I read more books this year than I did during the first twenty years of my life, maybe fifteen of which were spent meaningfully endowed with a capacity for words:

I read a lot of good books, several woefully mid books or outright bad books, and one or two exceptional books. This post is something of the "year in review" for the literacy effort, backed with some fun statistics sourced from my reading list, charting where my curiosities took me this year, forecasting where they might be better spent next year, and also slicing and dicing some genres in ways that might tickle your fancy SINCE finding good recommendations is really hard.

In particular, one of my favorite "sub-genres" of books this year were oftentimes the same one's whose plots I struggled to describe in a way which would motivate anyone to want to read them. "Cozy," "texture," and "<novel narrative device>," have become descriptors which fail me in adequately capturing what about them makes them good. So in this listicle, I'm probably not going to spend as much glyph-capital on plot since GR/Tik Tok/YouTube/your friends are better equipped along just about every axis to recommend things that way.

How to get your friends to read good books

A preferred framework through which I like to categorize stories (so, this excludes non-fiction), is into the Punnett square pivoted by simplicity & Complexity. This paradigm insists that there are just four kinds of story:

1. Complex story told in a Simple way,
2. Complex story told in a Complex way,
3. Simple story told in a Simple way,
4. Simple story told in a Complex way,

And I think my enjoyment of fiction decreases down the list, though 2 and 3 are oftentimes interchangeable, and some of my all time favorite's are category 4 – but there's is nothing more literarily insufferable than an author trying to convince you how smart he or she is about something which is not all too complicated to begin with for dozens/hundreds of pages at a time. Because of how difficult it is to pull this off well, I rank it last.

As with any sort of lens through which we might forcibly interpret all of fiction, this is obviously reductive and insufficient. But it's an easy heuristic which, when joined with another data point like a quantitative rating, is usually more indicative of why a book which eludes motivating description is still good. A couple notes to further instruct what each quadrant means:

• The Bible is obvious not easy to read, but –with many exceptions– the style is straightforward, or perhaps was at the time. Kind of hard to say since it is the benchmark against which so much of everything in all of human culture is measured. To say that it "makes sense" is to dismiss how it forms the basis of what makes sense in the realm of books. Simple sentences, not a lot of difficult rhetoric. Its complexities are born out of its content and the subsequent interpretation of that, and the stylistic technicalities are strictly a product of the complexity of the plot. No one would be splitting hairs about translations if they were not wholly incidental to the plot.
• To use Go, Dog, Go! as an example of Simple/Simple might seem condescending, but I couldn't be bothered to search for the quintessential example of "highbrow" literature to demonstrate what is meant by the most intuitive square. Sure, childrens' books often fall into this category, but that does not preclude great literature from existing here. James Clavell's Asian Saga also falls here: a straightforward narrative built largely on dialogue and navigable imagery. The appreciation of such books is limited only by the reader's interest in the subject matter rather than extant encyclopedic knowledge of esoterica or domain knowledge.
• The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner is my headcanonical example of a simple story told in a complex way and it's basically universally acclaimed by people who's opinions are worth putting stock into in the way of literature.
  • "oh, but peter, by applauding TSatF aren't you implicitly hoisting yourself onto the same pedestal of people who's opinions matter?" yes.
  • Before qualifying how I'm structuring the review much further, I will disclose the high level quantitative evaluation of what I read this year which should give a strong impression of whether or not you will care about what I have to say about anything.
• Lastly, it's kind of hard to pin down what constitutes a "complex" plot without offending my past or present sensibilities, let alone yours. The degree to which a story is encumbered by characters, details, and intricate plotlines – the amount of mental bandwidth it requires to keep a story straight in my head without feeling like I'm spending more time worrying about enjoying the story than just enjoying the story is how I would measure complexity. Maximalist books almost certainly fall into this category, though many-a-tome are just long (and become complex as a function of the author's refusal to conclude any plotlines) without demonstrating any affinity for higher-minded techniques like I don't know man, if you revealed that this whole thing was an allegory 600pp in I might be made less annoyed by how long this book is. Thomas Pynchon owns this quadrant. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bolaño, etc. Books in these quadrants need not be super long, but often times the ones that I read were. Selection bias at play for sure. Borges is probably the master of this in the short form.

