Good Morning Folks. As I often do, the start of a new year is a time for reflection back upon the previous one. While I never can seem to keep exactly the same rhythms anymore, I figured I might branch out and start what are hopefully a new series of yearly “in review” posts. 2025 was one of those years where I had to lean on distractions heavily, and those distractions came in many forms. Some of them were comfort gaming, others experiencing new anime, and an awful lot were the books that I read. This morning I am going to talk about some of the more significant books that I enjoyed. I set my goal for 30 books and ended up reading 38. For those curious, I use both Bookwyrm and Storygraph to track my reading journey. Bookwyrm is a federated client so it is very easy to share on Mastodon if the mood strikes me and I want to write a proper review of a book. Storygraph I mostly use because it has a really good recommendation algorithm, that has fed me a few books that I otherwise would not have paid attention to.
My Best Friend’s Exorcism
Probably my favorite single book of the year was My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix. This was my entry into this author’s work and at some point I want to check out more books. I read Witchcraft for Wayward Girls and it did not quite land the same for me. I think that might be in part because so much of this is my adolescent years bottled and packaged up into a novel form. It takes place in the 80s that I remember so vividly, and the pair remind me a bit of two of my friends who were always together but similarly somewhat mismatched. There is a made for amazon movie for this book… but I could not get through it. It just did not capture any of the magic of this book for me about demon possession and undying friendship.
Dungeon Crawler Carl
If we are not talking about single books, then my highlight of the year is reading the entirety of what has been published so far in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. This was my first foray into RPGLit and while I loved it… I am not sure if the larger genre is really my thing. In truth it takes a few books for this series to really reach its stride, and I think part of that is Matt Dinniman shuffling off the normal constraints of the genre and leaning into the best aspects of this cast of amazing characters. Specifically I LOVE the voice acting of Jeff Hayes, and if you have read these in text form, you owe it to yourself to listen to the audio books as well. Right now A Parade of Horribles is supposedly slotted for release in May and I am literally almost thrumming with excitement for it.
Murderbot Series
Another series that I fell in love with this year is Murderbot. In the months ahead of the release of the television series, I burned through these books and they are really comfortable reads. Each of them is very short and very focused, with a fast moving narrative that is just a delight. This will be another one of those series that I consume happily whenever a new book comes out, and at some point I should really dive out into the other things Martha Wells has written. Reading these books has made me realize that I might be slightly on the spectrum, just because the running internal monologue of Murderbot feels so god damned familiar to me.
News Flesh Series
In the column of… I should have read this decades ago… we have the Newsflesh series. Legitimately I remember seeing Feed at borders so many times and almost picking it up. I love Seanan McGuire, and I had no clue that Mira Grant was a pen name until earlier this year when I dove down this rabbit hole. This series is so damned good that it is almost painful that I did not read it before now. So many great characters delivered with only the level of sass that Seanan can. At some point I am going to start the October Daye series, because I am fully on board with anything crafted by this author I think. If you like zombies and honestly a kind of fresh spin on them, or at least fresh for the time in which these books came out. I highly suggest giving these a read. They go pretty quickly.
In the biggest disappointment or the year… we have Space Oddity by Catherynne M. Valente. I loved the adventures of Decibel Jones in Space Opera last year so freaking much, that I was rather excited to read this sequel. The problem is… this book is a bit of a meandering mess. It eventually does find its heart and lands the plane safely… but holy shit are you going to have to wade through a lot of nonsense to get there. More than anything it feels like this author was pressured to write a sequel and had zero fucking clue how they wanted to do this thing. The entire first half of the book could essentially be removed and you would still have a reasonable plot. It just sort of feels like stalling until inspiration hit and then rushing to the finish line.
Camp Damascus
Camp Damascus from Chuck Tingle is the book that almost broke me. I had never read a Chuck Tingle book before, but this is very much not the usual “pounded in the butt by” book. This book is bleak… really fucking bleak. It is extremely well crafted and does a phenomenal job of exploring the themes of “gay conversion” camps through the lens of horror. Sure this is horror and sure there are fantastical elements, but the core of this narrative is all too real. It is well worth a read but it was a bit of a suckerpunch that left me reeling for awhile. I finished the book on March 27th, and it was not until July 23rd that I even attempted to read another book. Sure I had a really fucking bad July… for reasons I have gone into at length in so many posts… but this book drained me of the will to keep reading for awhile.
Sworn Soldier Series
Another series that I really enjoyed last year was the Sworn Soldier series by T. Kingfisher. Essentially this is the Gothic horror of Poe, Shelly and Stoker for a modern audience. Each of these books is pretty short, similar to the Murderbot books and are extremely easy reads. What Moves the Dead is effectively a re-imagining of the Fall of the House of Usher, and from there we get more interesting snippets of nature gone wrong, and eldritch horror in the other two novels. Alex Easton is an immediately likeable protagonist, and the books are just enjoyable. Well worth your time if you enjoy unknowable horrors.
