persiflage_1

First of all, from the department of corrections and clarifications: I can't believe I forgot MURDERBOT in my last post, absolutely one of the joys of last year. (I didn't realise until it was happening what a delight it would be to have a show with an aroace autistic lead or how much it would mean. People like me don't get to be the main character!)

It has also occurred to me that most of the Pluribus I have watched was technically THIS year, so it doesn't entirely belong in a 2025 round up, but listen, time is weird, whomst amongst us is not fallible etc etc

I did make a bingo card for this year! I haven't decided yet if I want to share it here, but maybe. It's mostly household things, plus a few creative endeavours - I'm wary of putting too many of those on there in case it turns them into chores, but I'm hoping the bingo card format takes some of the pressure off.

Also, turns out I do want to talk about my year in books a bit. I read 149 books last year, the upper end of average for me, but although I read some absolute BANGERS, I feel like overall I read more books I felt three stars and below about than four stars and above - not necessarily a reflection on their quality, but on how much I personally enjoyed them. I don't do reading goals, because I find the freedom to read whatever whenever more motivating, but I think maybe this year I should DNF more.

I'm also pondering whether I want to do more awards-shortlist reading this year. I nominate and vote in the Hugos, but there's usually at least one or two things on the shortlist I don't end up reading (for 2025 it was Someone You Can Build a Nest In, because a romance where people get eaten is basically my banishing circle, and Alien Clay, because from the reviews I read I couldn't tell whether I'd like it enough to make up for the body horror), and I don't plan to force myself to read stuff I don't, at least on some level, want to. Other awards on my radar:

- The Le Guin! I'd read about half the shortlist when it came out last year, so decided to read the rest; I almost managed it and had a great time - I loved a lot of things on it and didn't regret reading any of them. (The only one I didn't read was because the ebook was FIFTEEN POUNDS and I simply could not. All in favour of authors getting paid, but FIFTEEN POUNDS for an EBOOK, come ON.)

- The Clarke! I never quite line up with this shortlist like I want to, but I'm always interested in what's on it.

- The Ignytes! I read one thing off the novel shortlist last year and really loved it, would have read a second if it wasn't for the FIFTEEN POUNDS issue mentioned above. I like that this one also has a novella shortlist (I've read three of last year's). And more categories, but I'm less into short fiction, YA and MG, so I'll keep an eye on them, but I'm not committing to reading them.

I haven't run the numbers, but based on vibes I think I am reading more older stuff than I have been (ie more than two years old). This is a good thing for me personally, I think, because when I was struggling to find things I was excited to read a few years ago, part of the way I got myself enthused was by keeping up more with the buzz around what was New! and Exciting!, and while I'm still enjoying that, it's nice to feel like I need it less.

And finally, my top ten books read last year, five published last year, five from earlier (not on purpose, it just worked out that way):

Metal From Heaven - august clarke
Menewood - Nicola Griffith
The City in Glass- Nghi Vo
The West Passage - Jared Pechaček
Rakesfall - Vajra Chandrasekera
The Breath of the Sun - Isaac Fellman
The River Has Roots - Amal El-Mohtar
City of All Seasons - Oliver K Langmead and Aliya Whiteley
Some Body Like Me - Lucy Lapinska
The Everlasting - Alix E Harrow

(Honorable mention to Iona Datt Sharma's Wish You Were Here, which came out in 2025 but which I read in 2024, just.)

When They Burned the Butterfly - Wen-yi Lee
The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles - Malka Ann Older
Cinder House - Freya Marske
The Fortunate Fall - Cameron Reed
Murder by Memory - Olivia Waite
The Isle in the Silver Sea - Tasha Suri
Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox - Victoria Finlay
The Everlasting - Alix E Harrow
These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart - Izzy Wasserstein
The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep - HG Parry
A Chorus Rises - Bethany C Morrow

Floating Hotel - Grace Curtis
This Brutal Moon - Bethany Jacobs
Audition for the Fox - Martin Cahill
Or What You Will - Jo Walton
Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age - Eleanor Barraclough
The Confession of Brother Haluin - Ellis Peters
All Is Bright - Llinos Cathryn Thomas
Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame - Neon Yang
Sunward - William Alexander
A Case of Life and Limb - Sally Smith

When They Burned the Butterfly (three stars), Cinder House (four stars), The Fortunate Fall (four stars), The Isle in the Silver Sea (three stars), The Everlasting (five stars), Sunward (four stars)

When They Burned the Butterfly
This was an incredibly frustrating read, because the first few chapters were stunning, and the last few chapters were also really good, but the middle just wasn't a patch on either. It's like the plot kicked in and suddenly all that rich atmosphere and character work just fell away and instead everything just felt so flat and generic, with an annoying tendency to tell us about an emotional revelation a character had had without showing them having it or the journey that got them there. I do wonder if something went awry in the editing process, because it's also a very messy book - plot threads and characters are dropped, it doesn't always make sense on a sentence level, the main character's significant tattoo moves from her breastbone to her collarbone etc.

