All My Favorite 2025 Reads

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Last week, I posted a big long list of Everything I Read In 2025. This week, I’ll be discussing some of my favorites from that list, categorized—per usual—in super normal ways, like Favorite Reminder that the Ocean is A Terrible Place, Creepiest Damn Book I Read All Year, and Most Cannibalism. (There were more potential nominees for that last one than you might expect!)

Young Matilda from 1996 film, sitting next to a huge stack of books, giggling while reading.

My inner child reading about cannibalism again. Also, giant spiders. Lots of giant spiders in 2025.

As always, I’ll be listing any books I loved reading in 2025, regardless of what year they were actually published. I’m not just gonna ignore a novel I adored because it came out in 2024 cause like. Why?

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1/5/2026: A New Year, Good Boy, and (Presumably) Bronchitis

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Well, 2026 has arrived, and I have spent basically all of it coughing my lungs out. Needless to say, any exercise resolutions have not been met, nor will they be met anytime soon. It doesn’t always feel like the best omen, starting a new year with a Chest Cold of Doom, although I was still trying to be positive about 2026—and then, three days into the year, Trump bombed Venezuela, kidnapped their president, and announced he’d be taking over the country, so. Yes, the positive feelings are in short supply these days. Don’t worry, though; the Democrats and their strongly worded letters are on the case.

In less bitter news, here is a picture of a criminal collapsing on his brother in the most awkward way possible, the big goof.

A black cat awkwardly half collapsed on his sleeping brother, a buff colored cat.

Marlowe’s crimes include multiple counts of murder, killing a small artificial Christmas tree and one or two glass ornaments, as well as poor Captain Kirk, who has finally lost the battle to Mirror Sulu after all. (Sulu—and Guinan, a few feet away— thankfully, survived more or less intact.)

Inspired by the Democratic leadership, I’m considering writing Marlowe a strongly worded letter about his crimes. I’ll be sure to update you about any improvement in his behavior.

WRITING

I’m working on a few things, albeit very, very, slowly right now. I don’t actually wanna talk about them in detail, though, because I’ve become superstitious in my middle age, and talking about a story too soon is increasingly feeling like the kiss of death. I will say that my current shiny is an SF short story. Maybe I’ll even manage to finish a draft of it after I stop trying to cough up my lungs. We’ll see how it goes.

GAMES

I’d kinda let Tiny Bookshop fall by the wayside for the past, oh, month or two, but guess what makes a perfect low stakes game when you’re sick and don’t have the energy to concentrate on shit?

I may have frequently changed the decorations in my shop, but that little skull was my constant companion throughout.

I’m actually kinda glad I dragged my feet a little, and not just because I’ve been feeling lousy. The most recent update came with a bunch of new books to sell, and I always get a kick out of recommending ones I’ve actually read before, like Siren Queen by Nghi Vo or Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle. There are a couple of side quests I never completed, just two or three location stamps, but otherwise I think I got to pretty much everything. It’s amusing that I avoided the beach for so long because some of my favorite side quests and cases came from there. (I absolutely adore that there are mini cases to solve. My dream job, truly, is a bookseller who’s also an amateur detective.)

This game is very cute. I’m glad I finished it, and I did not anticipate how much I’d enjoy decorating my little trailer with plants and manuscripts and spooky shit.

MOVIES

I finally checked out Good Boy, which I enjoyed, although yeesh, it hit harder than I was expecting. The pacing did feel a bit off to me at times, with a few moments that seemed kinda repetitive, but I might feel differently on a second viewing. We had to unexpectedly pause the movie once or twice, and that might have thrown things off.

It’s certainly not a long film, barely more than an hour and ten minutes, which seems like the right call when your main character is a dog. (The best dog. The dog that turns everyone into that one GIF of Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn Nine-Nine.) I really enjoy Indy’s POV, both conceptually and visually, and a couple of the jump scares definitely got me. And the last five minutes or so, just … goddamn. Suing director Ben Leonberg for emotional damages, how dare.

BOOKS

First book of the year: The Undetectables by Courtney Smyth, which already wins for Favorite Tagline: Be Gay. Solve Crimes. Take Naps.

Finally, I’m still working on my Favorite Books of 2025 list. Hopefully, that should be out later this week!

The Great 2025 Reading List – Novellas, Novels, Graphic Novels, Manga, and Non-Fiction

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Well, it’s almost 2026! Time to reflect on the past year, which has been, uh.

Yeah. It’s been that.