Who am I to say what a 'good book' is?

As promised, statistics for 2025:

Not much drama, romance, or history at the top (outside of a very narrow corridor *cough* LBJ *cough*), and this is pretty representative of the broader direction of preferences in the past few years as well.

DFW, Milton, Caro, Stephenson, Pynchon, Selby Jr., and Steinbeck being the handful of authors of whom I've read more than a couple of their books and all of whom "earned" 8+ average ratings, which I'm stingy with. Historical scores are approximately normally distributed about the mean rating of 7.232, which, when normalized maps, to a 6.925 (so I'm 0.3 points more lenient than I ought to be, relative to the subjectively harsh ratings I dole out to other books):

The obvious gaps in continuity show my tendency to round to the nearest quarter point. The freaky decimals in the underlying spreadsheet almost exclusively come from books whose composite scores are averaged across their constituent parts if the author had been thoughtful enough to partition it so, because how the hell else would one land on a "9.083/10" score (Fifth Head of Cerberus, 1972. p good u should check it out). This is not olympic diving.

Okay, so if none of that tickles your fancy and you don't think you'll be convinced in a thousand more words, I will not be offended.

Lit Fic / Texture / Cozy

After puzzling over how to describe these books I realized I just discovered the "literary fiction" genre from first principles. The subcategorizations I found interesting and worth highlighting were:

• Books that sound boring when describing them to a friend but are good, actually
• Breath of Stale Air
• Apostasy

Books that sound boring when describing them to a friend but are good, actually

Stoner by John Williams is very much a book for people who like books. It's about a boring dude and his boring farm life and his boring academic job which takes him off the beaten path of what men in his family are supposed to do as evidenced by what they'd been doing since the dawn of time: tending their land, rearing some ungrateful dustbowl spawn, and then dying upset with the fact that they wound up being just like their fathers with little to show for it (love the trope of "i will not become my father" though this book is about what happens if u actually don't. East of Eden is the textbook example of this theme and it rules). This is Simple/Simple. While the rhetoric is not absent whatsoever: Stoner is an English professor and we read the book from his over the should POV, after all.

Such a limiting may seem foolishly rigorous to some of you; but I have no doubt that we shall find enough to keep us occupied even if we trace only superficially the course of the trivium upward into the sixteenth century. It is important that we realize that these arts of rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic meant something to a late medieval and early Renaissance man that we, today, can only dimly sense without an exercise of the historical imagination. To such a scholar, the art of grammar, for example, was not merely a mechanical disposition of the parts of speech. From late Hellenistic times through the Middle Ages, the study and practice of grammar included not only the ‘skill of letters’ mentioned by Plato and Aristotle; it included also, and this became very important, a study of poetry in its technical felicities, an exegesis of poetry both in form and substance, and nicety of style, insofar as that can be distinguished from rhetoric.

It does the good thing of making you feel smart alongside him instead of patronized by him/Williams. The most significant action that occurs is family/domestic drama, but this is underplayed and taken in stride as Stoner solidifies himself as a distant, withdrawn academic. The texture of this book is what makes it good rather than any individual scene or payoff. The chapter where he delivers a lecture on rhetoric, though, is really good as a standalone.

Similarly, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera took me by surprise for reasons which did not sound compelling or pleasant even really to me as I heard the endorsement flowing from my own trap to my friends. Unlike Stoner, which I've seen on display at every bookstore I've stepped foot in in recent memory, I had never heard of this book or its author until I cracked it open. I think I added it to my TBR list off a listicle similar to this one I'm now writing. Great pull @Ben Roth whomever you are.

Tomas, who had spent the last ten years of his medical practice working exclusively with the human brain, knew that there was nothing more difficult to capture than the human I. There are many more resemblances between Hitler and Einstein or Brezhnev and Solzhenitsyn than there are differences. Using numbers, we might say that there is one-millionth part dissimilarity to nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine millionths parts similarity.

