In 2025 I read 68 books, which is par for the course. Number of pages, however, was at a high of 23,142 (data since 2023), for which I thank two book-bricks: Wind & Truth by Brandon Sanderson (1329pg) and The Veiled Throne by Kevin Liu (982pg).
My average rating dropped to 3.4 stars, notably lower than the 3.5-3.6 of recent years. This year I moved from GoodReads to StoryGraph (coz Amazon) which has been fine except that it's not possible to order my To Read list by average rating, so I'm back to selecting books from that list more at less randomly, as I did before moving to GoodReads in 2019. Hence my average rating has dropped back to pre-2019 levels. I've also been unimpressed with StoryGraph's own recommendations, so I am thinking of moving again, perhaps to Hardcover.
The gender of authors has remained close to 50-50, at 51.5% male. Average ratings for each gender were virtually identical.
Diversity has continued the gradual decline of the past few years, down to 29% non-white authors. Will have to get back on that horse to counter the anti-DEI forces! Unusually, non-white authors scored lower (3.3 stars) than white authors (3.5 stars), which dragged the overall average down - I blame poor book selection via StoryGraph.
New for this year, I've started keeping of track of where my book recommendations come from. I've haven't got data for every book I read, so the sample size is small, but a few highlights:
- Books by authors I have previously enjoyed (n=19) 3.6 stars (above par)
- Friends (n=19) 3.4 stars (on par)
- Books in series that I am reading (n=6) 3.4 stars
- Books listened to as sleep stories (n=6) 3.3 stars (below par)
- StoryGraph (n=5) 3.2 stars
Will be fascinating to see these numbers as I get more data. And yes, I am keeping track on a person-by-person basis - don't worry, I won't make it public ;P
Notable books for the year:
- Hardest hitting: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (4.5 stars)
- A classic that's actually good: A Room Of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (4.5 stars)
- Fattest (do not read in bath): Wind & Truth by Brandon Sanderson (3.5 stars)
- Oldest: The Odyssey by Homer, ~775BCE (3 stars)
- Most blatant ripoff: Just One Damn Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor (3 stars)
- Most enraging: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (2 stars)
Here is the full list for the year:
4.5 stars (7 books, 10%) | ||
| Material World | Ed Conway | A high-octane tour through the materials that underlie our civilisation: sand, salt, steel, copper, oil & lithium. So many intriguing side notes that sent me off down rabbit holes (African ghost miners!). Really brings home the mammoth scale, complexity & interconnectedness of these critical industries that we take for granted. But also highlights their fragility, the environmental damage they cause, and the immense difficulty of reforming them to be sustainable. |
| Question 7 | Richard Flanagan | An exploration of life & death, love & fate, encompassing everything from his family history to HG Wells and the development of the atomic bomb. Damn he can write! The description of his near-death experience is mesmerising. Didn't fully come together for me, but suspect it will benefit from a revisit. |
| Pride & Prejudice | Jane Austen | Long-time viewer (BBC only, thank you), but first-time reader (well, listener), and it did not disappoint. If anything the Bennetts are even nuttier. Love Lizzie's snark, and the frission with D'Arcy is frustratingly delectable. Really doesn't work as a #SleepStory though! https://downtosleep.podbean.com/e/pride-and-prejudice-audiobook-part-1-down-to-sleep-122/ |
| Prophet Song | Paul Lynch | A horrifying realistic account of an everyday Western country being gradually consumed by an authoritarian regime. Every moment of encroaching terror is disturbingly relatable. Writing style felt like a monotone ramble, which masked its poignancy. |
| We Are The Stars | Gina Chick | That wild woman who captivated us on Alone Australia is the product of genes, a generous upbringing, and intense tempering in the crucible of life. A remarkable range of life experience, and an impressive capacity to learn & evolve from life's challenges. Heavy on nebulous metaphor, but fitting. I envy her capacity to inhabit her emotions & body so fully. |
| A Room of One's Own | Virginia Woolf | A classic that is actually good! An essay on women & fiction (thus, feminism) that rambles along in a relaxed fashion without losing any of its coherency or piercing insight. And damn she can write. Sadly still relevant, nearly 100 years on. (For reference her £500/yr is A$55k/yr today.) |
| Radical Markets | Eric Posner & Glen Weyl | Proposes a number of dramatic reforms to foundational institutions: including property, voting & migration. A perennial auction of property would result in shared public ownership funding a basic income and ensuring more efficient use of capital - this one challenged my deep set conception of ownership & control. Quadratic voting would enable citizens to give more democratic weight to issues of more concern to them - fantastic, we should do this! Would love to see these ideas get consideration and trial runs. We desperately need more creative thinking along these lines. No consideration given to environmental limits. |
