Bookpost 2025
Bookpost 2025
Here are the books I read in 2025 and what I thought about them.
A Distant Mirror: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman
When I was in college, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on 14th-century chivalric literature and quoted this work's introduction in it despite not having read the book entirely. In 2025 I corrected that.
As I remember, part of my thesis was pondering how knights of the time squared dedication to violence with the dedication to Christian peace and charity. What did these men think of violence, their chosen profession?
Tuchman's work squares with my eventual conclusion: They thought it was fucking sick, dude. Some peoples' impression of the Dark Ages was that everybody was dumb, but Tuchman deftly avoids this, emphasizing instead that a lot of the leaders were immature, in many cases teenagers and young adults themselves. I recommend the book to anyone who wants to understand the period better, for hobbies or otherwise.
Broken Harbor & The Secret Place - Tana French
I read these at separate points of the year, but I've grouped them together. They're both books in French's "Dublin Murder Squad" series: they're dependable genre fiction, neo-noir mysteries set in contemporary Ireland. French has good prose and a knack for characters with fun perspectives and narration (who, satisfying the genre element, always say suspenseful things near the end of chapters).
Of the two, I somewhat preferred The Secret Place, which leverages that by featuring a previous protagonist (Frank Mackey) returning as something of an antagonist -- his daughter is a suspect in his protege's make-it-or-break-it case. Mackey's duplicity (which made him a compelling noirish protagonist) becoming an obstacle for a different protagonist we also want to root for was fun. The high school girls central to the case, too, all have different characters, but all felt like authentic kids of that age -- starting to think, inexpertly and self-consciously, like adults.
I wish it had a better title, though. I expect every mystery has a place involved that's secret, you know? It's a very forgettable name.
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
This book was awesome. I generally fuck with the gothic and reading this just sort of helped validate that. The plot thrills, and kept me continuously guessing (despite that I'd already been spoiled on a few details). All the bits with St. John Rivers made me fucking squirm. Top-shelf stuff. I liked it much better than Vilette.
The Fifth Season - N. K. Jemison
This book was a frustrating one for me. It took some time to get going, at about 100 pages, and before it did, it felt under-edited, and oddly dated in terms of tropes. I'm unsure if I'll read the rest of the trilogy.
It owes a good deal to Ursula Le Guin. The book's setting subjects, extraterrestrial humans who have an extra sense for geological activity, could have come from her Hainish Cycle. Some of the people are wizards, and they resemble those of "Earthsea." Those wandering wizards control seismic energy -- and this is the subject of one of the short stories in Tales of Earthsea. It's sort of a lot. A fourth similarity, which is a significant spoiler, confirmed the influence, but until that point, those similarities and some tropes made the book feel derivative.
I might have an unfair distaste for second-person narratives, and, frustratingly, one of the book's three early narrative threads is insistently second-person, from the perspective of a mother grieving a child. This leads to uncomfortable bits where you are literally informed that you feel very sad and so on. I don't think this was a good choice.
On tropes: maybe powerful wizards society relies but despises felt dated. A second story thread rested on this, following the mentorship of a child wizard whose nasty parents don't want her around, with the twist that Hogwarts is also nasty and so is the mentor. The worst part for me to get over is that wizards in this book manipulate geological power, and a given slur for these wizards is "rogga."
For extra effect, the "hard r" is employed: "roggar." This is only used sardonically by a bitter older wizard to a shocked mentee wizard. I don't have anything to say about race, but this felt... unsubtle. I have nicer things to say beneath the next header.
Spoilers follow this point
The 100-page reveal is that, of Le Guin's work, Jemison has also included "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." It turns out that various innocent-seeming "nodes" previously noted in the book all contain captive wizard Omelas kids, specifically the ones who couldn't be molded by nasty Hogwarts into docility, all continuously tortured to prevent earthquakes. This is revealed in a genuinely disturbing section where the wizard duo discovers a node where the Omelas kid blew himself and his torturers up. It's gruesome and affecting, and it makes the antiwizard sentiment feel grounded. But it takes a long time to get there and some of the fat from the earlier sections could've been trimmed.
Relatedly, the payoff from the POV gimmick is that all three apparent protagonists are the same person at different points of her life, leading up to the start of the second-person narrative. I'm not sure if the pov-thing was really necessary for this payoff -- she employs an alias or two, and I only started suspecting the connection close to the reveal. It didn't feel cheap, but the POV thing cheapened it.
End of Spoiler Zone
The Fifth Season feels like if you take the Le Guin corpus and sort of vigorously combine it with your doorstopper fantasy sagas full of Proper Nouns. For the moment, I'm likely to remain curious about the next two books.
Dune and Dune Messiah - Frank Herbert
This was my second stab at Dune, after I pushed my way through it as a high school idiot wondering where all the fucking sand-worms were. As an adult revisiting it, I really regret that. The drama of figuring out if House Atriedes had a mole in it, who it was, the dramatic irony of who it couldn't be, and so on -- in short, everything before they even get to the desert -- I loved all of that, this time.