I’m definitely not going to finish any more books before tomorrow, especially now that I’m sick—yay, what a fabulous way to spend New Year’s—so here we have it: the Great List of Everything I Read in 2025. (Not including fanfic or short stories/novelettes—I fell so behind on the latter that I didn’t even complete a  Favorite Short Stories List, which honestly kinda bummed me out. Well. Resolutions, and all that.)

As always, each of the following books will have an associated quote because a good quote can usually hook me faster than a blurb or plot synopsis. And if you scroll down—a lot—you’ll find a brief discussion of some personal 2025 reading trends, a handful of excellent opening lines, and some upcoming 2026 books that I’m particularly excited about. (Some of which I may have already purchased in B&N’s preorder sale. Look, I didn’t buy all of them, okay? I showed a modicum of restraint.)

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12/15/2025: Birthdays, Award Eligibility, Blue Prince, and Wake Up: Dead Man

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Today’s post is about two weeks belated, and it’s all my own Yuletide’s fault, but I’ll get to that later.

Recently, I had my 40th birthday. What a weird feeling that is. As with all birthdays, you feel exactly the same as you did the day before, but you’ve also hit a new decade now, and there’s this persistent feeling that you should be, ugh, taking a hard look at/reevaluating all your life’s choices. Gah, it’s annoying.

My actual birthday was lovely, though: I did some shopping at the local book and game stores, saw Wake Up Dead Man in theater, and treated myself to a very nice French restaurant. Thanksgiving was also unusually relaxed this year, which I am always grateful for. I did not make turkey, but I did have all the important carb side dishes, and really, isn’t that what matters in the end?

Considering that this post is two weeks late, I will give you double the cats.

Marlowe, alas, has refused to sit in the same cat tree basket. No appreciation for parallels or symmetry at all.

WRITING

God, speaking of the time to reevaluate things. It’s the end of the year, which generally means the dreaded Award Eligibility post, but … well. Primarily, I was working on my novel this year, so short stories kinda went by the wayside. In fact, the only story I had out in 2025 was “Four Questions With Something Like God,” which was published in The Dark back in January. I do wish I’d managed to publish more, but I also like this one and recommend it to anyone who enjoys very short reads, interactive fiction, and stories about raging against the dying of the light. Consider this my eligibility post, I guess? (It’s eligible for all the usuals: Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, the Hugos, the Nebulas, etc. I have absolutely zero expectations here, but hey. I’ve been surprised before.)

Case in point: I got my second ever award nomination in 2025 (for “Jinx”) with the British Fantasy Awards. I also got my first ever story selected for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (“The Weight of Your Own Ashes”). And recently, I signed a contract on having one of my short stories translated into Chinese. (I’ll update with more details upon publication, but it might be quite some time before that happens.) I mention these things mostly to remind myself, honestly. Querying agents is rough, particularly when you don’t have anything official on the horizon, and it’s very easy to fall into the trap of wah, I’m not accomplishing anything unlike all my cooler, smarter, better friends, particularly at this time of the year. (Not just milestone birthdays, either, but also the holidays and New Years. Bah. Who’s up for just skipping to February?)

On the plus side, I’ve been having fun working on my Yuletide fanfiction this year—and by fun, I mean absolutely fucking screeching at my ever-growing word count. This, my friends, is why I haven’t posted anything on the blog for a couple of weeks—I’ve been too busy trying to wrangle my Yuletide story into submission by the deadline. I want to be very clear here: to complete your challenge assignment, your story only has to be a thousand words. That’s it. People obviously can and do write more, but I cannot stress enough that you’re only required to write a story that is, at minimum, 1,000 words.

I finally uploaded my fanfic yesterday. It was literally a novella. 🤦‍♀️

MOVIES

As I mentioned earlier, I saw Wake Up Dead Man on my birthday. Could I have waited to see this on Netflix, where it literally just appeared a few days ago? Sure, but I love the Knives Out movies—ugh, marketing, they should obviously be the Benoit Blanc movies—and Mekaela and I didn’t want to wait. Glad we didn’t, honestly, because I enjoyed this film quite a bit. All of the BB movies have a bit of a different feel to them, which I enjoy. I’d say this one is a bit darker, perhaps, than the others? Certainly more interested in theology, although there is a core kindness to all three that I enjoy. Rian Johnson is very good at writing interesting movies for the moment that don’t feel horrifically on the nose, or at least not to me. Wake Up Dead Man never loses sight of being an entertaining whodunnit (and a locked room mystery, too—some of which I got right away, other parts I missed entirely), but it’s also very much a story about empathy, and I appreciate where the story lands on that front.