4 stars (15 books, 22%) | ||
| The Collected Schizophrenias | Esmé Weijun Wang | Essays on the author's experience of schizophrenia (along with bipolar, PTSD & chronic Lyme!) in the US. Fascinating & unsettling view into psychiatric hospitals, mental health 'support' in Ivy League colleges, and what the hell a psychotic break feels like. Blimey. |
| Home Fire | Kamila Shamsie | A British-Pakistani family gets caught (& distraught) on the three horns of identity, politics & jihad. Deeply immersive for a range of perspectives. |
| The Tainted Cup | Robert Jackson Bennett | A murder mystery fantasy novel - why is this a first for me?! Fairly standard whodunnit which escalates to political intrigue, made distinctive by very cool world-building: an empire built to defend against leviathans attacking from the sea, whose bodily fluids enable a raft of fantastical bio-enhancements. Interesting characters and the potential for more fleshing out give the series much promise. |
| Nervous Conditions | Tsitsi Dangarembga | Becoming a familiar refrain in African literature: girl fights for education & freedom against patriarchy & colonialism. This one, set in pre-independence Zimbabwe, might be the original (?) and the best, with carefully crafted & evolving characters. Ends very suddenly, though. |
| The End and Everything Before It | Finegan Kruckemeyer | A tangled weave of lives lived for love, community, place & simple pleasures. Beautifully written. I didn't quite grasp the ending, worth a revisit. |
| The Lathe of Heaven | Ursula Le Guin | A man's dreams shape reality, and his therapist uses him as a tool to fix the wrongs in the world. But if utopia lacks free will, diversity & creativity, is it still utopia? |
| The Season | Helen Garner | The author shadows her grandson's under-16 Aussie Rules team for a season. A glimpse from the boundary line of boys on the cusp on manhood, the solidarity of teammates, the strange spiritual appeal of sport. Wonderfully written & absorbing, but it's still just footy and Melburnians are weird. |
| The Mars House | Natasha Pulley | A sci-fi romance set on Mars, where recent refugees from climate-riven Earth are so strong in the low gravity that they are a mortal accidental risk to Martians. Excellent premise, and the contradictory reactions of the protagonist feel real & difficult. But some of the underlying science is dubious (MW ≠ MWh!!!), the romance had potential but felt a bit weak and the ending used up its momentum too soon. Mammoths! |
| The Help | Kathryn Stockett | In 1960s Mississippi, white women and the black maids they employ navigate the upheaval of the civil rights movement. The contrast of ingrained racism and the deep emotional integration of black women into white family life is astounding. Potential for deep analysis, but you can also just enjoy the story. |
| Playground | Richard Powers | The glorious wonder of the ocean, the fraught love of competitive friends, our tangled dependence on both extraction & love of the natural world, the tempting appeal of AI. Felt like there was too much to wrap up in so short a space, but he pulls it off remarkably, leaving an uncertainty as to what was real and what imagined or simulated. |
| Once There Were Wolves | Charlotte McConaghy | An attempt to reintroduce wolves to the Scottish Highlands faces strong pushback from the locals. In wilderness we fear monsters, but perhaps the true monsters are within. A thoroughly enjoyable thriller featuring the deep connection of twins, a remarkable form of empathy, the evil of domestic & ecological abuse and resultant trauma, and a little mystery. A strange lack of consequences. |
| I Contain Multitudes | Ed Yong | Delves into the many varied & amazing ways humans & animals have evolved to depend upon microbes. Most of this was familiar to me already, though told in the author's excellent clear & awed way. New was the incredible nesting of microbes within high-order animal cells, with each doing distinct jobs, such that none can survive without the others. Yong is always good for a celebration of life & its complexity. |
| Becoming Mrs Mulberry | Jackie French | In the aftermath of WW1, a woman strives to build a new life despite the sacrifices she has made. Eventful & enjoyable, if implausible, with an excellent cast of characters and strong Miss Fisher vibes. |
| Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow | Gabrielle Zevin | Two friends become productive creative partners in computer game design, but their emotional blocks cause regular estrangements (gets a bit frustrating - grow up already!). I enjoyed the nostalgia of old-school gaming, but would probably still be enjoyable for non-gamers. Now, off to play Oregon Trail ... https://oregontrail.run/ |