Cerulean Chronicles
At least for me, as I have found out what a regressive shitbag that J.K. Rowling has turned out to be… I struggle with the Harry Potter series. I will always love the characters because those books meant so much to me as I was reading them, but I want zero of my dollars to ever go toward supporting her quite frankly evil causes. I’ve read that TJ Klune set out to write the Cerulean Sea series as an unabashedly clear wizarding tale, and one of love and warmth and acceptance. They succeeded in this and the two books are a joy to read. I happened to be turned onto this series just as the sequel was coming out, so I was able to read them back to back. The first novel is really tight and clearly focused, but the second one takes a little bit to get started but has a rousing finish. If you crave some intentionally queer friendly wizarding worlds… I suggest you also dive into this series.
You can always see the full list of everything that I read in 2025 over on my Bookwyrm goals page, as that is probably the easiest and most concise way to see it. You can also follow me on Storygraph to see what I am actively reading there. I occasionally write reviews there, but fairly rarely as most of my content ends up here on the blog. What were some of your favorite books that you read in 2025? Would love to hear of anything that you think I should read so I can add it to my 2026 list.
The post 2025 in Review: The Books appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I’ve been working through the Craft Sequence series by Max Gladstone. The problem is I have no clue why I even know this series of books exists. Generally speaking, I can usually pin down a recommendation to a specific friend or group of friends who have been actively reading a given book. For this one however I am at a bit of a loss, but at some point over the last few months I added this to my “Want to Read” queue in Bookwyrm. I love Bookwyrm and for anyone who does not know what that is… it is essentially something akin to Goodreads but that exists as part of the ActivityPub “Fediverse” and federates freely with Mastodon. You could in theory use it as your primary Fediverse account, but I tend to treat it as a separate thing and then boost my activity there to my main account. I wish there was a way to formally link a Bookwyrm account to a Mastodon account, but in spite of that issue, it still works extremely well. I’ve been using it to track my progress with the various books I have read this year.
The Craft Sequence as a whole piqued my interest when I heard it referenced as another “Urban Fantasy” setting. The thing is… this is a wildly different flavor of Urban Fantasy than something like Dresden Files. In the Dresdenverse there is a veil between the true world and the world that the common folks understand, and it is maintained to keep both sides safe. In the Craft Sequence, it is a fully fantasy world that just happens to have evolved to modern levels of civilization. The thing is though… you don’t necessarily get this feeling in full effect until you get past the first book. Reading Three Parts Dead, it feels like you are reading any other fantasy novel save for the fact that it has a lot more modern language. It is a tale of necromancy and gods… and the legal contracts that bind them to their followers and what happens when a god dies. I loved the character of Tara Abernathy… a young associate at the Craft firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao on her very first project for that group. I described the feeling to a friend like “What if Hermione was a Necromancer and got kicked out of Hogwarts”.
The second novel Two Serpents Rise takes place with a completely different set of characters in a different kingdom. This is the point where I realized we were building a universe more than we were going to be getting serialized content focused on a single group of characters. This novel was deeply interesting because it focused more on the ramifications of an event that took place 50 years before the events of these novels. Craft practitioners and the Gods went to war… and the Gods lost. Two Serpents Rise is set in a pseudo-mesoamerican-inspired culture where 50 years ago… human sacrifice and the worship of the gods… were outlawed. There is an older generation that feels like this was not a good idea and as a result, the city has been in a bit of a cold war with the theists ever since. Your primary point of view on this situation is from Caleb Altemoc who works as a Risk Manager for Red King Consolidated and is attempting to make sure that city services are not negatively impacted. I did not think this book was nearly as dynamic as Three Parts Dead, but I still found it enjoyable.
Last night I finished Full Fathom Five, the third book in this sequence and this is the point when the methodology of this series is starting to pay off. Once again we are focused on a completely different setting, this time the Island kingdom of Kavekana. This is a place that lost all of its Gods during the God War and instead figured out how to create pseudo-gods in the form of “Idols” which are used as essentially savings accounts for storing “souls” as part of the banking industry of the magical world. This gives the island significantly more power than they have any right to, which places it on a precarious balance between assorted Military powers… but its Financial clout keeps them from being invaded. Your point of view character is Priestess Kai who works for the group that shapes the idols and worships them in order to imbue them with something resembling life to keep the financial transactions safe and secure. There is however a plot in the works to destabilize the entire system and a few characters that we met in book one and book two as minor side characters shift to the focus in this book.
