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es 2016 wonder what became of him i m really quite bad at reading non fiction books but luckily i don t depend on them to keep up with the news non fiction speaking of which only nine non fiction titles three of which i read for what i laughingly call work all those had titles including the words rule of law of the other six the most substantial were sam knight s the premonitions bureau and john cooper clarke s memoir i wanna be yours the premonitions bureau didn t turn out to be very substantial lots of background detail lots of full page pictures i was left with the impression that the whole idea of trying to prove the existence of dreams that accurately foretold the future was futile particularly given that the events foretold tended to be traumatic after all if you knew that the plane crash you d dreamt of was certain to happen what could you do with that knowledge i m not sure how much that sense of futility came from the subject though and how much from knight s treatment of it the john cooper clarke memoir creased me up when i looked at it in a bookshop always a good sign and mostly delivered subsequently he doesn t write an ugly sentence if it doesn t sound any good it s because it isn t any good my main problem with it was that almost a third of the book was devoted to clarke s fifteen years as a heroin addict with very little on the thirty years he d subsequently spent clean admittedly those fifteen years were also the years of his greatest success but it still felt unbalanced not to mention that jcc heroin user doesn t seem to have been an especially nice guy favourite non fiction book of the year either that or paul hanley s have a bleedin guess the 33 1 3 that never was on the fall s hex enduction hour horror like sf horror is a genre that s always worked best for me in short form although i read 29 sf novels last year so maybe i should revise that view in 2025 i read four horror collections one stand alone short and two novels of the short story collections ray newman s intervals of darkness stands out both it and the short by malcolm devlin were very much in working class aickman territory one hell of a territory neither of the novels were up to much sadly and both made me wish their authors had written short stories andrew michael hurley s saltwash because it was an overgrown short story adam s leslie s lost in the garden because it was a sprawling mess with some brilliant moments which would have made a great short story collection but a short story collection a 96 page collection of vignettes rarely has a 300 page book taken me so long to get through favourite horror text of the year malcolm devlin engines beneath us least favourite lost in the garden science fiction most of the 10 box reading project took place during 2025 28 books in total all of which i ve reviewed on the blog i won t say anything about them here a 10 box retrospective is still planned other than that roadside picnic is just as good as everyone says it is richard h francis s blackpool vanishes is just as good as i remember it was and the casual sexism of most male sf writers in the 1970s has to be seen to be believed i read ten other sf titles in 2025 including two retrospective short story collections and an adaptation of a douglas adams who script then there were three books by gareth southwell who s ploughing an interesting techno gnostic furrow and suzanne collins hunger games prequel sunrise on the reaping perhaps a prequel too far given that the only question it can really answer is how did i get to be a cynical old drunk the other three were by ira levin i got round to reading the stepford wives jane rogers the testament of jessie lamb great premise flawed execution and adam roberts lake of darkness i disagreed but found i had to disagree at some length and if nothing else disagreeing with a novel is an interesting way not to get on with it favourite work of sf this year or any year roadside picnic favourite work of sf not including the 10 box lake of darkness least favourite a slip of the pen a collection gathering together early pseudonymous pieces by terry pratchett well worth doing but not really worth the effort of reading thrillers this is a bit of an artificial category and could be merged with crime one of the books in this category was even called we solve murders but although there are generally people a breaking and b upholding the law in these books the narrative interest isn t in solving the crime or stopping the perpetrator quite the reverse in some cases there are sixteen titles in this category but only eight authors i read three patricia highsmiths last year and three mick herrons as well as two each by celia dale josephine tey richard osman and i regret to say janice hallett whose the examiner really was an outstanding stinker the other two were by holly seddon whose 59 minutes was almost as bad and gillian flynn i enjoyed reading clown town the new slough house novel but not nearly as much as i enjoyed the secret hours a prequel companion piece to the series it resolved a couple of long running back story mysteries filled in the background of some key characters and had an elegiac tone to it and all in all suggested that there might not be a new slough house novel when book series do continue avoiding diminishing returns is a challenge ask richard osman or even patricia highsmith the protagonist of the talented mr ripley was a fascinating character a monstrous underdog with a childlike neediness and innocence the main character of the second and third ripley novels has achieved success and is quite outstandingly unpleasant in seeking to preserve it which isn t quite the same thing like highsmith and ripley josephine tey always gave the impression of being heavily invested in her central characters be it inspector grant or brat farrar both the latter and his eponymous novel are highly conventional romantic fiction creations while somehow also being compellingly weird but the best books in this category were celia dale s a helping hand and sheep s clothing she was an outstanding creator of moral monsters favourite thriller of the year the secret hours closely followed by a helping hand least favourite the examiner crime like the neighbouring thriller category this grouping includes some very prolific writers 17 of the 20 titles are by four authors the other three were by henning mankell who i probably won t be pursuing further sophie hannah who i definitely won t and horst eckert a couple of years ago a german friend encouraged me to develop my grasp of the language by reading krimis and lent me several of hers including eckert s wolfsspinne i had recently finished eckert s schwarzlicht when my friend told me that she was terminally ill i didn t really want to immerse myself in german after that i should get back to it this year though it was good mental exercise and i did enjoy those books as of course did my friend the other thing about krimis is that they take me a while to read which is more than you can say of a lot of the english language crime novels i get through i read three books by reginald hill in 2025 having been given four for christmas during the year i had also read two books by anthony horowitz five by agatha christie and seven by nicci french the christies four of which were short story collections or rather one large short story collection split over four volumes stick in my mind mainly for their