| The Hobbit | JRR Tolkien | [re-read] The dwarves are dead weight - it's all Bilbo and Gandalf. Gollum really gets a raw deal in the riddle game. |
3.5 stars (19 books, 28%) | ||
| The Broken Kingdoms | NK Jemisin | A woman gets caught up in the manoeuvring of gods, godlings and grasping humans. Most notable for the protagonist's blindness, though she has the ability to see magic. |
| Record of a Spaceborn Few | Becky Chambers | Centuries after sending colonies into space as insurance against Earth's collapse, humans have integrated into alien civilisation. But now what purpose do those colonies serve, and what happens to their distinctive communal culture? Good premise & great world-building but not much plot, with a few too many characters. |
| Anxious People | Fredrik Backman | A bunch of charming idiots (i.e. everyday people) get thrown together and muddle their way through a crisis in the only way humans can: messily, and hilariously. Occasionally heavy-handed but the portrayal of people and their idiosyncrasies is a joy. |
| My Father and Other Animals | Sam Vincent | After an unsettled life of freelance writing, the author takes on the family farm. A memoir of his father and the land, an ode to regenerative agriculture, and an example of how to connect with Traditional Owners. The author is only two degrees of separation from me, so I found it easy to imagine myself in his shoes, going down a route that appeals but was not available. |
| The Grand Sophy | Georgette Heyer | A irrepressible cousin comes to stay and causes a great upheaval, but between cunning plans and good luck it all works out neatly. More wit than romance, but it does that well. |
| Enemy of God | Bernard Cornwell | The Saxons threaten to overrun Briton; a search for a legendary artifact to bring back the Old Gods; a little blissful romance; Lancelot is a backstabbing, cowardly bastard; oaths, what are they good for? A touch more magic than in the first book, but just as hard, dirty & cynical. |
| The Mark | Frida Isberg | An attempt to enforce empathic behaviour creates stark divisions at all levels of society. Very effectively conveys the ambiguous ethics and the entrenched positions taken by opposing sides. Strong parallels with toxic masculinity and vaccination. |
| Messy | Tim Harford | The importance of randomness & spontaneity in creativity & problem-solving. Plans, order & rationality are often counter-productive! So don't beat yourself up about meeting simplistic measures of performance. The tech discussion is a bit dated, but the principles are extremely relevant to AI. Ginormous gender blind-spot. |
| The Demon in the Machine | Paul Davies | How did life come about, how does it work, how does it seemingly defy entropy, and what has information theory & quantum mechanics got to do with it? Doesn't quite manage the clearest explanations, leaving me on the cusp of comprehension, but then the underlying concepts are at the forefront of human knowledge. Life, even in its simplest forms, is *amazing* and incredibly improbable. |
| Skyward Flight | Brandon Sanderson & Janci Patterson | While the hero of the series is lost in the Nowhere, her fellow pilots get on with being awesome and taking the fight to the oppressors. Decent YA fare with lots of dogfights, light humour and a little romance. The hyperslugs are adorable. |
| Bookshops & Bonedust | Travis Baldree | A worthy prequel to Legends & Lattes. New friends come together to reinvigorate a bookshop, with a couple of baddies dealt with along the way. Loved Satchel the animated skeleton. Moist! |
| The Scar | China Mieville | An exuberant, barely believeable steampunk world with cactus & mosquito people, underwater & floating cities, and mysterious powers. Very very long, and rather too serious. |
| The World We Make | NK Jemisin | New York finishes the job against the Multiverse, despite the conservative reticence of the Old Cities. Clunkier and without the freshness of the original. But fun to see more city avatars. I think Mamdani could easily be a character in these books! |
| Wind and Truth | Brandon Sanderson | An absolute brick of a book - possibly the longest I've ever read. Could certainly have been shorter (successful authors get way too much latitude), with too frequent changes in PoV, and while I appreciate his use of mental health to disrupt tired fantasy tropes, after three weeks of amateur therapy I was a bit over it. But he does pull together sprawling plot lines to a satisfying climax, with an appealing set up for a fresh take on the second half of the series. |
| Contact | Carl Sagan | A message from outer space is detected, and humanity sets about decoding it, then attempts to make contact with the originators. Delves into the nexus of science & religion, the complexity of international collaboration, and the social upheaval of such a paradigm-shifting discovery. Some excruciating elite-level gaslighting. Surprising ending! |
