Our reads in December 2025

Another month,another pile of books to enjoy. Share your reading plans for December

Dusty's TBR for December
Robert Jackson Bennett - Tainted Cup✔
Roger Zelazny - Damnation Alley✔
Lester Del Rey - The Year after Tomorrow ✔
Lois McMaster Bujold - Winterfair Gifts✔
(plus another group mini challenge crimes set in Egypt)
P Djeli Clark - Dead Djinn in Cairo✔
Sheridan Le Fanu - Schalken the Painter✔
Charles Dickens - The Signal Man✔
Paul C Doherty - The Horus Killings ✔
Fiona Veitch Smith - The Pyramid Murders✔

Completed
Bellwether by Connie Willis
The Arcane Gamble of Harvey Walters by Rosemary Jones
Inversions by Iain M. Banks
The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You by Dorothy Bryant

In Progress
Night Lamp by Jack Vance

I have in hand The Society of Unknowable Objects, The Art of Legend, Toward Eternity, The Forbidden Stars, and The Iron Dragon's Mother. Call this month Operation Loose Ends, as three of these books are the conclusion of trilogies; in some cases books I should have dealt with years ago.

My planned SF&F reads for December are:

Royal Assassin and Assassin's Quest by Robin Hobb
The Day of the Triffids by John Windham
Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny
Now Wait For Last Year by Philip K. Dick

Continuing on with the WoT with Towers of Midnight. Also, I am reading the Short Story Advent Calendar from 2023 which we haven’t yet read. We enjoyed doing the family Advent read along last year that we decided to do it again. But the 2025 edition is the 12 days of Xmas and we preferred doing the 25 days of December. So I found an unsold copy at our local independent book store: Porch Light Books. Here is the website for the 2023 stories which includes interviews with the authors: https://www.hingstonandolsen.com/2023.

The month gets off to a great start with a reread of Lois McMaster Bujold's Winterfair Gifts where our dear Miles Vorkosigin finally gets hitched. Its always a delight to sink back into his fun world and meet up with characters who seem like old friends .
Next up will be P Djeli Clark's A Dead Djinn in Cairo.

In my BoSh re-read programme, I shall be starting Other days, other eyes later this afternoon.

Not really scifi, I'm reading A Drop of Corruption. Since the tech is bio-based, maybe it is scifi? I'm finding it quite entertaining.

Currently reading...
•Mortal Love
•Where the Axe Is Buried

Next up:
•The Tainted Cup
•Virtual Girl
•Fungi

Reading this month and also probably the next month (but I’ll see how it goes as I try and wrap-up other reads for the year), a collection of short works by Edgar Allan Poe: Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe I always pegged Poe as supernatural / horror but not sci-fi, so looking forward to this.

I just finished Bellwether, which was great fun, though not much sfnal. Now I've started The Arcane Gamble of Harvey Walters, which doesn't even claim to be sf, but so far seems to lean more to the occult than the sf end of the Lovecraftian milieu.

I've now finished Bob Shaw's Other Days, Other Eyes. The short story that saw Bob first introduce us to 'slow glass', The Light of Other Days remains a classic of the genre; Bob's creation of a fix-up novel to frame it is less successful, with two additional self-contained stories and a linking narrative that feels rushed and a bit contrived. Light of Other Days is essential reading: the novel is not, though the "prequel" chapters leading up to the discovery of slow glass work well enough - the scene where the inventor, Garrod, confronts his sceptical wife with a fragment of the setting sun captured in a small piece of slow glass has stayed with me for years.

I've now started on an anthology I acquired from a second-hand shop some time ago. It rejoices in the imaginative title The SF Collection, and according to Goodreads, it is "A collection of the author's science fiction stories, including "From Zemo They Came," "A Visit from Astra," "The Battle of the Space Ships," and other stories."

But this is nothing but AI slop, because what the book actually is, is an anthology of sf stories from Mary Shelley and Edgar Allen Poe up to Iain M. Banks, with lots of notable writers in between. The book itself emanates from the Chancellor Press, a UK-based packaging operation, and it is pretty cheaply made. Fortunately, the contents look as though they will make up for that.

Finished The Forbidden Stars, which I regret not reading sooner as it was much more entertaining than I remember The Dreaming Stars being.

I just finished A Drop of Corruption, which was quite good. These are still quite inventive.