sheer oddity christie wrote several different fictional worlds into being oriented around different central characters all of them recognisable as versions of her contemporary world but all stylised to just short of the point of caricature the racism is also memorable of course the nearest contemporary equivalent apart from the racism is probably anthony horowitz whose books are ingenious larky thoroughly enjoyable and thoroughly forgettable i notice that in my review i described one of the year s two horowitzes as the fourth in its series and better than the third and fifth i do read a lot of this stuff both reginald hill and nicci french are a bit more of a serious proposition the protagonists are different all too human but well intentioned police detectives for hill potential victims trying to bypass the police for french but in both cases the setting is recognisably scuzzy the pursuit turns over many different stones with more or less unpleasant results and it s clear that very few of anybody s problems will be solved when the crime is albeit that one of the key problems in nicci french novels is often the continued survival of the central character which isn t nothing if i had 2025 again i wouldn t bother with sophie hannah and the agatha christies didn t really repay the effort the other 14 titles were all enjoyable even if not many of them linger in the mind favourite crime fiction of the year schwartzlicht least favourite the telling error english literature lastly i read twenty books in 2025 that don t fit into any of the above categories or rather that weren t marketed as fitting into any of them stand alone novellas seem to be having a moment i ve already touched on four by malcolm devlin gareth southwell gillian flynn but janice hallett there were four more in this category by alan bennett susanna clarke tessa hadley and alan warner i can recommend the darkland tales series in which scottish writers are commissioned to write riffs on scottish history as well as short story collections by tessa hadley again and magnus mills i read bernard mac laverty s cal before re watching the film which is remarkably faithful to it i re read pynchon s vineland before watching the paul thomas anderson film which is nothing like it i read truman capote s breakfast at tiffany s to see what it was like and i can only assume that the film s nothing like it i also read jane gardam s a long way from verona for the fun of it and so should you it s wonderful that leaves ten books all novels and all published relatively recently jonathan coe the proof of my innocence a weird and slightly gothic shadow version of what a carve up with some of the darker political edge of the closed circle and a greater than usual commitment to formal and metafictional experimentation i think i should probably re read it i do remember that the title features a truly appalling pun even by coe s standards jeremy cooper brian in which a painfully shy possibly autistic central character watches films and grows older he becomes part of a group of film buffs but with little effect on his life the narrative is about the films and brian s investment in them jennifer egan manhattan beach i love a visit from the goon squad with a passion some of which is presumably owed to its form so i approached manhattan beach which i d heard that egan had begun writing in a similar fix up form before reverting to a more conventional narrative with some trepidation and a considerable delay it s good though and not that great a departure from egan s other fiction it has some horribly relatable characters some heartbreaking moments and as i wrote last year a sex scene that practically leaves you feeling sore karen golightly there are things i know the things the narrator knows include how numbers work the things he doesn t include what people want from him including the man who picks him up from a school trip claiming to be his uncle things could get very dark indeed at this point but thankfully don t reminded me of walker hamilton s all the little animals of which you should certainly have heard andrey kurkov death and the penguin poverty and corruption in the life of a freelance journalist in post soviet pre invasion ukraine and a penguin the penguin doesn t play a huge part in the story it has to be said rebecca makkai i have some questions for you a heroic metoo story which rapidly degenerates into the kind of self deluding relationship breaking career ending health destroying mess that setting out to be a hero in real life is liable to cause it then switches gear and turns back into a heroic metoo story weirdly disjointed weirdly disappointing paraic o donnell the naming of the birds two victorian police officers are plunged into a mystery whose gothic horrors go far beyond their abilities the prose is beautiful and the horrors are unsparing a distinctive combination of delicacy and viciousness as i said last year michelle paver rainforest if the last two books were bordering on crime and thriller respectively this is definitely bordering on horror the two strands inner and outer of the protagonist s story don t entirely knit together though or for that matter fall definitively apart perhaps this makes the book less generic but i felt that it made it less successful as with the makkai lynne steger strong flight i didn t really get on with this the central bereavement that should have been the engine of the story served mainly as a device for bringing a lot of characters together each with their own unrelated backstory the multiple meanings of the word flight become significant a literary touch i found more irksome than jonathan coe s puns it s all a bit creative writing asako yuzuki butter sometimes it s hard to be a woman particularly if you were born in japan japanese food culture seems utterly unlike our own and substantially more demanding in terms of women s domestic labour work and family culture seem oddly similar but with some features greatly exaggerated specifically including the demands placed on women there was also a plot i think a very odd book but much of that may have been down to my unfamiliarity with japanese society including its fictional conventions favourite non genre fiction of 2025 the proof of my innocence closely followed by manhattan beach least favourite flight closely followed by i have some questions for you discoveries of the year celia dale malcolm devlin karen golightly reginald hill ray newman gareth southwell and of course arkady and boris strugatsky devlin golightly and southwell in particular are authors i d literally never heard of before last year devlin s and golightly s books were both impulse buys from the book case in hebden bridge incidentally support your local share this print opens in new window print email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook like loading by phil posted in 2025 in culture culture everyday life friction skiffy the 10 box up to my eyes comments 0 older posts about me more work less pay more work less pay q a posts june culture post an academic writes i applied an academic writes the long summer holidays may culture post palestine action at the court of appeal 5 of 5 palestine action at the court of appeal 4 of 5 palestine action at the court of appeal 3 of 5 palestine action at the court of appeal 2 of 5 comments luca zani on june culture post getting darker oh good ale on if a tree don t fall...
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