I read 60 books this year! This was in fact too many!

I got swept up in the competitive spirit (local bookstore did a summer reading challenge), and also had class readings (5 books), which overall made for a hectic and at-times very unfun reading experience in 2025. There’s a span of books in the middle of the year that I just really don’t remember, and quite a few more books than normal that I just didn’t like at all. S,o here’s to a chiller reading experience in 2026!

However, it’s not all bad; I did read some really excellent books. My favorites for 2025 were:

When The Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo (Re-read, still great)

Sister Deborah by Scholastique Mukasonga (New favorite author)

The Cave by José Saramago (Incredible use of format and punctuation)

Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather (A bunch of things I love: nuns, living starships, mystery, crises of faith and ethics)

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (One of the most arresting works of fiction I’ve ever read)

A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters (my friend Cadfael)

Big Bad Wool by Leonie Swann (Delightful point of view for a murder-mystery).

The biggest disappointment this year reading-wise was The World of Edena by Mœbius. I picked it up after reading online that the art style of Scavengers Reign (possibly the best television show of all time) was reminiscent of Moebius’. As I neared the end of The World of Edena, I was white knuckling my library copy. ‘How are they gonna get out of this? How will Mœbius wrap up all these plot threads? Where could this possibly be going?’ The twists and turns leading up to the end were tantalizing, and I read on with a sense of both wonder and worry that the ending would fail to stick the landing. And it really did fail to land for me. It was all a dream. The setting at the end is still sci-fi, but it turns out all the previous was just a step too wild to be ‘real.’ Dream endings always feel like a deflation to me, all sense of tension and progression immediately exploded, and this was the case for me with Edena. Nothing that came before really mattered, no one was ever in any real danger. Did like the first section with the Citroën a whole lot, though.

I started 2025 with a reading project that lasted for maybe the first five months of the year. I read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allen Poe. It’s his only novel and ends on a strange cliff-hanger where Pym dies before he can finish relaying his narrative to the narrator/editor of the novel, leaving us wondering what strange and dangerous wonders he could possibly have encountered that would top the other-worldliness of Tsalal. Two different authors wrote sequels attempting to address and wrap up this cliffhanger. One of these was Jules Verne’s An Antarctic Mystery, and the other A Strange Discovery by Charles Romeyn Dake.

Verne definitely capitalized and built on the action and sailing aspect of Arthur Gordon Pym, and was by far the more enjoyable of the two sequels. More ship travel, more shipwrecks, and the mystery of where Pym disappeared to keeps the narrative moving at a strong clip and is fairly compelling throughout. Dirk Peters as a character fares better in Verne’s sequel, as he is a much more sympathetic character and allowed some introspection, but then Verne will just left hook you with an awful racist description.

Dake’s sequel is pretty dry; long and meandering, the characters often stop the narrative of what happened to Pym in order to opine on the politics and social issues of the time. The plot of what happened to Pym is revealed with agonizing slowness in order to make room for Dake’s characters, in a much more mundane setting than the mythical Antarctic. Near the end, once the answer to the actual mystery is arrived at, the narrative briefly becomes a bit of utopian fiction that had what I felt was a rather limp end in order to expel Peters back out to the regular world.

Throughout the end portion of Arthur Gordon Pym, the inhabitants of Tsalal cry “teke-li-li” upon encountering anything white (the Tsalal islanders are all black and have black teeth and keep black animals, are ignorant and low tech, and murder the rest of Pym’s shipmates, just to hammer home the racial and racist ideas Poe is drawing upon).

“Teke-li-li” reappears as the cry of the Old Ones and the shoggoths in Lovecraft’s at the Mountains of Madness. I thought it was interesting that while Mountains is one of the less baldly racist of Lovecraft’s works, it would also call back to Arthur Gordon Pym. While the arctic exploration and the hidden lands beyond the end of the mapped earth link is obvious, Arthur Pym is rife with racism around the character of Dirk Peters and his indigenous heritage, as well as with the indigenous Black inhabitants of Tsalal island. So the specter of that racism still haunts Mountains, in its use of a reference to that cry and the division of the black islanders who fear the color white. There’s this thematic through line carried across both works by the cry of teke-li-li, of an obsession with exploration and its linkages with white anxieties and biases of the time.

Reading Mountains of Madness reminded me how much I had enjoyed The Color Out of Space, so I went back to re-read it. It’s still my favorite of Lovecraft’s works, and in reading it I found that there are, similar to Arthur Gordon Pym, two “sequels”: The Color Out of Time by Michael Shea and the novella The Saliva Tree in The Saliva Tree and Other Strange Growths by Brian Aldiss.

I liked the Color Out of Time in the same way I like Aliens 2; there’s a turn from pure horror to action, and I’d rather engage with the first piece of media, but the second is still a fun romp with a few decent scares, even as the power of the first narrative is a bit eroded by its expansion.

The Saliva Tree didn’t work quite as well for me. It’s overall less scary, and the farmer’s daughter was just such a disappoint nothing of a reward for a man plot element. I did think it was funny how much Aldiss loves H. G. Wells, though, to name drop him in a story borrowing from Lovecraft. Incredible move.

This was quite a fun reading project, tracing the lines of two literary family trees, and seeing the ways these stories are in conversation with one another. I wish I’d let it sit more, rather than rushing on to the next book to read.

I have another reading project planned for 2026, although it’s much less thematic than last year’s. The past few years, I’ve identified book-buying as my main point of over-consumption and have been working to cut down on book purchases. I’ve had a rule that I can buy a new book if I read two of my existing books. I then loopholed my own rule by not counting library books, since I wasn’t permanently acquiring them. This has been good for diminishing my buying habits, as library books didn’t count towards the two books needed to by a new one. However, I have made little progress in the backlog of books I already own.

Right now, I embarrassingly have 240 books in my house (this is too many) and have only read 74 of them. I’m amending my rules to 5 books read = 1 book I can purchase, and 3 books read = 1 book I can get from the library. I currently have 4 library books, which I’m not including either way in the total count. I don’t know why I’ve made so little progress on what I already have – all of the books on my shelves are something I was really excited for at one point or another. It’s time to be excited about them again, and to read some of the books I’ve left languishing on my shelves.

May we all have a calm and fulfilling reading experience in 2026.