than I fear. But it is kind of fun to have an enemy that one reads at least once a year, right? The premises, like always, were golden, My Best Friend's Exorcism is set in the 80s, and has a girl's best friend possessed by a demon, while they still have to do all the stuff like go through puberty and suffer in school. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is set in the type of place you get sent if you're a girl "in trouble" in the 1960s who has a family that can pay to hide you until you are no longer visibly pregnant and you can return to the trajectory of a successful young woman they expect. This book was clearly meticulously researched, I appreciate the light shed on the deep powerlessness felt by these young mothers. However, nothing fun or empowering comes from their dabbling in magic. The most fun I had was reading Horrorstör, a send-up of an Ikea knock-off big box store, but haunted. But every one of these damn books ended with a flash forward sequence that smacked of "help, I'm writing and I've fallen and I can't get out." Between his inability to finish a story  and the other bad vibes I should really stop reading his stuff. But the titles and premises sucker me in each time. 

The Worst Things I read

Only three books got ye olde 1 star stamp of shame from me this year. In my rating system it goes that I give 2 stars to books that were weak, dull, forgettable, they didn't leave me an impression. 1 star means the book was memorable enough to be considered objectively "bad." I have a lot of things that I give a 2 or 3 to because I recognize they just aren't written for me (see: almost any romantic book I read, unless it's a raunchy KJ Charles). 

This Book Will Bury Me - Ashley Winstead. A fictionalized story of the Idaho Murders, written and published with really gross, exploitative timing. I felt bad after reading it, but I had waded pretty deep before I realized what it was—a baaaarely fictionalized retelling, with a Mary Sue insert wannabe journalist. It feels really unethical to take advantage of this real-life horror to sell a book, when the tale is fresh enough in the headlines that when I did an online search just this minute there was a story from a mere 8 hours ago about the murderer's sister having some made a statement to the press. It seems like the author is a wannabe journalist who resorted to (barely) making up shit about a popular true crime story so the already obsessed rabid true crime fans would buy her garbage. Ew. Yuck. Gross. Yeah, I’ve got opinions. 

Hooked - Emily McIntire. This was bad, but I have less bile in my heart about it, it is close to getting the "not for me" tail pinned to its bad book rump. The premise is that it is a retelling of Peter Pan where Wendy hooks up with… well, you can guess from the title. But also absolutely nothing is at all like the story of Peter Pan, so what’s the point? “Dark romance” which felt like badly written fanfic. If I wanna wank I have better options. If I want romance I have better options. If I want Peter Pan fanfic I have better options! I think I was sick when I listened to this, and spent the day sleeping and waking to this one, so the audiobook reader must not have been too bad. Did anybody need this "dark" retelling where for some reason Wendy's dad is Peter? Bruh, what?  How does that even... nevermind. Some legit gory descriptions of cutting tongues out, but by the end of the book we are just totally cool with the horrific things Hook has done because love = perfect redemption. Forget all that stuff that was monsterous and murderous for personal gain. Sure, fine, whatever. Romance is weird. There were some arms deals, a club, a pointlessly rich (and emotionally traumatized) love interest, a stupid attempt at naming characters who didn't resemble or even serve the same point to the plot as the Lost Boys. I dunno what to say except this was a mess. 

And, as I wrote about above, Those Across the River. 

DNFs: 

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches - too cozy, where was the conflict? 

I Want to Die But I Still Want to Eat Tteokpokki - I started this the week the author's obituary came out, and it made my heart too heavy to continue. Life is too heavy a weight for some people. 

The Haunting of Room 904 - I just could not find momentum here. 

Portalmania - but I will go back and read the rest of this short story collection, for sure. The stories all had an odd sensibility, I loved the skewed world they were illuminating. One of my favorite covers of the year. This gorked out 1950s housewife is going to have a marvelous time in that portal, you can just tell. 

The Stars Too Fondly - or as I would have it, the stars, too cutely. Please roll my eyes back over to me, I think they fell out when I rolled them too hard in the first few chapter. What could have been a space adventure with a misfit group of friends was going to be a romance plot. I was surprisingly bothered by what was clearly going to be a romance between a flesh-and-blood woman and a hologram. Cute and queer. But too cute for me. 

The Angel of Indian Lake - Stephen Graham Jones. I messed up and read I Was a Teenage Slasher, thinking it was the second in the Indian Lake trilogy and then I started reading this one and it was the third in the series and I lost all steam. This was all my fault, not the book's. 

Black Ops and Beaver Bombs and The Axeman's Jazz -I moved a continent away from the library and had to return these books before finishing. D'oh. 