I have to say so far… Full Fathom Five was my favorite of the Craft Sequence to date. Like I said we are beginning to finally see the payoff from all the work building this world and setting up its political and theistic structures. I think going forward the plots will begin to interweave a bit more as the entire sequence of books is likely leading to some crescendo. This is very much a series of books that has been constructed with a plan and I am exceptionally interested in seeing where that plan is going. I’ve tried not to read up too much on this series but it seems like Chronologically Book Two takes place before the events of Book Three… and then Book 4 is technically the beginning of the series. There are apparently Six books in the main sequence and then two additional books that begin another series that is connected to the first six. I think at this point I am bought in and will be reading through these until I reach the end.
It has been a bit of a wild ride for me when it comes to books and reading. Generally speaking, I tend to only read a few books in a given year, but as of last night, I had completed forty-three and will likely close out the year around forty-five. I’ve had a blast and in part, all of this was prompted by my wife and I finally renewing our Library cards last December in order to take advantage of the easy book checkout process brought on with the LibbyApp. We both have three different library cards connected to that system now each with their own slightly different collections of what we have access to. It does however make me a little frustrated that I did not do this sooner given how much I have thrived while reading all of these books.
Right now I am taking a bit of a break from the Craft Sequence as the second “Viv” book by Travis Baldree was released yesterday. I did not realize this was going to be a prequel and would technically be book zero in this series. Legends and Lattes is probably my favorite book that I read this year, and it was such a cozy and comfortable setting to spend some time in. I fell in love with all of the characters, and so far Bookshops and Bonedust seems every bit as delightful as the first book did. I’ve only put in about a half dozen chapters but I will be burning through this one over the next few days.
What are your favorite books that you have read this year? What series should I check out? Drop me a line below.
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Friends… I have been on a bit of an adventure. The other day I saw some commentary from a friend talking about the movie Dark Harvest that came out earlier this month. The poster for it seems rather compelling and being a huge fan of Children of the Corn it piqued my interest. This was released as a rental on streaming platforms and got a live screening at the Alamo Drafthouse. So in another place and another time this likely would have been a major theatrical release, but in the weird place we are in at the moment it went “directly to home video”.
Then I read the fateful words on the poster… that it was “Adapted from The Award-Winning Novel”. 2023 has been the year of the book for me, and I am currently reading my fortieth of the year. Given how drastic movie adaptations can veer from the original material, I figured I would take a pause in my reading of Agency by William Gibson and give this novel a try. In the worst-case scenario, I bounce hard and simply watch the movie like I was going to originally.
This was a bit easier said than done because apparently, Dark Harvest has been a VERY popular name for novels. Some further research led me to the fact that the first one in this sequence is the one I was looking for by Norman Partridge. The “Award Winning” in the movie tagline relates to the Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction from the year 2006. So yesterday morning I popped over to the Libby App and luckily one of the three libraries that I have a card for had it available. The novel itself is really more of a novella given that it is only 176 pages in length and I was able to easily read it over my lunch break.
Dark Harvest tells a tale that isn’t necessarily unique, but it does so in a really visceral manner from the perspective of an omniscient narrator that you learn more about as the tale comes to its conclusion. It is a tale of a suffocating small town, with bitter meanspirited people, and a yearly ritual that holds a dark secret. It is a novel that contains a “twist” but one that is pretty easily guessed and outright explained well before you have reached the halfway point. It is a novel with a deep sympathy for the monster, more in the vein of Frankenstein than Pumpkinhead. The town and more specifically the Police Officer stand in opposition against our trio of anti-heroes as we the readers root for them to succeed. Things may not be tied up in the neatest of bows at the end… but it was still fairly satisfying. More than anything this is a novel that rebels against the “things have always been this way and have to stay that way” narrative of small-town America. As a product of deeply rural “one horse town” America, I at least found it satisfying and immediately identified with the narrative of wanting to leave at any cost. That is precisely what I did… once I was gone, I was gone and I didn’t even come home on the weekends.
The movie however does what Hollywood always seems to do… and mercilessly fucks with the story. By the time we are ten minutes into the tale, it is already barely recognizable from the source material. While the novel is a tale of rebelling against dark traditions… the movie leans significantly more into the monster movie genre. As a result, you end up with this sort of what if Lord of the Flies happened during the Purge where the kids who all look like Back to the Future 1950s extras go out and wage war against Pumpkinhead. The only pieces that remain from the Novel, are the most basic building blocks of the plot… the October Boy, Starved Children Pressed into Service to Defend the Town, and the townsfolk enabling or at least turning a blind eye to the whole process.
