Novel Reading: Looking Backward and Forward
Closing the book on 2025 and starting a new page for 2026.
2024 was the year of long books. I read way less than twenty, if memory serves, but they were all epics. I tried to fix that in 2025 and had set the goal to read 25 books. I fell just short at 23. There was one book I got halfway through and quit on, and another that I was halfway through when the ball dropped, so let's say I read 23 and two half books. Here's the full list of my reading exploits from last year (in the order I read them):
I did a little breakdown of my favorites and the genres I frequent most:
The Tainted Cup, which I wrote about once already was my far-and-away favorite. The world, the complex characters, the mystery: it was all like nothing I'd ever read before and I was completely hooked from start to finish. The fight scene juxtaposed with the training flashbacks was something I read more than once and would like to study it more. What a masterwork. The Potter of Bones was the biggest surprise. I didn't expect to my completely enchanted by a twenty-year-old novella about aliens discovering the theory of evolution. James, of course. How could you not admire that? A Sorceress Comes to Call definitely had me wanting to read more T. Kingfisher and after Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Zevin is becoming one of my favorite authors as well.
In 2026, I'd like to find time to read more... but we'll see what happens. I'm not going to kick myself or do anything to make reading less fun. I just started Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist and was thinking that maybe I could try to read first books by authors I like in January. Maybe Player Piano and Setting Loose the Bears. Maybe in February I'll tackle a sequel (I have a couple friends insisting I read the follow-up to Three-Body).
Other loose goals include reading the last book in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (finally) and doing another Dickens (I think I've read a Dickens every year for the last few years).