2025 - The Year's Reading In Review

I know, I'm hardly ever around here any more, am I? Perhaps I ought to just retire SOTSOGM, and yet--I dunno, it's been something I've "done" for a very long time now, even when I haven't been doing it.

Yet again, this year I kept track of everything I read (not including magazines and RPG rulebooks). I'd love to offer you a cool reason, but the truth is I've reached an age where keeping a reading log of some kind helps me remember what I've read and what I haven't; even so, there's one book of short fiction in this list that I picked up thinking I hadn't read it when in fact I had.

In similar vein, I've been tracking my movie watching. And this year I also made a point--in this case, for the fun of sharing--of logging all the music I purchased this year.

Those lists will show up here after the start of the new year; I might watch a movie or two in the next few days, and there's a slim chance I could buy some music before next week. After finishing Volume 2 of Playing At the World, I'm making a point of not starting any new books until 2026, and anything I read or re-read over the next few days will be something like an online short story or an article in a story or magazine.

In the Mad Mountains	Joe R. Lansdale	fiction/ short stories
Gaudy Night	Dorothy L. Sayers	fiction
Whose Body?	Dorothy L. Sayers	fiction
Clouds of Witness	Dorothy L. Sayers	fiction
Unnatural Death	Dorothy L. Sayers	fiction	a.k.a. The Dawson Pedigree in the U.S.
Billy Summers	Stephen King	fiction
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club	Dorothy L. Sayers	fiction
Strong Poison	Dorothy L. Sayers	fiction
Five Red Herrings	Dorothy L. Sayers	fiction	a.k.a. Suspicious Characters in the U.S.
The Best of Joe R. Lansdale	Joe R. Lansdale	fiction/ short stories
The World of Lore: Dreadful Places	Aaron Mahnke	folklore
Have His Carcase	Dorothy L. Sayers	fiction
Murder Must Advertise	Dorothy L. Sayers	fiction
Nine Princes In Amber	Roger Zelazny	fiction	reread
In the Flesh	Clive Barker	fiction/ short stories	read/reread*
The Wood at Midwinter	Susanna Clarke	fable
The Guns of Avalon	Roger Zelazny	fiction	reread
Sign of the Unicorn	Roger Zelazny	fiction	reread
The Nine Tailors	Dorothy L. Sayers	fiction
The Hand of Oberon	Roger Zelazny	fiction	reread
Busman's Honeymoon	Dorothy L. Sayers	fiction
The Courts of Chaos	Roger Zelazny	fiction	reread
Behind the Death Ball	editing credited to Alfred Hitchcock	fiction/ short stories
Careless People	Sarah Wynn-Williams	nonfiction/ memoir
Lord Peter	Dorothy L. Sayers	fiction/ short stories
The Searching Dead	Ramsey Campbell	fiction
A Head Full of Ghosts	Paul Tremblay	fiction
Duma Key	Stephen King	fiction
Weird Tales (Vol. 1)	selected and introduced by Peter Haining	fiction/ short stories	collection of stories, poems, and reader mail published in Weird Tales 1934-39
Watergate: A New History	Garrett M. Graff	nonfiction
The Bloody Chamber	Angela Carter	fiction/ short stories
The Unworthy	Agustina Bazterrica [translated by Sarah Moses]	fiction	translated from Spanish [orig. title   Las indignas]
Playing at the World 2E (Volume 1: The Invention of Dungeons & Dragons)	Jon Peterson	nonfiction
Weird Tales	edited and with an introduction by Leo Margulies	fiction/ short stories
Later	Stephen King	fiction
Born to the Dark	Ramsey Campbell	fiction
Alfred Hitchcock's Games Killers Play	editing credited to Alfred Hitchcock	fiction/ short stories
Bardic Voices: The Lark & The Wren	Mercedes Lackey	fiction
The Way of the Worm	Ramsey Campbell	fiction
The Hamilton Scheme	William Hogeland	nonfiction
Alfred Hitchcock's Noose Report	editing credited to Alfred Hitchcock	fiction/ short stories
Echoes--The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories	edited by Ellen Datlow	fiction/ short stories
The Monsters--Mary Shelley & the Curse of Frankenstein	Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler	nonfiction
The New Gothic	edited by Beth K. Lewis	fiction/ short stories	read/reread(?)**
Colonel Markesan and Less Pleasant People	August Derleth & Mark Schorer	fiction/ short stories
Lord Edgware Dies	Agatha Christie	fiction	a.k.a. Thirteen at Dinner in the U.S.; reread
The Cutting Room--Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen	edited by Ellen Datlow	fiction/ short stories
Murder on the Orient Express	Agatha Christie	fiction	reread
The ABC Murders	Agatha Christie	fiction	reread
Cards On the Table	Agatha Christie	fiction	reread
Playing at the World 2E (Volume 2: Three Pillars of Role-Playing Games)	Jon Peterson	nonfiction

 

 

*In the Flesh is a collection I don't think I've previously read, but I'm quite sure I've previously read two of the stories ("The Forbidden" and "Babel's Children") included in the four-story collection. (While the volume is labeled a collection of short stories, three of the four are really novella-length or close to it.) 

 

**I was travelling, found myself momentarily sans book in hand, and pulled up an ebook out of cloud storage, thinking it was one I hadn't read. Several stories in, and I realized I'd at least started it. Several more stories in, and I realized I may not have finished it whenever I'd begun reading it. So maybe it's a reread, maybe it isn't, or maybe just parts of it were. I've now finished it this time, in any case. Nice collection, no misses and some palpable hits. 