| The Shadow of the Wind | Carlos Ruiz Zafon | A rare book sets a teenage boy on a path of mystery, love & revenge. This was nearly great, with an intriguing setup, smooth prose, vibrant characters and an evocative sense of time & place (mid-century Barcelona). But it ran out of steam with repetitive storytelling and too much exposition. And nearly all the men were incorrigible womanisers. |
| To Be Taught If Fortunate | Becky Chambers | A small crew of scientists leave Earth, and their time period, forever to explore life on distant planets. But what will they do when Earth goes silent? An ode to science, discovery and the inherent worth of knowledge. The lack of interpersonal conflict under such trying conditions feels unrealistic. |
| Limberlost | Robbie Arnott | With his elder brothers away at war, a teenage boy attempts to fill the uncertain hole of their incommunicado absence by restoring a decrepit sailboat. In it he finds freedom and love for his surroundings. And there's a quoll and a crazy whale. A nice snapshot of mid-century northern Tasmania but I didn't really feel it. |
| The Veiled Throne | Ken Liu | A silkpunk epic full of far-fetched but fun battles - of both the naval and MasterChef kind! A refreshing change from the usual fantasy fare, although rather too long & detailed. Explores the mess of identity, culture & colonisation. |
3 stars (17 books, 25%) | ||
| Howl's Moving Castle | Diana Wynne Jones | A young woman gets caught up in magical machinations and is turned old & fabulously crotchety. Great characters and vibe but I lost track of the plot a bit (disclaimer: listened to this as a sleep story), and wasn't really into the romantic ending. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8eOjQ3JrXk&list=PLp6dwtXsi8Pu6G7MT4ajMGB1YrumzQRZ9 |
| Every Secret Thing | Marie Munkara | Mission mob vs bush mob in the Top End. Crude & cutting humour, with occasional glimpses of the raw, traumatic truth of dispossession & cultural genocide. |
| Mind Of My Mind | Octavia Butler | The god-like mutant Doro finally breeds his race of super-powered telepaths. Can they hold it together, and can he tolerate them? Not much narrative tension or interesting characters, and not a lot happens. |
| The Odyssey | Homer | Travel back in time for a little insight into the worldview & values of the ancient Greeks. Fickle meddlesome gods, male honour, rampant war and liberal violence, slavery & female subjugation. Easy flowing translation, though I sometimes lost the rhythm. |
| Sleeping Giants | Sylvain Neuval | An alien artifact triggers a race to harness its immense power. Told mostly via interview transcripts, which kinda works (I liked how the interviewer gradually becomes more of a protagonist, and more invested in the interviewees) but doesn't do justice to the action sequences. Smoking Man X-Files vibes. |
| The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches | Sangu Mandanna | A lonely witch finds family & love when she is sought out to tutor three young witchy girls. A cosy romantic fantasy. Some enlivening characters and fun use of magic. Very 'House by the Cerulean Sea'. |
| The Sound of the Mountain | Yasunari Kawabata | In post-war Japan, an aging man grapples ineffectually with the autumn of his life, the failure of his children's marriages, and his slightly inappropriate relationship with his daughter-in-law. Calmly mellow & unfocussed, much like old age might be. |
| The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde | Robert Louis Stevenson | When our baser urges are allowed to run free, they end up dominating. Disturbing, even if the 'science' is a bit amusing. https://downtosleep.podbean.com/e/jekyll-and-hyde-complete-audiobook-with-relaxing-fire-sounds-down-to-sleep/ |
| Slade House | David Mitchell | Every nine years, people disappear into a house which otherwise can't be found. The author's usual layering of stories across different time periods gradually reveals the truth, though it's not particularly clever this time around. Dark arts & illusions, bit creepy, not really my thing. |
| The Cruel Stars | John Birmingham | Action space opera that doesn't take itself too seriously. Humanity has become a diverse species dangerously dependent on digital & genomic enhancement - a zealous puritan strain plans to change that. A few too many characters to begin with - none of them I connected with, and many of whom die - but they come together nicely. |
| The Art of Uncertainty | David Spiegelhalter | A fairly readable overview of probability & uncertainty, from the straightforward games of chance through to the deep uncertainty of future risks such as climate change & AI. Not sure who it's aimed at: some of it is too complex for the layman, but not deep enough for the technically minded. Has some good examples, especially from covid. Would have liked some worked examples of how to apply its principles to real life decision-making. |