It’s also longer than its predecessors, although it didn’t actually feel long to me, which is always a neat trick—particularly because Blanc, himself, doesn’t come on scene for a while. Excellent acting all around, particularly by Daniel Craig and Josh O’Connor, but the whole cast (Josh Brolin, Glenn Close, Mila Kunis, Kerry Washington, Thomas Haden Church, Jeremy Renner, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, and—in a small but wonderful role—Jeffrey Wright) is extremely solid. Also, it’s just a good looking movie. The lighting in this film is both deeply, intentionally unsubtle and absolutely gorgeous.

As always, I appreciate the ties to golden age detective fiction. I kept thinking of one novel in particular (well, two novels actually), which I won’t discuss here, but the book that’s specifically mentioned in the film is The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr. This is only unfortunate because they highly imply the solution of that novel through dialogue, and I haven’t had the opportunity to read it yet. Mind you, I’m not actually complaining about a film spoiling a 90-year-old book. I’m only frustrated because I’ve tried to read this book, only to never find it. I’ve been in whole ass specialty bookstores dedicated to nothing but mystery novels and couldn’t find one of the most infamous locked room mysteries of all time. (You can get it on Amazon, it seems, although I prefer not to buy books on Amazon, but if you want a physical copy, it takes 3-4 weeks—which is practically an eternity by their weird ass standards.)

GAMES

So, I mentioned last month that I started playing Blue Prince. Well, unfortunately, I’m afraid to report that it has taken over my whole life.

Screenshot of Blue Prince, Day 24. An illustrated picture of a manor with lots of red bricks and flags. Along with stats, text reads: Scarlet Shopping Center of the Dead.

You don’t even understand. I have over 100 screenshots of potential clues. My sister has pages and pages of notes. This game is so involved, with so many layers and so much backstory. I love it.

In Blue Prince, your great-uncle has died and you’re set to inherit his strange and wondrous manor—if you can find the mysterious Room 46. Each day, you have a certain number of steps to explore the house, and each day the house resets, so the floor plan is never the same. There are puzzles upon puzzles. The lore unwraps bit by bit, and there is so much of it. Even after you complete the main objective (and it took us a while), there is still so much more to do and explore—I am not in the least bit surprised that this game took eight years to make. I’m still enjoying the hell out of it, and I’d highly recommend it for anyone who likes puzzle, strategy, and mystery games. It is a time commitment, but it’s a pretty great one.

11/6/2025: Until Dawn, Crime Scene Zero, and A Bit of Welcome Hope

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Well, holy shit, some actual good news on Election Day. Quite a bit of it, actually: California overwhelmingly voted to pass Prop 50, Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, and all over the country, from school board to legislative to gubernatorial elections, people showed up at the polls to say fuck you to Trump and the Republicans and their hateful ass policies. In a year full of bad news after bad news after—somehow—even more fucking bad news, Tuesday night was such an immense relief. I will revel in the hope while I can.

Also—and this is considerably less important—but some friends and I went out for trivia last night, and we won, so that was delightful. (I was absolutely zero help on the music category, but—despite being burned out on them for the last several years—superhero movies are in my wheelhouse.)

Also, here is a picture of a cat who has just been awoken by another cat’s antics and is staring suspiciously at the offending noise:

As for everything else that’s been going on …

WRITING

Well, the British Fantasy Awards came and went, and …. I lost. But I also lost to Eugenia Triantafyllou, who is literally one of my absolute favorite short story writers. So not only am I not surprised—her novelette is excellent, not to mention a well-deserved finalist for several other prestigious awards—I’m also super happy for Eugenia herself. If you haven’t already had the chance to check out “Loneliness Universe,” you should do so here for free at Uncanny.

Also—and I promise this is, maybe, the last time I bring this up—The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025, edited by Nnedi Okorafor, is now officially out for purchase. Fun fact: my story “The Weight of Your Own Ashes” comes right after S.L. Huang’s “The River Judge,” which I’m pointing out because one, “The River Judge” is a great story, and two,  S.L. Huang is another one of my absolute favorite writers, and I’m basking in the glory of proximity today.

BOOKS

To presumably no one’s surprise, I read a fair amount of horror last month, much of it fantastic. My favorite October read was probably The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling. If you like weird, cannibalistic, medieval, and/or queer horror, this one might be for you, by which I mean, go read it.

GAMES

Blue Prince finally became available on Mac! I’m not very far into it yet, but I’m liking it so far. Mystery and puzzle games are my jam, and honestly, any story where someone has to explore a strange manor is a big plus for me. I do suspect this one is going to take a while to beat—damn my poor spatial reasoning skills—but I’m looking forward to working at it.