For those that keep track of such things, the 2025 Year in Review page appears to be active, though I can't refresh mine.

Old Man's War by John Scalzi - I enjoy Scalzi's light humor, and this was another good story. Also appreciate the author's ability to flip tropes, in this case what "age" a soldier is ideally: interesting to consider, lightly, some of the maturity aspects - but very lightly, mind you.

Finished my reread of P Djeli Clark's A Dead Djinn in CairoEnjoyed it more this time,it has an interesting world setting which got explained in a surprising amount of detail for a work only 48 pages long.
Maybe I'll reread Master of Djinn next year but I found all the personal character descriptions too much as I didnt really engage with the characters much. Wasnt an issue in a short story.
Next up is Daniel Galouye's Dark Universe
I am going to try to read more Hugo nominees from the 60s in 2026,lots of intriguing stuff there

Haven't been reading a ton of print sf lately, but I am catching up on my reviews; just posted one of Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions.

>19 Stevil2001: Your take on the Sturgeon story is disappointing to me, since I am a fan, but I chortled at how you put it. Not surprised that Delany contributed one of the keepers.

>19 Stevil2001: I've had a three volume version of Dangerous Visions on my book shelves since 1974 without noticing that one of the versions weren't in print :-)

https://www.librarything.com/catalog/bnielsen?&collection=-1&deepsearch=...

I'd appreciate a short version of the long saga. (I'm Danish and I bought and read some of the stories back in the old days :-)

>19 Stevil2001: Sturgeon is and was one of my favorite authors, but I was unimpressed by that story even when it first came out.

>21 bnielsen: There were originally two Dangerous Visions anthologies; what you have is actually the first one broken up into three separate books on account of how long it is.

The third one, The Last, Dangerous Visions never came out why Ellison was alive despite many many promises on his part over the years; some authors got quite angry at him (because it meant their stories went unpublished), others published them elsewhere.

Finally, after he died, his executor put the volume together and released it.

Some rundown here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Dangerous_Visions

Finished The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. A post-apocalyptic tale in which most of human-kind is blinded by an astronomical phenomenon. Semi-intelligent plants, called triffids, which had been discovered in a remote area & which have the ability to be mobile, add to the menace. Our protagonist navigates the dangers to try to create a life. It's Wyndham's best-known novel & while good, I'm not so sure it's his best. The Midwich Cuckoos was, for me, a more interesting premise. I do expect to read more Wyndham in the future.

>23 Stevil2001: Ah, a trisected trilogy. That makes sense. Thanks!

Started Fantasia Mathematica by Clifton Fadiman. I think it's a book I read in junior high, but not certain yet. An anthology of stories and miscellaneous with the shared topic of mathematics.

I’m still on my fantasy track with The Wheel of Time and will get back to SciFi once done. I just finished Towers of Midnight. Simply put, it was excellent despite its length (over 1000 pages).

I’m taking a short break from the Wheel to finish a book I started months ago, The Malaise of Modernity. It’s a short book. Should be done in a couple of days and then I can get back to The Wheel with the last book, A Memory of Light.

Like >9 Karlstar:, I am reading A drop of corruption; it's a book group selection for the month.

January's book group books are Kelly Link's The book of love and also The Adventures of Mary Darling, Pat Murphy's book that runs perpendicular to that of Peter Pan. I expect to start the Murphy soon; I've been looking forward to it since it was announced, I think.

>28 karenb: I thought it was very good, let us know what you and your group think!

>27 Neil_Luvs_Books: Such a great series, glad it is working for you.

Finished mystery W is for Wasted and started Charles G. Finney's fantasy story collection The Ghosts of Manacle.

Reread the novella version of Zelazny's Damnation Alley. Really enjoyed the first half as the anti hero Hell Tanner crosses a devastated America after a nuclear war to carry a vaccine across the continent to Boston from LA. I always enjoy Zelazny's landscape descriptions and the scenary is wild,and mutated creatures are huge. But I didnt like the second half when it just became a shoot-em-up with Tanner killing huge numbers of bikers! Still I preferred this shorter version.Wonder if Roger had been reading Hemingway,certainly he was aiming for stripped down prose and action,probably taken too far. But still it was an interesting read as is usual with Zelazny. Even his failures keep us gripped.
Oh and of course everyone is smoking,even after a nuclear war. A Zelazny book wouldnt be complete without the protagonists puffing away madly - even in the mighty castle of Amber or a dungeon cell or even in the far distant future.! lol.
I'm halfway through my final Winston juvenile series read,#37/37.The Year After Tomorrow

>32 dustydigger: I didn't realize the Winston series included an anthology. The ISFDB entry notes that it does not have the Schomburg endpapers. Just a few of the stories merited reprinting in any other anthology.