I am not saying Dark Harvest is a bad film, just that it has very little to do with the novella that spawned it. It seems to constantly be flipping back and forth on this border of taking itself way too seriously, and cartoonish levels of nonsensical violence. For example, I give you the “bloodsplosion” which is a truly nonsensical scene where apparently the monster brutally murders an entire cellar worth of kids who have tried to hide away from “The Run”. Nothing that the monster could have done… would have caused this giant fountain of blood to come crashing out of the cellar, but we have it nonetheless as a weird hamfisted callback to the elevator scene from The Shining maybe? There is zero sympathy for the devil here… as Sawtooth Jack is just a mindless abomination that must be killed. There is some attempt to pin a message on at the end… but the delivery just does not really work with anywhere near the same gravity as it does in the novel.
I am not saying it is a bad film. So long as you go into it with the knowledge that it is going to be a movie with an easily guessable twist that makes some oftentimes interesting stylistic choices… you will probably enjoy yourself. That said after watching it… I fully understand why this went “directly to home video”. I think the biggest sin that the movie does, is doing a poor job of representing the novel. That however often seems to be the case, especially with horror adaptations. It isn’t that the novel itself is the best thing I have ever read, but it is good enough that I would suggest it, especially considering how quick of a read it is. I am less certain however if I would recommend the movie. This is maybe one of those situations where you would be better off watching the movie first, and then reading the real story afterward if you found the premise at all compelling.
So yes… I am damning this with the faintest of praise. If nothing else it was an interesting journey that I went on yesterday. The novel if nothing else has some really damned good lines in it. I will leave you with my favorite:
words don’t matter unless they are walking the hard road to the truth
Good Morning Folks! I stayed up fairly late last night to finish The Hero of Ages, the final book of the first Mistborn trilogy. This was the first series by Brandon Sanderson I had read, and I guess I can now say I am a fan. When I get into a series, it is often because I fall for the setting more than the characters, but in this novel, it was probably a combination of the two. I genuinely like the characters in this series, and they will be characters that I remember for eternity. I do find the original artwork a bit jarring because this is not at all how I pictured either character. I never would have pictured Vin as Battle Ready Shannon Doherty, and I always pictured Elend as Edgar Figaro from Final Fantasy IV. I guess that is always the challenge with books… your brain associates images with everything that rarely matches up to the later visualizations. Given that I consumed these in digital form, I was not quite so confronted by a book cover at every turn to cement a specific impression.
This has been a bit of a wild ride as far as years go because I went from maybe consuming two books in 2022 to now having finished my thirty-fifth. It feels like in many ways I am making up for lost time, because while I have always loved books and bookstores specifically… I never really forced a place in my life to read. I always had something else that was going to take priority and the only other time in my life when I really voraciously consumed books was when I got into the Dresden series several years back. It is bizarre how the simple act of wanting to get a current Library card created this chain reaction of getting access to the Libby App and then burning through a chain of books.
While I really want to read the sequel series that takes place after Mistborn, I think I am going to dive into something a little bit more chill for the moment. I just consumed two multi-book epics back to back, so I think I need to read a singleton for the moment. Given that I started with Scalzi’s lighter fare, I plan on giving Starter Villain a try tonight. I have no clue how long of a read this is going to be, or more so how quickly I will move through it. It sounds great though, and I have seen a lot of folks giving it praise on the Fediverse. After that, I think my plan is to probably pop into the next book in James Butcher’s Unorthodox Chronicles series as it released on the 10th. The first book was a bit of a mess and took me a while to get into it, but once I settled in I enjoyed it enough to keep reading the series.
Some other books that I am looking forward to are Rubicon by J.S. Dewes, because while I would rather have the next book in The Divide series… I enjoyed those books enough to try out something else by them. I have no clue when Alecto the Ninth is going to release, but whenever it does I will likely drop everything else and switch over to that as I am very sold on that universe and more specifically the characters of Gideon Nav and Harrowhark Nonagesimus. I thought book three of Linday Ellis’ Noemena series would be coming out soon, but while the book has cover art and everything… it appears that maybe it won’t be released until next summer. We have no clue at all what is going on with the Dresden Files series and while there is a tentative title for book 18, I’ve not seen anything regarding potential release dates.
There is always the Iron Druid Chronicles series that I could return to as well, and absolutely intend to at some point. I enjoyed Hounded quite a bit in a very Not-Quite-Dresden-Files sort of manner, but I’ve just never actually gotten around to reading the second book. I know in November I will make a beeline for Bookshops and Bonedust the next book in the Legends and Lattes series from Travis Baldree. There is also a bunch of stuff from N.K. Jemisin and Sangu Mandanna that I want to explore as well. After that, I have a whole slew of books that have been orbiting in the back of my brain and can essentially endlessly keep pulling forward as needed. This year really has been the year of the book for me. As always though you can follow my journey over on Bookwyrm.
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