I've heard other people talk about Messiah as like a coda to the first book, and they're right to: My main quibble is that it felt odd for how important the Tleilaxu were here that they didn't come up at all in the first book. I'm definitely going to come back and at least read one or two more of these, as I'm given to understand shit gets even weirder.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
This one was fun and easy to read. I know it's being made into a movie, and I think it'll adapt well. I'm about to say some mean things about it, but this is my honest final verdict. It is fun.
OK, gloves off. The protagonist's amnesia is annoying. It is textbook Hollywood amnesia, which is not caused by anything important and is cured by experiencing a series of conveniently-timed flashback revelations.
The book can thus be split into roughly two interleaved parts: Guy in space solves problems, and people on Earth in flashbacks. The space parts are fun. The Earth parts are largely bad: Weir is not very good at characters. The Earth parts eventually go away to focus on the space plot. Unfortunately, before they do, they include the worst courtroom scene ever.
The Worst Courtroom Scene Ever
I won't bury the lede. The courtroom scene in question is a like a wet dream of a tech libertarian. In essence, it's the end of the world, and the U.N. has given a thinly drawn U.N. Girlboss wide discretionary power to void copyright law -- or whatever laws, mostly -- to give the astronauts chosen for a last-ditch save-the-world scheme whatever they need for their ship.
At first, the book (sensibly) notes that nobody bothers to contest this, because what kind of asshole wants the bad pub of "WB sues Granny $4 bajillion for a limewire mp3" times five billion?
But then it forgets this happened so U.N. Girlboss can show up in a courtroom and say "we're trying to save the world if you try and have a trial I'll have military (every military ever) kill you." Then everybody except Mean Mister Judge Copyright stood & clapped, and an eagle named "Information Wants to be Free" flew in the window and shed a tear on a copy of the GNU Public License, and I really wish I were exaggerating more. It is very bad.
And, add to that: It is reiterated that the Hail Mary has every copyrighted work on its computers, as well as works in the public domain. My question for Mr. Weir if I meet him, and I think he might enjoy this kind of speculative math problem, is: Precisely how many kilograms of hardware do you think it would take to store all recorded pornography ever?
Spoilers unrelated to unfathomable quantities of hardcore digital smut
Rocky, an alien engineer our protagonist encounters, is a highlight. There's a short section where we learn all about Rocky -- he's a sort of rock-and-lava creature from a dense planet with a very thick atmosphere, he communicates with something like music, he uses a base-6 number system -- and our protagonist has to work all this out, like a mini "Arrival." This part's great! I wish it were a little longer. But Weir is invested in other things, like copyright law, and I'm unsure if he could keep it up anyway.
A good chunk of the rest of the book involves solving space problems with made-up materials provided by Rocky. These parts glide by without complaint from me, but I appreciated that the made-up materials eventually have made-up issues that are creatively solved.
The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin
This was an exceptional book. Shevek and his Odoism have been firmly lodged in my brain: It's somewhat rare for me, now, to see any kind of injustice without being able to think about how such a thing would be handled on Anarres, Le Guin's anarchic "ambiguous utopia."
Because I want you to read it, a brief synopsis: Shevek, a scientist, of Anarres, a moon colonized by "Odoist" anarchists, is the first such colonist to return to Urras, its Earthlike mother planet, in almost a hundred years. The ensuing culture shock is a risk, and an opportunity, for the entire system.
The success of the book relies, I think, on Le Guin's portrayal of Shevek's anti-"propertarian" ethos. The guy isn't a politician -- he's a physicist -- which makes his commitment to Odoism seem pure, and his discomfort with contradictions of Anarras' and Urras' societies convincing.
And: The Dispossessed has a love story in it, an intriguing inclusion for investigating a society where you can't even say "Be Mine." (There are no personal pronouns on Anarres.) Shevek's journey to Urras has no precedent: It's not clear he'll ever be able to come back and reunite with Takver, his... well, a scientist who loves him. Salting this wound is that the two spend, by necessity, a lengthy period of their pre-mission relationship communicating by Anarres' irregular postal service. If you have experience in LDRs or yearning more generally, this stuff hits. It squeezes my heart just thinking about it again.
To close on a lighter note, I've learned of the following remark made by Le Guin in an interview about the book that this review would be incomplete without:
Interviewer: If you could make a change to anything you’ve written over the years, what would it be?
ULG: "In The Dispossessed, I would mention the communal pickle barrels at street corners in the big towns, restocked by whoever in the community has made or kept more pickles than they need. I knew about the free pickles all along, but never could fit them into the book."
This is how you know Le Guin is a real one: a lesser artist would have been (understandably) enraptured by the communal pickle barrel concept and left it in. Great art, however, requires sacrifices like these.
Final Thoughts
This post is probably already too long, so I'm not going to include the books I reread (Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley; The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins; or Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett). Shelley is among the greatest of all time, of course; Collins is highly underrated, and worth a read if you like mysteries and the gothic; and Pratchett everybody knows about.