Yeah,I was surprised when I found it was an anthology.its a bit dull,some of the stories are poor and I am plodding a bit but I hope to finish in a couple of days.The humour of Peter van Dresser's ''By Virtue of Circumference'' and intriguing sinister tone of Robert Moore Williams ''The Red Death of Mars'' caught my eye,I will look around for more work by those two authors.

Done with The Iron Dragon's Mother, where the high concept is more interesting than the actual novel (an occupational hazard of the genre I suppose). It's not as though the reading was an actual chore, but I suspect that Swanwick was going more for vibe than efficient plot machinery; this is set in Faery after all.

I recently finished They Shall Have Stars, by James Blish. Considering this was written in the 1950's, I thought it was interesting when one of his characters said (about 2013!) "If space flight were still a live proposition, by now some of it would have been taken away from the army again. There'd be some merchant shipping maybe; or even small passenger lines for a luxury trade, for the kind of people who'll go in uncomfortable ways to unliveable places just because it's horribly expensive."

What's sad is that he was talking about interstellar travel, in this book by 2013 we already have bases on the moons of Jupiter and one on the 10th(!) planet. Also sad that there we have a small 'luxury' space flight business that pretty much exactly matches the description, even if it doesn't actually get into space.

>37 Karlstar: I re-read They Shall Have Stars about ten years ago, and was distinctly unimpressed.

Time Traveler's Passport
So far I have read the first three of these short pieces. The third, For a Limited Time Only was like a punch in the gut. Is anyone else reading these time travel vignettes?

>38 RobertDay: I picked up this novel at a used bookstore recently, because I'd read one of Blish's short stories and was impressed. I wasn't all that impressed by They Shall Have Stars. Your review is very accurate.

>40 Karlstar: Thanks for that. I did carry on and read the rest of Cities in Flight and found that the other three novels didn't fail as completely as They Shall Have Stars. All in all, I found them still readable, though not without difficulties.

But considering that this was a series I loved as an adolescent, I found myself not needing to consider another re-read any time soon.

I grew up on Blish's Star Trek novelisations but haven't read much of his original fiction, just A Case of Conscience and The Devil's Day and a few short stories. ("Surface Tension" is a top-five piece of short sf, in my mind.) I own a compilation of Cities in Flight novels, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

I haven't been reading much original sf of late, but I did post a review of my most recent Vorkosigan book today.

My Blish reading has been limited to After Such Knowledge, all of the books of which I found wonderful in different ways. But I thought the weakest of them was the first earliest and most sfnal one, A Case of Conscience. (Series order is given by chronological positioning, for no good reason, since the "later" books could not actually share a narrative continuity.)

Oh, and his jauniste horror short "More Light!" is a touchstone.

I'm finishing the Janitors of the apocalypse trilogy with Terminal Peace. While this is a comical fantasy it has complex plotting and some serious themes. I really enjoyed the first two instalments.

>42 Stevil2001:. Nice review of Memory.I am doing a ''Year of the Reread'' challenge in 2026,reading 50 of my favourite SF/F books over the year and I honestly had a hard time stopping myself from choosing at least 10 Vorkosigin books. lol.I too cant really articulate what is so attractive and addictive about the series. LMB has a horde of loyal committed fans who reread her work on a regular basis,but you dont hear much about her among the pundits. It seems that being beloved and worth rereading is looked down on,not serious enough for the higher realms of SF. Their loss.
One book I am almost needing to force myself to read is the book after Mirror Dance and that is Memory.So much darker than the other books but a major character development tale and a pivot into a new story arc..

>45 dustydigger: Sadly, Bujold has struggled to get UK publication in recent years (along with so many others), and with the decline of so many specialist SF booksellers, her name doesn't get seen on enough bookshop shelves for readers to demand her work.