Tomas was obsessed by the desire to discover and appropriate that one-millionth part; he saw it as the core of his obsession. He was not obsessed with women; he was obsessed with what in each of them is unimaginable, obsessed, in other words, with the one-millionth part that makes a woman dissimilar to others of her sex. (Here too, perhaps, his passion for surgery and his passion for women came together. Even with his mistresses, he could never quite put down the imaginary scalpel. Since he longed to take possession of something deep inside them, he needed to slit them open.)

We may ask, of course, why he sought that millionth part dissimilarity in sex and nowhere else. Why couldn't he find it, say, in a woman's gait or culinary caprices or artistic taste?

To be sure, the millionth part dissimilarity is present in all areas of human existence, but in all areas other than sex it is exposed and needs no one to discover it, needs no scalpel. One woman prefers cheese at the end of the meal, another loathes cauliflower, and although each may demonstrate her originality thereby, it is an originality that demonstrates its own irrelevance and warns us to pay it no heed, to expect nothing of value to come of it.

Only in sexuality does the millionth part dissimilarity become precious, because, not accessible in public, it must be conquered. As recently as fifty years ago, this form of conquest took considerable time (weeks, even months!), and the worth of the conquered object was proportional to the time the conquest took. Even today, when conquest time has been drastically cut, sexuality seems still to be a strongbox hiding the mystery of a woman's I.

So it was a desire not for pleasure (the pleasure came as an extra, a bonus) but for possession of the world (slitting open the outstretched body of the world with his scalpel) that sent him in pursuit of women.

This is another drama of characters whose affairs, –at first, and at least as far as we seem to ought to care about them– seem largely unrelated to any action surrounding them in their environment. The first half of the novel is a romance drama, and the second half is the same romance drama but now with the implications of the Prague Spring in 1968 Czechoslovakia. It features one of the zaniest philosophical introductions of any non-philosophically-presenting book I've ever read, and Kundera deftly revisits those intellectual themes while intertwining the characters' plot lines together. The philosophy in question being the intersection between (6th century BC) Parmenides's aim to partition everything along a binary spectrum (hot/cold, good/evil, light/dark, etc.), and Nietzsche's idea about infinite recurrence wherein permanent things become dull and germane because of their inevitability, and ephemeral & transient things are weightless and novel. The novel asks the question which thing is positive or negative: weightlessness or lightness. It is such a complete story, filled with immense texture, philosophy, linguistics, politics, drama, love, and meta-fiction. It perfectly fits the bill of a dull book too - no individual chapter (barring maybe three: sexual encounters, police state interviews, Cambodian marches) are gripping in isolation, but together the movements of the novel they paint are matched by few other books I've read.

Shifting gears, Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov was my favorite of his other than Pale Fire. Having become something of a Nabokovian scholar this past year, I feel equipped to back that up and defend its supremacy over his other, more popular novels. Lolita is great, I didn't care for Ada (simple story told in a complex way), and Pale Fire is top 5 of all time. If you like Nabokov, start here. If you don't know whether or not you like Nabokov, start with either of the aforementioned. If you know that you don't like Nabokov, thanks for entertaining this. Transparent Things one of his darker novels:

Crumbling partitions of plaster and wood allowed human cries to reach him, and one of his last wrong ideas was that those were the shouts of people anxious to help him, and not the howls of fellow men.

and appropriately then also one of his funnier stories:

it was explained to him that in strangling a young adult one of two methods was commonly used: the amateurish, none too efficient, frontal attack, and the more professional approach made from behind.

Like Stoner, this is a book for people who like books, and maybe even a step further: a book for people who are in the industry of reading/writing books. Many of Nabokov's novels are semi-autobiographical to the extent that they focus on Russian/European émigrés, oftentimes authors or people who are in some way themselves struggling to tell a story. This is that: the protagonist Hugh is an author, the other main character aside from his wife Armande is another author who goes by R. Nabokov's own literary vicissitudes at various points in his career are expressed through both Hugh and R.:

“I have been accused of trifling with minors, but my minor characters are untouchable, if you permit me a pun.”

and a tragic, indeterminate ending.