I’m also still playing Tiny Bookshop, mostly in between doing other stuff. My conclusions thus far are these: Anne is adorable,  Klaus is adorable, Tilde/Maryam are cute as either a ship or as diehard lifelong besties, Fern needs to stop requesting fantasy books without magic because my inventory is fucking limited, okay, and also, hell yeah, I’m not only crushing it at selling books, I’m funding the local theater and music scene. Surely, this cozy video game skill set will transfer over into real life and I can finally quit my quote-unquote day job? Surely?

MOVIES

Well, I watched a bunch of movies for Horror Bingo, obviously. Outside of that, we ended up checking out a couple more HB movies on Halloween: Until Dawn and The Conference. Until Dawn is very messy and continues the, er, proud tradition of video game adaptations that have fuck all to do with their source material. (It does have Peter Stormare and a couple of very small references to the game, but otherwise … not so much.) Some bizarre choices aside, though—including the feeling that a lot got left on the cutting room floor—I did have fun watching this one, and I thought the cast was overall very enjoyable. (I was especially amused to see Ji-young Yoo and Ella Rubin, given that I just watched them last month in Freaky Tales and Fear Street: Prom Queen, respectively.) Also, I suspect I sympathized with Abe (Belmont Cameli) more than I was supposed to. Like, at one point was he being a total asshole? Absolutely. But other times? Dude was just making sense, I’m sorry.

Meanwhile, The Conference is a Swedish slasher comedy that I enjoyed. It’s a cautionary tale about going on a team building work trip—already a horror story all on its own—warning that if you do, you have a decent shot at being brutally murdered by a vengeful guy dressed up like your store mascot. Some of the violence definitely made me cringe (in the best way), and I enjoyed a lot of the supporting characters: Nadja (Bahar Pars) is the best, and I also liked the performances by Adam Lundgren, Claes Hartelius, and Eva Melander, too. I don’t know that The Conference would make my Top 5 Horror Comedies of All Time—I mean, there are just so many good ones—but I definitely think it deserves a higher rating than it has on, say, IMDb, what the hell.

TV

Crime Scene Zero

For the most part, I really enjoyed this Korean variety show. This appears to be the fifth season or iteration of it, but the first I’ve had access to, and I’d happily watch more: in each episode, there are five regular cast members and one guest actor. One person takes on the role of the Detective, while everyone else is a Suspect (and one, of course, the Murderer). Everybody digs around the various recreated scenes, looking for clues as they try and solve (or try to frame someone else for) the murder. Actually, it looks extremely fun to do and reminds me of all the murder mystery party games I loved playing as a kid. I like the whole cast and all the guests, and the cases themselves are mostly a blast: twisty, dark, and usually more than a little ludicrous.

My main problem is the fourth case (warning for SPOILERS and transphobia), where the victim is a transgender woman who’s also a con artist, going by different names and genders to trick, seduce, and blackmail various people. By no means do I think we should be restricting con artist characters—everyone’s favorite—to cis people, but the execution of that kind of thing is extremely tricky, and I don’t think it was handled well here at all. (The pronouns also switch nonstop, but I don’t know how much of that is a translation issue—I didn’t think gendered pronouns were used so much in Korean, although I could absolutely be mistaken about that.) The victim isn’t killed because she’s trans, at least, but she is murdered pretty violently, and I just … I really wish they hadn’t gone this way.

Aside from the fourth case, though, I really liked this show. I’m also extremely ready for someone to open up a Solve the Case style escape room in my area. That would be amazing.

Horror Bingo 2025: Crimson Peak

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Crimson Peak came out in 2015, but I never got around to seeing it, probably because—despite my love for weird houses and fabulous costumes—I can be a bit hit or miss on gothic fiction. Ten years later, though, I have finally sat down to check this one out.

Honestly, it’s unlikely to ever be a favorite of mine. But it’s still a decent watch and—predictably—goddamn gorgeous.

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Horror Bingo 2025: Heretic

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While I’ve been having a great time with Horror Bingo, as I always do, I’ve noticed that I’ve been a little more mid on this year’s movies than usual. More Rocky Roads and Neapolitans and such, while the majority of Chocolates have been given out to old favorites. It’s not really a problem—I just enjoy watching horror movies, even if they don’t end up fully working for me—but I have been a bit worried about being too overly negative or hypercritical.

Thus it was a bit of a relief to watch Heretic over the weekend and realize how much I enjoyed this one.

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