>46 RobertDay: Very true. For years I had to buy from US online. Same with C J Cherryh. For the first nine Foreigner books I had to get a bookshop to order from the US till I got my first laptop in 2010 and could arrange things myself. So at least 20 years never seeing either author in the bookshops. Very sad.

Finished The Ghosts of Manacle. Charles G Finney was one of a kind. The closest author I can think of is R A Lafferty. Started Water Witch.

>14 RobertDay: Well, I finished The SF Collection, and the contents are fine, starting with Mary Shelley and Edgar Allen Poe, then working its way through the Golden Age with stories like C.L. Moore's Shambleau, Campbell's Twilight and Sturgeon's Macrocosmic God. It then progresses through the 1950s and 60s, with Ballard's Billenium, some PKD, a Bob Shaw story, Harlan Ellison's I have no mouth, and I must scream, one of Stanislaw Lem's pieces from The Cyberiad, and finally ends up in the 1980s with Gibson's The Gernsback Continuum and contributions from Bruce Sterling, C.J. Cherryh, Pat Cadigan and Iain M. Banks.

Production values are awful, though. Worth a pound if you see one in a charity shop.

>49 RobertDay:
Your review provided entertainment value itself, though I agree the selection is broad and I wonder how many I've not read, despite a good career thus far amongst various SF Collections.

>49 RobertDay: I posted the cover to the "Good Show Sir! — bad science fiction and fantasy covers" group, with a link back to your post.

>49 RobertDay: Seems like a good one to pick up when I get a chance, thanks for the entertaining review, and the quality warnings.

Managed to finish Lester Del Rey's The Year After Tomorrow which actually improved as it went on after the first few stories were very dull. But in the main it was mediocre though the illustrations were nice but it does mean I have completed the Winston Science Fiction series list on WWEnd
Have now started Tainted Cup and like it,some unusual and distinctive world setting and interesting characters. Madly busy at the moment with Xmas and Mr Dusty,but I hope to finish this and then maybe read some ghost stories rest of the month while compiling a list of books to buy with my book token gifts

Finished Terminal peace which is a more thoughtful and serious end to the trilogy, though still with humour.

I'm still reading Edgar Allan Poe's science fiction short stories but I've taken a pause to read more about Poe (who I know v little about)), so I may not finish this book this year.

I'm also planning the books I will read next year, and I'll be reading at least one version (1818) of Frankenstein if not both, along with Stepford Wives, there's more to come, I haven't worked it all out but it will also include a range of short stories from various collections I have.

Still doing some non-genre reading on the side. Yesterday I finished The Malaise of Modernity which took me a while to complete due to its philosophical treatment of authenticity in our modern culture. Written in 1991, it still has relevance today. I wish Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher would update his treatise to include the influence of social media.

Started today, The Rights Revolution as a result of reading Taylor’s book which included thoughts about how modernity can disenfranchise people from political life which ends up impacting their rights.

I’m about 1/3 of the way through A Memory of Light. Still enjoying it though there is certainly a lot of violence due to the apex of the series being essentially the final battle at Armageddon.

Wrapped up The Art of Legend and I'm left wondering whether I should be disappointed it or not, as while the ending wasn't quite resolved by a deus ex machina, the wind-up was so extended that it did come from left field. Maybe I'm just not emotionally prepared to embrace brick-like novels as a way of life.

I just put Inversions to bed, and now I'm going to give The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You a spin.

I enjoyed Robert Jackson Bennett's The Tainted Cup.more than I was expecting. Characters were interesting,Bennett handled the complicated crime plot very well,but what fascinated me most was the world setting,very fresh and original. I will definitely continue on with the sequel A Drop of Corruption soon.
I am yet again rereading Dicken's A Christmas Carol over the Xmas time,and also another couple of Dicken's ghost stories. The Signal Man of course,and a new one that I before have never read before,SmeeI will also watch again the bbc ghosts stories at Christmas tv plays,including Michael Horden in Whistle and I'll Come to You,My Lad and of course Denholm Elliot's remarkable performance as The Signal Man.

>59 dustydigger: The BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas are essential seasonal viewing. Don't forget that there's one extra film which the BBC made in its Omnibus arts strand (and so doesn't get included in the listings of the ghost stories), which is definitely in the same vein, Schalken the Painter, based on the Sheridan le Fanu short story of the same name (no touchstones for the BFI video, but it is available either as DVD/Blu-Ray, or at least three different versions on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dap2X4oYibg).

