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I read (listened to) the first 6 books of Dungeon Crawler Carl. The whole series is fantastic. Best enjoyed via audio book because the narrator does a great job with the voices.
I also got around to reading The Shining by Stephen King. Definitely worth the read!
Happy New Year!
I'm reading Dungeon Crawler Carl at the moment and it's great and completely bonkers! Just started book 4 today.
Damnit Donut!
A good narrator is priceless!
I can definitely recommend the recent sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep. The movie adaptation is not bad, but as in most cases the book is better. What's interesting is that the book version of Doctor Sleep is a sequel to the book version of The Shining, while the movie follows up the 1980 Kubrick film.
Just added to my tbr!
I haven’t done a full recap yet, but this is year I read all of the Murderbot books (recommended if that’s your sort of humor, steer clear otherwise) and the Black Sun trilogy. Honestly the latter has stayed with me the longest, even if it’s a light read.
Project Hail Mary is a sound hard scifi book that finally doesn’t mix romance into everything (as or rarely happens since a couple of decades).
I read all the Murderbot books in a row a couple of times a year and they never get worse, they are fantastic.
And Project Hail Mary is so good, I love the relationship with Rocky, I really did feel horror and dread when he was in danger and that is very rare for me.
Kindred by Octavia Butler
I read that in 2024. It really stuck with me and honestly in a way felt timeless. As their "present" was just the apartment really with no notable descriptors but def felt the shift into the past. Amazing writing.
same… i read Project Hail Mary and it was awesome…
arl read The Gone World and it was also amazing
I'm going to go with Dungeon Crawler Carl book 7: This Inevitable Ruin. The whole series is great, but TIR reaches new heights. Just the scope and how everything meshes together is amazing. I'm looking forward to more.
I am so excited to listen to Book 7! I'm waiting for my husband to catch up!
I wanted a place to talk about them, so I just made !dcc@piefed.world in case you’re interested.
Yes, I’m pasting this a million times, trying to hit the people who mentioned really enjoying it.
I started reading them this year on a recommendation from a lemmist, and got a bit fatigued with them by book 4. It's my first foray into litrpg, and while they're a rollicking good read, it started to bother me that there was a bit too much 'rpg' and not enough 'lit' for me. By that I mean, I'm into the overarching story with the aliens and what they're up to, but not so much the dungeon crawling stuff, and all the stat's and leveling and so on, which is the majority of the content. It's a bit grindy, is what I'm saying.
That said I will get back to them, I think, after I finish the Stainless Steel Rat series I'm currently on.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-game-in-yellow-hailey-piper/567aec11eab5b2e5
'A Game In Yellow.' It may not be the finest book I read, but it was the one that instantly sprang to mind.
"The King In Yellow" is an old play that was banned by the Vatican and every European king; every actor and audience member who has been part of a performance has gone mad. Now the play has resurfaced in New York, and an unsuspecting couple are going to be part of the next production.
Definitely the Dungeon Crawler Carl books. Currently listening to the Bobiverse series and it is a close second.
This year my highlight was "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang.
It is a collection of (not so) short stories. I didn't like every one, but those I liked were absolutely brilliant. The title story, "Exhalation", was one of those. I wanted to read something by Ted Chiang specifically because I adore the movie "Arrival" (2016), and found out it was based on one of his stories (not in "Exhalation").
Btw. I liked "Project Hail Mary" too, read it last year.
I read my first Ted Chiang this year! I think my favorite was his short story "Tower of Babylon". It dragged a bit for me but "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" gave me a lot of food for thought with the current LLM mania. I'm looking forward to more.
Hail Mary was excellent, looking forward to the film.
TBH though, I read so many books this year it's hard to keep track.
Electric State was a stand out, and I fell down the rabbit hole of his other three books too!
Tales From the Loop:
https://www.simonstalenhag.se/tftl.html
Things From the Flood:
https://www.simonstalenhag.se/tftf.html
The Electric State:
https://www.simonstalenhag.se/es.html
Sunset at Zero Point:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Sunset-at-Zero-Point/Simon-Stalenhag/9781668096413
Electric State was a stand out, and I fell down the rabbit hole of his other three books too!
The author also made a wonderful ambient album under the same name. It is wonderful background/dark ambient and fits the vibe of his other art perfectly!
https://simonstalenhag.bandcamp.com/album/the-electric-state
Azalea Ellis' A Practical Guide To Sorcery series starting with A Conjuring Of Ravens. Absolutely loved it and I have listened through 3 times since I got them in early December. The audio books are fantastic and really well read and the story is such a great power progression fantasy. It is not as serious and dark as much of modern fantasy with a lot of love for magic and some really great characters. The magic system is also awesome and not overpowered or silly, yet it has flexibility in terms of power level so you don't feel like the characters have massive plot armour or answers to problems that just fix plot holes. Very well constructed, a great piece of fiction.