Will and Testament would probably be easier to pitch to any enthusiast of "dark" stories, it's perhaps the least dull & bookish of the books present in this category, but is still lit-fic which scratched that itch for me. In a vacuum, I think this book is a low-middling seven. Nothing about it is bad, but some the characters are frustrating in ways that don't quite make sense narratively in the story which unfolds through memory sequences about the present issue relating to the family's inheritance/estate dispute. The elder two of four siblings try to navigate estrangement and the dispute which arises when the younger two sisters seem to conspire with the mother to cut the elder two out of the significant portion of the titular Will which takes the form of two cabins representing the most significant and sentimental portion of the family's estate. Bergljot proves to be not an unreliable narrator per se, but one who anxiously processes emotions out of order. In this sense, reading this book is like peeling back layers of an onion as we skip around chronologically to various punctuating points in her life which in turn explain her complicated emotions towards her siblings and her inheritance. Our confusion is a reflection of her confusion symptomatically mirroring the behavior of someone with PTSD who grieves alternate scenarios (whether they're nightmares or fantasies) of lived tragedies. The revelation that something more is obviously going on at the story level is accomplished satisfyingly through the cues of Bergljot's diction which reverts to deer-in-the-headlights matters of fact e.g.

"Dad always said that we would have to carry him out with his shoes on"

and that's what happened, they had to carry him out with his shoes on.

and continues to build towards traumatic climax. It's feverish and chilling, but nothing to write home about. ...That is until you google the author and discover that the book is almost certainly autobiographical to some extent. The troubling, stilted characters become a lot more understandable – those people did those things those wonky ways because that's how it went down in real life. The book has a non-trivial "Reception" section on Wikipedia explaining how, despite the fact that the Hjorth family put on a cheerful and congratulatory air when Vigdis' book was in the limelight and denied any similarities between fictitious characters and their family.

Hjorth's sister Helga Hjorth wrote her own novel in response, titled Free Will, in 2017. The response novel tells the story of a woman surprised to find that her sister had written a fictional book inspired by familial conflict in which her character hides alleged incest.

which is a very normal thing to do when your older sister writes a completely unrelated book that allegedly bears no relation to real world characters. This is one of the great modern works of metafiction (if airing out your family on the NYT Best sellers list can be considered "a great work").

Short and Sweet AKA "Breath of Stale Air"

These books tickled my fancy for their refreshingly unique takes on storytelling. Granted, the stories tended not to be "fun" or uppity per-se, usually the opposite – the ability to accomplish so much with so little and with such identifiable tonality is very fun to read.

Monsieur Pain by Bolaño is a delightful novel which I think is more digestibly representative of his abilities as an author without requiring the reader to signup for one of the monoliths for which he is better known (2666, The Savage Detectives). This novella reads like an Edgar Allan Poe fever dream. Comedic snafus and classic ironies unfurl in this occult noir backdrop of absurdism and it's just too fun.

“See, Jean-Luc”

“All right, all right,” said the blind boy

Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. (perhaps better known for Requiem for a Dream). I read Requiem first, and expected it to be as gruesome as the movie. It is, and then some – but what I think the movie fails to capture (doesn't translate well to the screen, no fault to Aronofsky) is the tongue-in-cheek humor present throughout the most harrowing moments of this debaucherous (TIL this is not a word) and vapid sequence of interconnected stories. I gotta stop reaching for IASIP whenever bad people do bad things for my entertainment, but it really is that – but more violent and upsetting. Part of it read as a vulgar stream of consciousness. Most of it is irreverent. The characters are phobic in all the ways characteristic of the your imagination's worst parts of NYC in the 60s and I think I was most surprised that a book like this would be written back then. Naïve sweet summer child thought that it was too indecorous to print. It's gritty like what I might expect from a Brett Easton Ellis from the late 90s, but to graft those societal machinations and commentaries onto a world that that no longer exists seems to be a very unique perspective relative to a lot of the other fiction from that time. Parts four and five (Strike and Tralala, respectively) are standalone nines. Selby Jr. is able to do the "I'm about to portray the worst thing you've ever read" without it being too exploitative of shock-factor. I read a lot of books that failed in their attempts to do what Selby accomplishes in these stories, and after closing the cover I was able to sigh with relief. Breath of fetid, industrial, smoke-filled air indeed. These are all Simple/Simple – how's that for a dual to Go, Dog, Go!