>60 RobertDay:. Thanks Robert. I just watched a documentary on the TV series on You Tube,and I think I had seen all of them except Schalken. I have located the video and the short story and will be reading then watching sometime before the New Year.
I am of course familiar with some of Le Fanu's work - Carmilla (It always surprises me at any reread that it even got published at that time! Vampires 7 years before Dracula was published. And everyone at the time just have being determined to turn a blind eye on lesbianism a la Queen Victoria. lol) Green Tea and the genuinely intense Mr. Justice HarbottleIt frequently comes to mind when there are weird tales etc set in old houses,that story was gripping,and is seminal to a million later stories. Couldnt someone just casually leave a copy on the bench of the US Supreme Court,might make an impression on somebody. ;0 I wish.....) Havent come across Schalken till now in book or film form,looking forward to it.

Finished Water Witch, started The Final Circle of Paradise.

I read the 6 short stories available on Amazon dubbed The Time Traveler's Passport. Some I loved, only one I hated. Interesting views on the topic of time travel.

Hmm,Schalken the Painter was very intriguing .It was atmospheric and strange much of the mystery was never resolved really,and the ending was more mysterious even than the rest of the story.Good stuff. I hope to watch the TV version in a few days.
Poor Mr D has been rather poorly today has been resting so I had a good reading day. Besides Schalken i completed my reread of A Christmas Carol and Dickens The Signal Man and will finish up my Christmas ghost stories with A M Burrage's Smee
Expecting gift vouchers tomorrow and will have fun acquiring some new books. Cool

Finished The Society of Unknowable Objects. Not quite the sort of novel that I was looking for but I wound up enjoying it enough to hunt down Gareth Brown's first novel in a timely fashion.

I'm not sure where I had previously seen references to The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You but when I saw the psychedelic cover of the 1980 Moon Books edition at a shop in my neighborhood, it rang a faintly familiar bell, and I was definitely willing to spend $3 and a few hours on it.

Completed this year's reading program with Toward Eternity. Novels about achieving immortality via artificial replication generally don't grab me, and this book is not an exception to my tastes; though the author does write with conviction.

Somehow got ahold of Aftershocks by Marko Kloos and really enjoyed it. Have blown through Ballistic and am working on the third book Citadel.
In a solar system with 5 inhabited planets, the planets are recovering from an interplanetary war that ended 5 years ago. Told from the viewpoint of 4 individuals with vastly different experiences and roles in the system, we slowly learn how the individuals are connected as peculiar happenings start across the system.

Finished Hunter's Run by George RR Martin, Gardner Dozois & Daniel Abraham. Got this cheap on Kindle & thought I'd give it a try - actually quite good.

I managed to read 151 books this year (starting on a huge doorstop, so won't finish another this year). 70 were SF&F, the remainder mysteries, historical fiction, biography & history & miscellaneous other. Hope you all enjoyed your reading this year as much as I have.

I read only sixty books this year. I blame this group for the fact that about half of them were science fiction. These monthly threads have really encouraged me to plan and carry out my sf reading.

>59 dustydigger: I felt the same way about The Tainted Cup, it was excellent. I also enjoyed A Drop of Corruption, just not quite as much, but close.

My count for this year is 56 books, a little low.

I should finish on about 114 reads,but quite a lot,possibly 30 or more were novellas or short stories that could fit in at any time I was free,especially an hour or so during the night.
Ah for the good old days when I consistently completed 180 books a year minimum 200 reads were common.
Its ''The Year of the Rereads '' for me this year. At least one vintage reread a week.plus maybe one new read weekly from the dear old pulps or at least pre 1980 and at least one latest decade award winner or nominee from my WWEnd lists a month just to keep some slight semblance of connection with modern SF/F genre works.Apart from a handful of fave authors cant say i have much interest in todays SF style and themes. Old age (78 next month aarrgghh!!) and almost 70 years reading the genre means there seems nothing new under the sun. ;0)
Still sorting my general basic booklist for the new year. I usually post it on here so I can look back at the end of that year to marvel that I never read half of them. They then go on the list for the new year and eventually I get round to reading them lol. Sometimes take 3 years or more
Only one Hugo left to do to get up to date on that list before we get a new one added soon! lol.