| Blackout | Connie Willis | The Oxford time travellers are back, back to the London Blitz in WW2. But they are having trouble returning home, and getting caught up in all sorts of trouble in the meantime. Slow moving and overly detailed, but the near slapstick humour saves it. Only the first half of the story, so unfulfilling. |
| Before the Coffee Gets Cold | Toshikazu Kawaguchi | In a particular seat in an otherwise unremarkable cafe, it is possible to travel through time. Despite stringent limitations, the customers and workers nonetheless find solace from the travails of life. Its a pleasing enough community of everyday people, but nothing special. |
| The Lebs | Michael Mohammed Ahmad | A deeply uncomfortable portrayal of Lebanese teenage boys in western Sydney as dumb, racist, misogynistic, sex-obsessed fundamentalists. The last third was more interesting, as the protagonist struggles with the foreignness & ugliness of the White world that he has always idolised. |
| Drake Hall | Christina Baehr | A fine continuation of the story, but not a standalone book. |
| Just One Damn Thing After Another | Jodi Taylor | A shameless rip-off of Connie Willis' time travelling historian concept, but with much more chaotic excitement. A bit too much, perhaps, and not enough historic immersion. Don't think too hard, just enjoy the ride. |
| My Cat Yugoslavia | Pajtim Statovci | Interleaves the story of a young Albanian refugee in Finland, excluded & traumatised, with that of his mother's wedding & her hopes for a future filled with love. The symbolism of the cats & snakes is a bit weird but I think I finally got my head around it. Mostly interesting for its depictions of Albanian culture and Finnish xenophobia. |
2.5 stars (8 books, 12%) | ||
| The Man Who Died Twice | Richard Osman | More fun times with the crime-solving (& committing!) pensioners. The stakes are higher but doesn't feel so fresh. A bigger role for the inscrutable Bogdan is welcome. Laughs off some pretty substantial abuse of the justice system. |
| Akarnae | Lynette Noni | Fairly derivative YA fantasy: teenage girl crosses into a parallel world, where she becomes a fish-out-of-water at a school for talented students, and discovers she's the only one who can prevent the obliteration of humanity. Some ingrained patriarchy - why do female heroes always have to be hot? Totally needless. Nice enough but nothing special. |
| The Erratics | Vicki Laveau-Harvie | Two sisters deal with the aging of their estranged parents, the mother psychopathically unhinged and the father cowed & abused. Morbidly fascinating but scattered and purposeless. |
| Watership Down | Richard Adams | The trials & adventures of rabbits setting up a new warren: strange cultures, claw-biting escapades and the terror of war. Similar to Wind in the Willows but the anthropomorphism is weaker and the characters less vibrant. It's just as misogynistic: does are thought of as mere 'breeding stock', though worth fighting over. Drags along though it builds to a decent climax. |
| Comes the Night | Isobelle Carmody | YA dystopian set in Canberra! In a polluted world, cities have been enclosed in domes and pervasive tech & propaganda keep the population in line. A teenage boy gets entangled in mysterious intrigue, and soon starts to wonder if his dreams are more than they seem. Very slow and overly explicatory, except for the ending which was sudden, unclear and too easy. |
| A Court of Thorns and Roses | Sarah Maas | My first foray into romantasy. The plot is so-so (humans vs faeries, love & intrigue) but finishes strongly. The romance is weak - it's never clear why she loves the faerie lord, except for his sexy man-beastiness. Hopefully this is not the best the genre has to offer. |
| The Strangest Criminals | Blake Polden | In a world where the Occult lives along side the Ordinary, a magical mafia family turns bad. Has potential, with some fresh creativity, but the writing is too choppy & disrupted. |
| Sula | Toni Morrison | Tracks a black community from the 1920s onwards, focusing on two women who choose to live life on their own terms. A lot of eccentric characters and matter-of-factly told traumatic events, with a sardonic reflection on life at the bottom of the hierarchy. Never hooked me in though, so fell flat. |
2 stars (2 books, 3%) | ||
| Spring Snow | Yukio Mishima | A doomed romance in early 20th century Japan. Interminably slow, with frequent tangential digressions into philosophy and description. Nearly gave up but something finally happened 100 pages in. The climax verges on the tragi-comic, but it's mostly just brooding & hopeless. I was intrigued by the nobleman who is so elegant that problems solve themselves, hence effortlessly maintaining said elegance. |
| The Secret Garden | Frances Hodgson Burnett | [re-read] Illness is all in your head which can be overcome through fresh air & mental fortitude. Fuck that shit ... Surprised it didn't trigger me on my first read (4 stars)! https://downtosleep.podbean.com/e/the-secret-garden-complete-audiobook-with-rain-down-to-sleep/ |
