Now that 2025 is ending what has been your favorite book you’ve read in the last year?
Mine is Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (audiobook is the way to go!)
Lesser known: Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle. Satire Horror. It was a fun ride.
All Sinners Bleed (mystery noir) by S.A. Cosby and My Friends by Frederik Backman are also my notable mentions
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 wanted a place to talk about them, so I just made !dcc@piefed.world in case you’re interested.
I’m reading Dungeon Crawler Carl at the moment and it’s great and completely bonkers! Just started book 4 today.
I wanted a place to talk about them, so I just made !dcc@piefed.world in case you’re interested.
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
Definitely the Dungeon Crawler Carl books. Currently listening to the Bobiverse series and it is a close second.
I wanted a place to talk about them, so I just made !dcc@piefed.world in case you’re interested.
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 wanted a place to talk about them, so I just made !dcc@piefed.world in case you’re interested.
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.
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.
The Lies of Locke Lamora and its sequels are wonderful reads. Loved the world and characters and has a fun gripping plot.
Those books are fantastic
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon or Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. The former is an incredibly important read for understanding nationalist anticolonial wars of liberation and the latter is a deeply affecting account of slavery. Harriet Jacobs’ experience is genuinely horrifying and disturbingly common.
Upvote for Fanon. I read Wretched of the Earth as my first book of '25, and A Dying Colonialism late in '24. If you haven’t already, I’d definitely recommend The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s only novel and his 2024 pseudomemoir The Message.
Thanks for the recommendations. My list grows ever longer
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
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.
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.
The Devils. Fantastic mix of grim dark and fantasy.
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.