Finally for this section, and on a happier note: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Same praise extended to Monsieur Pain applies to this book along the lines of being a comparably digestible taste of the author that does not require resigning oneself to an 800 page maximalist tome. I love Pynchon's tomes, and I went into this expecting to be somewhat underwhelmed due to the constraints imposed by accomplishing what he's known for in a tenth of the space, but this book exceeded those expectations which jumped up it's rating on my scale. I knew Pynchon had range in terms of content, but wasn't sure if it would translate into short(er) form. It does, and that's why he's one of the Complex/Complex goats. Reading this book is like mainlining concentrated ADHD-distillate. We get Bloody friggin Chiclitz who appears in other Pynchon novels, we get songs, we get historically inspired conspiracy involving a niche arm of the government bureaucracy (USPS's rival: Thurn & Taxis who did legitimately exist as an independent German merchant house from the 15th Century to the 19th century), we got LSD-induced mania, homage Nabokov/Lolita who he was a student of (along with RBG, another TIL) at Cornell – it's just a high concentrate dose of fun. It's conspiratorial, detailed, historically plausible in ways that make you scratch your head about how the hell he found out about this stuff, goofy, and absurd. If you like his other work, this is a treat; if you don't know about him, it's a treat; and if you hate Pynchon we probably disagree about life.

APOSTASY

Per some other, unrelated posts – this has been a theme of speculative enjoyment for me the past year. If 2024 was the year of "I will not become my favor" in book form, 2025 has been the year of questioning God (great for the brand).

Silence by Shūsaku Endō must've come up in some other wikipedia articles related to Clavell (King Rat was the shortest, and semi-unrelatedly my favorite entry to the saga. Gai-Jin was the only one I didn't care for and even it had its moments making the investment worthwhile, the rest are all really strong). Don't know how Silence ended up on my list but I'm delighted that it did. It's a historical fictionalization of Jesuit missionaries having a hell of a time in 17th century Japan who was increasingly unhappy with the spread of Christianity (following the historical events of Shōgun and the dawn of the Edo period). Just a great, great depiction of a man struggling with his faith in a wasteland.

“it seems as though when I speak to you [God] I only blaspheme”

he prays for the redemption of others and sees only their torture and suffering because of their refusal to renounce their faith whether symbolically (which would be understood by God and thus exempted from divine punishment) or actually.

In the same vein, surprisingly-maybe-unsurprisingly is The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. I read this at the start of the year when I was churning through the backlog of horror novels that didn't make the October cut. I'd seen the movie and expected it to be ... I don't know – like that (fool). But it has stuck with me as a good-faith presentation of what that situation would be like.

MY BROTHER HURTS. I SHARE HIS PAIN. I MEET GOD IN HIM.

Steelman representation of the Church's posture towards the occult/demons n shit, and it takes the trope of a devout man struggling with his faith and dials that to 11 in a grotesque, irreverent masterpiece.

Also present in this category is Paradise Lost, obviously, more on that later.

GOAT

Not really belonging to any category other than David Foster Wallace appreciation is Wittgenstein's Mistress, and more specifically DFW's afterword to it. Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson itself was enjoyable but not extraordinary for me because I have not-enough fondness for Wittgenstein himself. It reminded me of Amalgamemnon by Christina Brooke-Rose, with the subject matter of a woman losing her grip on reality but clutching onto mythology and her own appreciation thereof as an anchor, but W’sM was way less tedious than that. I gave W’sM a solid 8.25 because it managed to do something really well w.r.t. a subject I don't particularly care about, thus making me care about a lot of things in a hurry, and all that without being condescending. It's on the bubble between Complex/Simple story (depending on whether or not an unreliable narrator monologuing about something which is not explained till near the end of the book constitutes complex. It's not hard to figure out what's happening in the first few chapters and then it pretty much plateaus at that level of narrative complexity), but certainly told in a Complex way. I became able to infer what must have been (and ended being) a Wittgenstein-ism from her speech patterns and the things with which she was concerned in the story, and that is kind of the point.