I am finishing up my final WWE challenge read this week with Virtual Girl. An interesting enough post-apocalyptic cyberpunk premise but the writing style is really not very good. Stiff dialog and third-person, present tense with lots of telling and little showing. Ah well, at least it's short at only 248 pages.

My two most recent reads were much better as I blazed through both The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption, finishing the 2nd book over the holiday weekend. Definitely plan to get a copy of A Trade of Blood when it releases in summer of 2026...

Just started today on one of my Christmas books, The Last Dangerous Visions. Joe Straczynski's introductions are revealing.

As for my year's reading count, for various reasons I count this from April 1st each year. But I note that to date, I have read 84 books since 1st April 2025, whereas my count for 2024-25 was 85 for the whole year. Again, not all these were SF, or even fiction; but I'd say that around half were fantastic literature of one sort or another.

So I am clearly a slower reader in this group. I read only 33 books this year. However, a little less than that (15) were the volumes in The Wheel of Time series of which I think the average page length is 900-1000 pages. So…

Last night I finished the last volume of WoT, A Memory of Light. I have never read anything like AMoL before in which the vast majority of the book was plot/action of Armageddon told from the PoV of multiple characters interwoven within and between chapters. It was breathless but after a while the violence became burdensome.

I started reading WoT back in mid-March. So this 15 volume series (I include the prequel, New Spring in that count) has taken up 9 months of my reading life. I’m glad I read it but I’m also glad to be done with it. I can easily understand why so many love WoT and why so many dislike it. Overall, I can say I enjoyed the journey despite one or two volumes being slow.

This week I also completed The Rights Revolution which was interesting. This week, by New Year’s Day, I hope to finish this year’s CBC Massey Lecture, Universal: Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World by Alex Neve. Then I can start the new year getting back to some SF. The first of the new year will be Asimov’s The End of Eternity which has been on my TBR list for years.

I am finishing my WWE challenges with Seasons in Flight - a collection by Brian Aldiss. I am having a hard time getting into these stories, but that is typical of me and short stories. I may or may not finish There is No Antimemetics Division before the end of the year. Not sure if I like this one, but it is getting better the further I get.

I reread a lot of Iain Banks this year and I still really liked those books as much as I did when I first read them. I haven't read Surface Detail or The Hydrogen Sonata yet, so those will be at the top of my list for next year. Books that I read for the first time that I really enjoyed were Shroud, The Deluge, and Alien Clay. I read 73 scifi/fantasy books this year plus three short stories. I reread Ponies just because it was being banned somewhere. Having spent a lot of time at stables with teen and preteen girls, I have seen this behavior and loved the story for showing the consequences of that behavior, even though the story is so sad.

>75 Neil_Luvs_Books:. I listened to the entire Wheel of Time series a couple years ago when I had a 2.5 hour commute everyday. I don't think I would be done with them yet, had I had to read them. I am glad I listened to them, but I did get annoyed by the puerile behavior of the main characters and by the detailed description of everyone's clothing. I still see Rand dressed as a Christmas elf from one of those descriptions.

Happy New Year to everyone!

Hey daxxh. Just saw your comment in memoriam of Charles Dee Mitchell over on WWEnd. I had missed Dave's touching notice as Mr Dusty has been rather poorly the whole month requiring a lot of care Dee was so knowledgeable on weird fiction in particular.
Icowrich was a solid foundation for WWEnd he will be greatly missed. I always used to tease Dave about whether Rich actually existed,but of course he did hidden in the back room producing all that wonderful accurate data we all expect from WWEnd.58 is a shockingly young age to die these days. :0(

Finished The Final Circle of Paradise, starting In Ascension.

>75 Neil_Luvs_Books: I did a bit better I guess, 46 reviews added. I expected a lower number, closer to a book every other week. Still, as my mother used to tell us at the dinner table, "It's not a race!"