It also tries to have its cake and eat it with regards to having a lesbian lead in 1970s Singapore - the main character and her girlfriend at one point are given a magazine with quotes from members of Singapore's burgeoning lesbian community, and we're told it's meaningful at least to the girlfriend, but everyone in the book has been so incredibly neutral about the fact of their relationship (including the main character herself, who has absolutely no feelings negative, positive or mixed about the realisation that she's a lesbian) that it just doesn't land.

I will be keeping an eye out for what this author does next, because this book had so much potential and she's still very early in her career, but this book just wasn't it.

Cinder House
Really great Cinderella-meets-the-Gothic-novel novella. I wish it had been just a hair longer, to flesh out two important secondary characters and their relationship more, and to tie off a dangling plot thread, but otherwise, loved it.

The Fortunate Fall
Absolutely fantastic. This is a mid-nineties cyberpunk novel, recently reissued, and while it has unavoidably dated in parts, it still feels so fresh and alive. Its two main strengths for me were its sense of humour (I feel like a lot of its contemporaries were a bit po-faced, this isn't) and the ending: it eschews a more superficial happy ending in order to stick to and fully crystallise its central theme, that people matter more than ideas, in a way that ultimately felt more true and more hopeful than the alternative.

The author has a second novel coming out next year, I'm very excited for it.

The Isle in the Silver Sea
Sadly this was a bit of a mess. It was very readable, and it has some great ideas, but overall I was left with the sense that it hadn't quite figured out what it wanted to be, or how to get there - there's a moment towards the end where it makes an explicit thesis statement, and I could see a lot of things in the rest of the book that could back that statement up, but there was also a lot in there that wasn't doing anything at all: it wasn't so much a crystalisation of what had gone before, but more a sort of "yeah, ok, I suppose so" moment.

I originally wrote here that I thought the romance hurt it, but actually I think the romance suffered from the same problem as the rest of the book: lots of potential, but the narrative continually seemed to be pulled away from the interesting and the specific towards something more generic. With the romance, it felt like it took a situation with a lot of potential for conflict and interest (they've known they were fated to fall in love since before they met, how do they feel about the fact that they seem to be falling in love for real? What does "for real" even mean in this context?) and then just... didn't really dig into that at all. The whole book just felt like it kept gesturing at some really interesting stuff, but then it would swerve away to some easily overcome plot obstacle instead of getting into anything that could be in any way meaty or difficult.

It also had a bit of a case of not caring about anyone who wasn't a named character - part of the tale that Simran and Vina are fated to play out involves Vina laying waste to the countryside, burning villages and presumably killing a lot of people, but neither she nor the book seem to have any feelings about that at all. And when we're told that destroying a tale destroys part of the Isle, no one seems to be in any way concerned about the people who were living there, and none of this factors into how Simran and Vina feel about either giving into or resisting their story.

The setting was potentially really interesting - a sort of perpetual Elizabethan present under the Queen Undying, but with deliberate anachronisms - but again, the lack of development meant it was just "vaguely Tudor but showers and same-sex marriage exist" (the book wasn't clear on whether it was a queernorm world or whether being queer meant you were marginalised). It also had a lot of different magical elements thrown in, between the tales themselves, witches, cunning people, fae, misc other powers etc, but without any sense of whether and how it all interacted.

It was just all so frustrating. There was a really good book under there, but it needed a lot more tightening up, pruning and refocusing.

(Some time after writing this it occurred to me that the Arthuriana aspects might have made me more judgy than I would otherwise have been? Like, I am judgy and mean about books sometimes, this is a known fact and because of the love I bear them, but I have particularly high standards for Arthuriana.)

The Everlasting
Time loops! Lady knights! The danger and power of a simplified version of history being told as truth! What does freedom really mean! This was an absolute banger and I loved every minute of it.

Sunward
I've bounced off a lot of the cosy books I've tried (eg Murder by Memory in November), but this one really worked for me and I can't quite work out what's different. I think it managed a good balance of the stakes being personal (and comparatively small scale compared to what else was going on in the world) whilst also really mattering, both to the main character and in terms of the possible implications of the world at large. The book's about a space courier who also fosters baby artificial intelligences who haven't quite settled yet, and it does a great job of making the baby bots idiosyncratic without being self consciously cutesy, which really worked for me. (Her current foster named herself Agatha Panza von Sparkles, so I did have concerns going in.) Anyway, I liked this a lot, would be interested in more in this universe or from this author.