 

What to say about the year's reading, if anything?

Well, for one thing, it somehow feels like I read less, though the list this year is about the same length as last year's and with various magazines and such, it's very possible I read more this year that didn't quite count for my record-keeping purposes.

For another--and this may be why it felt like I read less, it seems I read a bit more anthologized fiction this year than I have in year's past, which wasn't any kind of conscious decision, it's just the way things went. I also may have read a little less non-fiction this year, which wasn't really a conscious choice despite the comments some friends and acquaintances made about last year's list, to the effect that they were surprised I read so much fiction, possibly buying into some kind of stereotype about middle-aged boys and history books (especially military history; and/or are we supposed to be reading about Ancient Rome for some reason? I feel like that was a meme I kept seeing on social media).

One fun thing was finally getting around to basically binge-reading the Lord Peter Wimsey books by Dorothy L. Sayers, which was enormous fun notwithstanding the midcentury English lady racism, antisemitism, and classism that's baked into most writers of her sort. I was pleasantly surprised, notwithstanding the issues with Sayers, to find that she'd created a detective with more depth than he needed--Lord Peter's WWI PTSD being a significant issue throughout the series, and that she'd made the interesting choice, when she decided to off her series protagonist, by doing it with marriage instead of, say, throwing him off a waterfall, and that she put a little more thought into it than abruptly introducing a nemesis from out of nowhere who is exactly like the consulting detective, only evil. To that end, we also have the delightful fact--widely understood, but I don't mind stating the obvious--that the character who brings about Lord Peter's withdrawal from detective work ends up largely taking over the series and becoming its most interesting character, and I'll count myself amongst those who find Gaudy Night  to be the best in the series (and not merely because I started there mostly by accident before going back and reading things from the start).

Anybody who's bothered and made it this far may have noticed that while the year began (ish) with Sayers, it ended with a re-read of Dame Agatha. One of the pleasant surprises of the year was a break in my decade-long writer's block and I'm sort of gathering some ideas for a loopy version of an English Manor Mystery, and revisiting M. Poirot for the vibes seemed like a worthy thing. Alas, I'm afraid to say I'd somehow forgotten or (having read most of the Christies I've read as a child in the 1980s), she was actually even more racist, antisemitic, and classist than Sayers was. Anyway, I reread one of those old Avenel Books 5-in-1 anthologies they used to put out, a collection I've had since the early 1980s, and I expect to start the new year with an anthology of Miss Marple books belonging to my wife that I've probably read back in the day, though I'm not completely sure now.

Other thoughts before I wrap?

There are several Ellen Datlow anthologies in the list, and I can't recommend her collections enough. She has brilliant taste and you can't go wrong with her.

I'm not sure what I'd put down as the best thing I read in 2025, but it might be the Angela Carter. The Bloody Chamber is exactly the kind of thing I would have and could have and should have read in college in the 1990s, and (mea culpa) somehow I did not, despite being indirectly acquainted with her work via The Company of Wolves (which is an excellent movie and worth seeking out if you don't know it; parts of it actually are adapted from The Bloody Chamber).

The Zelazny re-read wound up being more worthwhile than I expected; I'd picked up a two-volume collection of the first Amber cycle at a used bookstore quite a while back, remembering that I'd enjoyed them in high school or maybe even junior high and that my D&D friends at the time were as obsessed with them as I was; I'm pleasantly pleased to be able to say that they actually hold up better than I would have guessed and even have a little more depth as pulp fantasy than I might have credited them for or even noticed when I read them at 15 or 16 or 14 or somewhere around then.

Putting asterisks on the mid-century fiction's issues and daggers on the unevenness of some of the non-Datlow edited multi-author anthologies,  I don't believe I actually read any bad books this year; I read any genuinely bad books. Or unenjoyably bad books, I might say: the Derleth/Schorer collection is by no means good, though even August Derleth acknowledges that in his introduction to the collection, but it's mostly fun in an undemanding way if you can make it through the racism and sexism of mid-20th Century Weird Fiction. (And, hey, Derleth's racism is not nearly so bad as Lovecraft's was, whatever that's worth.) 

I went on a little bit of a jag of finding out-of-print cheeseball anthologies at Internet Archive--the kinds of things I used to pick up from the school and public libraries as a kid (it occurs to me that if there's a connecting thread to much of this year's reading, it might be how 2025 drove me to the comforts of things I liked to read as a child; huh, that's interesting, now that I see it). And those anthologies are, frankly, uneven; a heralded or unheralded gem of pulp fiction might be followed by something rightly forgotten or merely forgettable. But again, none of it was really bad; it was more that you might read a thing that left you saying, "Well, that was certainly something that appeared in print between 1930 and 1960 and was chosen for republication in the mid-1960s or early 1970s," but the virtue of those anthologies was/is that you just turn the page and hope the next thing Robert Arthur or whoever was pretending to be "Alfred Hitchcock" that day was a secretly-great classic of the form.

This leads me to close by noting that of the anthologies I read this year, Datlow's Echoes is a damn fine collection that includes one of the best ghost stories I think I've ever read, Gemma Files' "The Puppet Motel." If you pick up anything on my list that isn't Angela Carter, that might be the one to grab a copy of.

And with that, I'll wrap. See you in a few days with my lists of movies and music. Thanks for dropping in.