It was compare and contrast time in my last two reads of the month. Two very different Irish writers produced extremely different takes on a common theme. An evil totally corrupt judge,long dead,has left an empty old house and we see the people cope with ghosts,but with very different outcomes. Written in toally contrasting styles. Only the theme is in common.
I was familiar from a prior reading with Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Mr Justice Harbottle. Stately elegantly written,calm and discreetly removed from the story so we are not viscerally connected really,unless that was just me. However Bram Stoker's The Judge's House was a pile driving punch,melodramatic and immediate in effect. Crude maybe,but because Stoker spent time building up the charmingly hardworking young man preparing for his university maths final by retreating to an old abandoned house to avoid any distractions while studying,the story is heartwrenching the thrills and horror immediate and stunning.
Le Fanu's tale may be more famous and literary but I think Stoker's cruder less polished tale made an indelible impression on me.A nice and thought provoking way to end up my read for 2025.
I wish everyone a great exciting and fascinating new reading year. More than ever we need to retreat into our books to escape the cruelty and craziness of the world around us!
Happy New Year!

I'll finish the year at 151 books (but hey, I'm retired), a new record for me which I doubt I'll try to surpass. Looking to read a few more long &/or difficult book in '26. The genre breakout was:

Science Fiction: 43
Fantasy: 27
Crime/Mystery/Thriller: 32
Historical Fiction: 14
Westerns: 12
Non-fiction: 13
Horror: 2
General Fiction: 8

Completed the novella Ring Shout, a nice blend of folktale, sword & sorcery, Weird Tradition with nods to HPL, and parallel universe / portal travel. I suppose it also could be considered either a secret history of the US or alternate history, depending on the individual's interpretation. Regardless of the pigeon hole I stuff it in, a pleasant way to end the Reading Year as I doubt I'll get any reading in tonight.

I've been interested in the posts about the year's reading: amounts, types. Having finished my last book of the year a couple of hours ago (Mansfield Park by Austen), I can now say that my 2025 total was 80. In recent decades I've tended to land between 70 and 100. In my teens & twenties it was usually well over 100; that was when I was reading huge amounts of SF, Fantasy, and Mystery, mostly in thin mass market paperbacks (those in my generation will remember thin mass markets with prices in cents). Over the years my books have gotten longer & denser, with a good sprinkling of doorstops.
Non-genre fiction 12
Fantasy 23
SF 8
Biography/Memoir 12
Essays 9
Other Nonfiction 9
Mystery 4
Children's/YA 3

SF was lower than usual this year; biography was up (I'm in a reading group reading bios of all the US presidents, which is increasing my bio count -- this year we did Zachary Taylor through Teddy Roosevelt)

My total for the year, per my Year in Review page, was 56, with scifi being 15 of them. That's lower than last year, I will have to try and go in the other direction this year, at least as far as the total. I read a couple of long non-fiction books and a couple of very long fiction novels which may have slowed me down a bit.

I read a lot of short or image-heavy works, which is why I have such a high book count.

I finished 135 books this year, 55 that fall into the speculative fiction (broad) bucket, 50+ have some degree of romance, 30+ involve mysteries. Only four graphic works, which is lower than usual. Lots of overlap across genres.

8 rereads, including (for the first time this century, IIRC) Wizard of Earthsea and Wizard of the Pigeons. It's often interesting to see how my aging and the world's changing affect how books hit you at different reads. (For example, WotP was a lot darker than I recalled, for example, and how US society treats the unhoused hasn't improved enough since the 1990s.)

Lots of books that I read previews of, or started but didn't finish. I don't track those very much, so it's hard to say how many pages those added up to.

>86 karenb: By chance have you seen the Earthsea TV movies? We watched the first one last week, other than some really huge variations in acting, it wasn't terrible.

>87 Karlstar: I could not get past the acting in the Earthsea TV movies - assuming those are the ones you mean. Is it this one with Shawn Ashmore or is there a more recent one?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407384/

I also remember trying to watch the animated Tales From Earthsea but didn’t last 15 minutes.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/gedo-senki-tales-from-earthsea

Which is unfortunate. I always thought if done properly, Earthsea could translate well to the silver screen. Or as a lengthy premier series on HBO.

An example of one that I thought was done incredibly well was Shogun last year. Or was it in 2024?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2788316/

>87 Karlstar: Le Guin hated the TV movies because they depicted the characters as white Europeans rather than the Pacific Islanders she had in mind.

>88 Neil_Luvs_Books: The acting was in parts actually horrible.

>89 ChrisG1: I hadn't considered that, I can see why that would be a problem.

We have not continued on to the second part.

>89 ChrisG1: I don’t think I keyed in to the fact that the Earthsea characters were not white until my second read back in the 1980s. I was so clueless growing up in the 70s! 😳