But without me belaboring the point, the real treat which I didn't even know was coming was the afterword by DFW which just about made me cry. He points out that this book is significant in large part due to its publication in an era where literature was marked by the tone of anti-intellectualism. Brett Easton Ellis shared the same publisher as Wallace and famously did not like his books. Juxtaposing e.g. American Psycho with this novel, I can see why it might seem like a breath of on-fire air for him in the same way that Last Exit was for me (role reversal where my notion of 60s lit would be intellectual, and Selby Jr makes a point of undermining all of that). Wallace gets at the heart of the troublesome Simple story told in a Complex way quadrant by describing self-conscious books as tedious and postmeridian, but in the W’sM breaks that mold by serving a purpose –the purpose– in its self-consciousness as manifested by the Kate the narrator. In so explaining why I liked the book back to me, Wallace furthered the point of making me care about something (analytic philosophy) that I have no business otherwise caring about.

Also by Wallace: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, is excellent. Octet in particular is the best short story I've ever read. In the same way that The Crying of Lot 49 is a good sampler for Pynchon, this story (and the whole of the novel) captures the joy of Infinite Jest in brief. I had the same reaction to it as I did to the first chapter of Infinite Jest which is that if I were allowed (through some Rube Goldbergean series of disasters and mistakes) to teach an English class, this would be on the syllabus. Octet captures the je ne sais quoi of what makes Infinite Jest great, which –till I read this– I thought was only achievable via the maximalist form. The interviews with hideous men are just that, the standalone short stories are hit or miss, but the hits are par excellence. Octet consists of eight super contrived (but not really) set of quandaries spread across paragraphs of Wallacean idiosyncratic prose followed by a gut shot a la “Q: Is she a good mother?”

Q(B): … The crux: X now finds himself, behind his conservative expression and solicitous gestures, secretly angry at his wife over an ignorance he has made every effort to cultivate in her, and sustain. Evacuate

hilariously detailed and specific “hypothetical” begging the question about whether or not DFW wants validation for some real world situation PQ9 fully ACKs the problem of PQ6 in a delightful meta discourse and manages to still sneak in one of the “failed” octets into a footnote.

In another footnote describing the proper latinate quantifier for “duo plus dual attempts at the third,” for which he’s been using “quartet” he sidetracks himself again to footnote usage of "quartet" again to say “or whatever” parenthetically. God, I miss him so much

If limn doesn’t end up seeming just off-the-charts pretentious I’d probably go with limn

The whole structure of the story is ingenious because the first PQ seems simultaneously like filler but may well be the only one DFW actually gives a shit about.

Commercial Slop (Sci-Fi / Fantasy)

i'm just a boy.

I read all the Red Rising books and they’re not good ok. Predictable and disappointing in the same way that James S.A. (unfortunate middle name for a pen name broskis why did y'all do that to yourselves) Corey’s Expanse is more frustrating than it is fun. Rare DNF series for me.

These are books which desperately want to escape their quadrant and in so doing confine themselves quadrately within the walls of simple/complex at worst, simple/simple at best – remaining predictable, annoying, and derivative throughout. It's not just that they're doing something which maybe I am a fan of: it is that they are trying to do something which I am a fan of but doing it poorly still. Cosmic horror is great. Mythological inspiration is great. But if you can't do better than Percy Jackson, then maybe you shouldn't stake the entirety of your mythos on a perversion thereof. Books about narcissists who are unable to see that their problems are entirely of their own making despite being endowed with plot-armor and god-status suck.

I picked up The Dandelion Dynasty by Ken Liu, who helped translate the Three Body Problem trilogy (good/great tier) from some YouTube video which had another niche book that I'd enjoyed in the thumbnail and basically got oneshot by the algorithm to commit to reading 4,000 pages of Chinese fantasy. R.F. Kuang's writing sucks IMO for the same reasons that Pierce Brown's sucks, and Ken Liu does pretty much the opposite of all those things. The pacing of the first book was rough, but I think I'd appreciate it a lot more on a second reading because the whole series which spans generations of war still hinges on the actions, character, and legend of the two main dudes in Grace of Kings. The series takes off from there and the world building becomes important in a way that is equal parts technical and impactful to the plot (c.f. J.S.A. Corey detailing the workings of spaceships / futuristic weapons / armor (and then doing it in ways that are technically inexplicable to anyone who knows anything about what they're talking about. Everyman is capable of doing All Fi no Sci) because it's fun for them but does not matter much to the plot is just a waste of time). Each book retains prominent single theme which is explored through the book without being to pedantic:

• The Grace of Kings is the simplest: it is the rise of power of Kuni Garu, the bandit who would become king.
• The Wall of Storms is a story about the clash of civilizations and the lengths people will go to in times of desparation.
• The Veiled Throne, in turn, is about negotiating cultural fusion, particularly when faced with the twin challenges of history and misinformation.
• Speaking Bones is like Kwisatz Haderach shit.