The New Life - Tom Crewe. I kind of want to give this one another go, maybe with the physical book instead of the audio. Why was this so off-putting? It started out with a lot of masturbation and shame, and felt very gay-man-gonna-have-a-real-bad-time, but not in a way that made me curious. 

False Bingo: Stories - Jac Jemc. Two things going against it, short story collection, and physical book, both of which made it hard for me to finish. I liked the author's sensibility and style with short fiction, though. 

The Fivers! 

Nonfiction 

Entangled Life - Merlin Sheldrake (also, check out his brother Cosmo Sheldrake's music. I would love to have dinner with the Sheldrake family). You will learn about mushrooms if you read this book.

Frostbite - Nicola Twilley.  Refrigeration and freezing technology and how they changed the food system and how and what we eat today. Some very interesting bits about the rather short lived history of the ice industry, including the ice storage industry and the ice supply chain. I'm glad I finally understand where the American obsession with having ice in their drinks. It was a more accessible luxury to all classes in the U.S than elsewhere in the world. Still, I can't tell you how nice it was to work in a hospital in New Zealand where we didn't even have an ice machine. Why would we need to? 

The Madman's Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History – Edward Brooke-Hitching. This book was gorgeous and fascinating, full of tidbits and trivia and incredible illustrations. Highly recommend you pore over a hefty copy of this and send me your favorite bits. 

Strong Female Character - Fern Brady. A powerful perspective from a fascinating brain. Warning, the audiobook is read by the author so it took me a few minutes to really tune my ear and brain to the thick Scottish accent. I had the dumbest thought when listening, that books need subtitles. Facepalm. Yes. 

Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II -  Abbott Kahler This is such a specific story of weirdos. German vegetarian philosophizers who move to an island of the Galapagos and continue to be weirdos but slowly sacrifice their high moral standards and have petty-AF fights with their neighbors. I can't even begin to get into how weird this was, they became hermit celebrities? It was super compelling. People will be people even at the end of the earth, and they will have property disputes as the world burns. 

Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections - Emily Nagoski. Practical advise for wtf to do when our bodies and brains seem to be against us. A good foundation in neuroscience and research told in a compelling way. 

Rest is Resistance - I read it January of 2025. That was a long, long, long, long time ago in political terms. This is a fucking marathon, so get your rest, and know that rest is part of the fight. 

Honorable Mentions for their beauty coffee table books: The Queer Arab Glossary and The Universe in 100 Colors. 

Tom O'Niell's Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties kept me sane while I spent hours and hours and hours and hours sanding years and layers and layers and years of paint off my back deck so I could refinish it properly. I also keep thinking about this book, not the true crime aspect nearly as much as the psy-ops and uncontrolled spending of the CIA. Good thing the 60s are long past, amiright? 

Most likely to be ruined as a major motion picture 

Three Bags Full - Leonie Swann.  A murder mystery told from the perspective of a flock of sheep. I appreciate that they are written from a kind of alien perspective, complete with their own sheepy kind of spirituality, including Sky Sheep and The Abyss. For some reason I don’t think that aspect will make it into a the movie version. When the best you can hope for is a voiceover? Lose hope. But it's a mystery, and an ensemble, so maybe I'll love it? Hugh Jackman, Emma Thompson, Julia Lous-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Patrick Stewart, Bella Ramsey, and Rhys Darby are going to be in it.  Some of them are going to be sheep. I won't tell you which ones. The name of the movie is The Sheep Detectives, because I guess not enough people could be trusted to know the nursery rhyme.

Best graphic novels 

Stop Looking at My Tiny Town non sequitor and absurdist humor. 

Ducks - Kate Beaton. A nuanced memoir of Kate's experience in the oil refinery camp towns in northern Alberta, a place that is disconnected enough from the rest of the world that it creates a kind of toxic culture all its own. Unfliching, and beautifully drawn

2120 - George Wylesol. What a fantastic conceit. I recommend this emphatically, an existential horror graphic novel that plays out as a choose your own adventure/puzzle game. Having your fingers in the book makes for a more intimate and visceral horror experience. Your agency by choosing the next step and the physical act of touching the book made for a more charged horror experience in a subtly disturbing way. The spare palette of ugly colors used in the illustrations (so much yellow, so much green) only underline the modern horror that is a corporate workplace. Devoid of art. Full of monsters. Yes, I had to cheat a few times to get past some of the puzzles and onto the next phase of the story. Shhhh. Don’t tell anybody.

And just as a little treat, I will tell you that Rhys Darby will be voicing a sheep, one of these long-haired fellahs:

By Jane Cooper Orkney - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45899869