This is fresh on my mind because I just made my "reading recap 2025" with nine of the books I read.
Nothing Burns as Bright as You by Ashley Woodfolk was my stand out book of the year. Her acknowledgements also really resonated with me even though that's not usually something I look for in a book.
I also really enjoyed The Feather Thief despite the fact I rarely read non-fiction.
Not done yet, but "1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus" by Charles Mann is excelent. So much insight presented in an interessting and accessible way.
Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy:
Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and Maddaddam
Read these a few years back; they're still a monumental achievement. I can't buy chicken at a grocery store without thinking about the engineered chickens she describes.
I read a lot of great books this year. But, my shortlist goes to one author: Omar El Akkad.
One Day Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This (2025) and American War (2017) were both revelations.
P.S.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (2020) by Rashid Khalidi. An absolutely vital history in its address of Occupied Palestine, the State of Israel, and the world's interactions with them. In much the same way Tony Judt deepened my perspective of Europe with Postwar, and Davids Wengrow and Graeber pushed my understandings with The Dawn of Everything, Khalidi weaves family history with world events to lend a sorely lost dimension to a vilified people.
One of my favorites I read was the trilogy which starts with The Three-body Problem. Mind boggling stuff, and page turners, but not perfect.
I also read a lot of Stephen King, and the award for the best book I read in 2025 has to go to The Green Mile. It's one of King's best, and one I have great memories of reading when it came out.
Just finished Strange Houses, a Japanese horror themed, interview and conversation style novel.
A psychological story with lots of twists and unsettling situations. I immersed myself in the world and the story is believable as could be real.
It's a quick read under 200 pages with some pictures but I loved it.
I'm now going back to his first book Strange Pictures and will probably pick up Strange Buildings when it comes out.
Oooh you have piqued my interest with this one and especially with only 200 pages? I'm in. Tyvm for sharing!
My favorite "book" this year was Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Omnibus which is a collection of a couple of his books. The world building, physics, vast timelines and very human characters really did it for me. I still love Ian Bank's Culture Series more but the Xeelee Sequence has been a lot of fun, highly recommend (if you're into sci-fi).
Honorable mention goes to Charles Stross, I finally read his Accelerando and while it didn't trip my trigger as much I felt like it really captured something of our current zeitgeist and had a lot of great moments that will stick in my head for a while.
Contemporary Theological Approaches to Sexuality, ed. Lisa Isherwood and Dirk von Der Horst.
For me I think it was Atmosphere, by Taylor Jenkins Reid. So many emotions lol.
Project Hail Mary was another one of the highlights!
I always have trouble picking favorites, so here are the three I most enjoyed:
My favorite, or the one that has stuck in my head and bounced around the most, is The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (pub. 1924). The audiobook version is great!
It is not new to me, I revisited it some this year and started the audiobook with my partner though and the synchronicity with this moment in history is crazy intense especially since Mein Kampf came out within a year or so of it and yet The Magic Mountain is an intensely human experience that revels in imperfectness and sickness as a state of living, illuminating a polar opposite potential in German society than what was allowed to manifest in the following decades or what horror had transpired in the previous decade with WW1.
It wasn't the novel I chose to live rent free in my head, I didn't read it for large portions of the year, but there is no other way to see the future for me other than all of us entering the world Hans Canstorp travels into and through in The Magic Mountain. I think this is in large part because The Magic Mountain was bifurcated by WW1, and the centrist politics of Thomas Mann can be seen evolving throughout the course of the book as Thomas Mann's politics radicalized throughout WW1 and in the wake of it... Thomas Mann began The Magic Mountain before WW1 but put it aside during the war to write more directly about politics and only returned to complete the novel after his worldviews had been thoroughly ground to a powder by the horror of WW1.
No other novel in 2025 gobbled up my reality harder than The Magic Mountain and I suspect 2026 will share a similar vibe.
In 2026 I am looking forward to reading Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann and trying to explore more modernist experimental literature from around the world that often slips by invisible to the "western" literature gaze fixated on white european guys being erudite in crude ways tho I love Pynchon don't get me wrong.
Sounds amazing. I just added to my TBR pile. Thank you for sharing!
Note If you read it in English, get the John E. Woods translation not the old Lowe-Porter translation. The Lowe-Porter translation doesn't capture the dry humor of the original German version anywhere as much as it needs to in order for the comic aspects of the novel to levitate. Also... Mann is a stunning writer and the John E. Woods translation leverages ~70 years of engagement with the novel to do the artistry of his writing justice in English.
If you listen to the audiobook by David Rintoul it also uses the John E. Woods translation.
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. Very enlightening.