There's a lot wrong with these books from a continuity or immersion-suspending standpoint, but it's still worth reading. Nothing as glaring or ruinous as could be observed from any 10 page sampling from some of the other competing Sci-Fi/Fantasy which has received lots of approbation in the past decade.

I began working my way through qntm and Greg Egan's respective bibliographies to adjust for the disappointing lack of "hard sci-fi" found elsewhere. And they're good at it. Last year I read qntm's first edition of There is No Antimemetics Division which remains top-in-class (can't speak to the 2nd ed, I heard it's substantially different and I like 1e well enough that I don't need to besmirch that fondness), and was hoping to find more of that in his other novels. Alas – not quite as gripping and existentially entertaining, but still fun and technical in ways matter to "left-brained people." He's clearly an engineer himself and sometimes I appreciate reading that sort of stuff. Similarly Greg Egan is a programmer and aspiring physicist and that also shows in his books. I think I read Permutation City a couple years ago and found it dull, revisited him after reading his short story The Planck Dive which is so good that you should stop reading this and go read that instead. Diaspora and Quarantine were both really fun in ways that reminded me of the tangential philosophy bound up in Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. If you like that, you'll like these. His stories are complex because of the "hard" sci-fi elements. The prose are strong (especially for a programmer amiright), and his novels seem motivated by a deep underlying question rather than a desire to wax poetic about the intricacies of his It's-Basically-A-Lightsaber-But-I-Can't't-Call-It-That™ inventions which litter some aforementioned titles.

This section is titled colonialism sucks in space. Or does it?

Last year I powered thru all of Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish Cycle or whatever her publisher calls the 8 books spanning Rocannon's World thru The Telling. Most of them were sleepers, but The Dispossessed has such a cool framing device and the politics of The Word for World is Forest were engaging because of how propagandistic it is, especially relative to where it falls in the series (read 4,5,6 and skip the rest IMO). Skirting around questions of what constitutes life or galactic citizenship, we find ourselves in the middle of a Mai Lai incident, a bureaucratic tribunal and subsequent cover-up staging the the titular forest world of Athshe for tyranny at the hands of a few bad men. I blinged TWfWiF a 7.75 and ALSO I blinged Starship Troopers an 8. Both set out to accomplish something. The tone and rhetoric of both books heavily reflect the leanings of the author (which should be desirable for any piece of fiction, I'm here for flavor not facts pls!), and both succeed in their respective visions. I did vastly prefer The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but c'est la vie.

A "breath of stinky putrid air" pick in this category would be The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw which features a Lovecraftian-adjacent body horror story similar in tone to Between Two Fires by Christopher Beuhlman, but less aimless. My gripe with this book is simultaneously its biggest boon. Initially, the vocabulary feels forced, as if the author is trying to use find reasons to use words rather than use words to articulate a mood. E.g.

Manufactured. Understanding frissons. With new eyes, I contemplate the variegation in their complexion, how some swathes of skin are infinitesimally lighter than their neighbour, how their fingers share no commonality in texture

as well as repeated use of $5 words like evanescence, effulgent, and limn. However, as the story progresses and the diction remains consistently above-expectations, (and shifts according to narrative perspective), the poetic prose start to work. The story is also brutal, which I dig.

Non-Fiction

I don't read a lot of non-fiction, or at least I didn't this past year. I say that, but I also read all of Caro's books which is a lot of non-fiction. I think I like him as an author more than I care at all about any of the people he writes about, so I'm not sure how this would translate to other subjects if there's no equivalent presentation of the content. We must protect Robert Caro at all costs. The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson have convinced me that LBJ either is the devil or at the very least struck a deal with the devil. I have acquired vicariously through Caro an interest in people who are infatuated with power and go to lengths to attain and then wield it. I've been consistently surprised by how gripping the material can be, and so in some sense these books all fall under the "hard to sell a friend on" category, but all non-fiction is an uphill battle for non-history buffs methinks.

Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery by Brian Boyd in conjunction with Nabokov's son rekindled my amazement with Pale Fire and reminded me why it's up there at the top as one of the best books of all time. I read and re-read Pale Fire, and then went down various rabbit holes of interpretation trying to scrape together some coherent understanding of wtf I had just read, and so when I saw this book I figured I probably had a handle on like 60% of the theories that might be contained within. No. The thesis is that Pale Fire, lauded as one of the greatest post-modernistic literary accomplishments is not a post-modernist book.

Despite the resistance a good problem must have to easy solution, others must be able to solve it, or it is a failure … The relationship between composer and solver is fundamentally a generous one: the composer invited the solver as close to creative equality as the difference in their role allows.

It is not "up to interpretation" or vacuously riddled with different angles of appreciation, despite having all the trappings of a book which can and does do that well. Boyd blends some crucial biographical information about Nabokov, his affinity for translation and chess, which I only glimpsed myself after reading the rest of everything he ever wrote, but certainly did not have under my belt at first blush of Pale Fire. In so dissecting the mysterious plot of Pale Fire, Boyd takes you on a journey thrice over and –if you enjoyed Pale Fire– you will enjoy this, and it will make you love Pale Fire that much more. It is something of a definitive analysis. He contains multitude fr fr.

Uncategorized Honorable Mentions (zines?)

Deathconsciousness by Dan Barrett that comes with the DLP of the vinyl of the same name. Was fully expecting this to be a look book, but it is quite a bit more substantial than that. Enjoyable even if you're unfamiliar & uninteresting in the dirge rock, and (like The Magic of Artistic Discovery did for me to Pale Fire) if you are familiar will jettison your appreciation to new heights. Similar to Pynchon, almost, Barrett mixes in believable historical accounts that are just plausible enough to dismiss the need for scrutiny, and it's not until later on in the 90pp pamphlet that it becomes obvious you bought into the lore. It plays with layers of immersion to a similar extent as House of Leaves. At what level you begin to disbelieve the narrative is helpfully gradated by the frame narrative(s) and the story being told at each level is cool in the same way that W40K's reverent appropriation of Christian mythology is cool.

He left a one-lined suicide note on his desk, carefully placed on top of everything that was left of his writing. Attached to the small scrap of paper was a 50-pound note.

“I would be remiss,” he wrote, “if I did not include this month’s rent. And being remiss is one thing I can no longer tolerate”

A Short History of Decay: Sea of Cortez, an homage to the nihilistic tracts of Emil Cioran (on the shitlist for this year also, but thought provoking I guess), as well as Steinbeck's novel – idek where else you would find this thing other than exactly where I found it: hiding between two other, much thicker, large hardbacks in somewhere as stocked as Powell's City of Books. After the first few pages, I was extremely skeptical, and after the last few pages I felt like I knew Murry intimately and sympathized with/for him. It opens with a tinge of supreme pessimism, overt references to the likes of Cioran, Celine, as well as Faulkner and Steinbeck (in decreasing order of morbid outlooks on life). At first, it consists of a few meandering cynicisms that, by themselves, are wholly insufferable. However, when given life by strokes of Stephen Morton, they're actually not bad pretty good, understandable, and no longer isolated to the delusional dystopian outlook of a sad man. In the same way that Transmetropolitan becomes enjoyable and even humorous, this book matures from the platitudinally depressed, Nietzschean reddit commentary on a cold world, and into a confessional of a (still a deadbeat) man with nothing to lose going on an adventure. It’s like the dark foil to Passage to Inis Mór whereby the man becomes healed (or, at least, changed?) by indulgence and an orthogonal, near death experience, rather than through the forward path of recovery. If you can find a copy (I could hardly find any trace of it online), it's worth checking out.

Goat pt. 2

Paradise Lost was the best thing I read this year, longer "post" on that should be out sometime this Spring.