Ready Player One
Tender is the Flesh
A Dowry of Blood
Carmilla
Game of Thrones
Interview with the Vampire

2025 I will read 50 pieces of fiction

I don't recall reading more than one book all year

The Will of the Many

so that i guess. i spent my time watching movies and listening to music, but that's still bad.

How to say Babylon (Memoir)
Frankenstein (Fiction)
Bad Monkey (Fiction)
Hyperbole and a Half (Memoir, funny)
Black Sunlight (Fiction, flawed but visceral)

I had a similar experience, but it was from reading Eileen and My Year of Rest back to back. Didn't like Eileen very much (but I enjoyed the movie adaptation quite a bit), and then My Year of Rest was surprisingly enjoyable. Darkly funny too.

Same lol. It was the book I read then thought to myself, "okay, I get the cult following of Ottessa Moshfegh."

The ending was a bit wonky but I dug the rest of the novel.

1. Warlock by Oakley Hall
2. The Shards by Brett Easton Ellis
3. Angels by Denis Johnson
4. In the Heart of the Country by William H Gass
5. Blood on the Forge - William Attaway

Hm: Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

So excited to dive into warlock. Heard so many good things about it

Excellent western and a very engaging read. Felt like the blueprint for Deadwood in many ways.

Ayo

Deadwood was my s***. Yeah I'm hype

it being a collection of notes loosely related to a topic really shows but it has high highs and low lows, it’s interesting and i enjoy it cause it is edited to be systemized with aphorisms being placed in “books” relating to a certain topic, but the quality of the “books” varied a lot.

1. Another Country - James Baldwin
2. Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler
3. Cinema Speculation - Quentin Tarantino
4. Heaven - Mieko Kawakami
5. Babel - RF Kuang
Bonus Friends & Lovers - Eric Jerome D***ey

currently reading One Hundred Years of Solitude so if i finish this before the years out, maybe the list will change.

Which ones did you like most? Maybe I’ll just skip the bad ones

how was the troop? thinking about getting that one next year

big fan of that one man. haven’t read a ton of horror but that book had me engaged from the first page to the end

i read it at start of the year, so my memory is hazy looking at the content all topic do seem “books” do seem enjoyable to me, there’s only 4 but i remember book one “europeon nihilism” being a standout while the rest have their ups and downs

y'all know what focking time it is

stopped really caring about numbers but I read 40 (I'll probably get to 42) books this year which is my lowest in a while but had my longest average book length at 364 pages

1. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
2. The Border Trilogy by Don Winslow
3. La Sombra del Viento / The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
4. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig
6. The Magus by John Fowles
7. Lapvona by Otessa Moshfegh
8. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
9. Babel by R.F. Kuang
10. American Tabloid by James Ellroy

My top 5 for the year:

1. Madonna in a Fur Coat (1943) - Sabahattin Ali
2. Flowers for Algernon (1966) - Daniel Keyes
3. Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) - Ahmed Sadawi
4. Homegoing (2016) - Yaa Gyasi
5. A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) - Amor Towles

already got 1, 4, and 5 on my tbr and will try to get to em next year

bout 20 books read this year. highest since i was a teenager i think. want that to be my new baseline. hitting 40+ like op would be ideal. anyway

1. The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuin
2. Stoner by John Williams
3. A Story of Yesterday by Sergio Cobo
4. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
5. The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley
6. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
7. The Stranger by Albert Camus
8. De Profundis by Oscar Wilde
9. Eleven by Patricia Highsmith
10. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

CLASSICS

East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)

LESSER ENTRIES FROM AUTHORS I LIKE

Death with Interruptions (Jose Saramago)
Croppers Cabin (Jim Thompson)

JUST OKAY

The Taiga Syndrome (Cristina Rivera Garza)
Carmilla (Sheridan Le Fanu)
The Big Clock (Kenneth Fearing)
Madonna in a Fur Coat (Sabahattin Ali)
The Twenty Days of Turin (Giorgio De Maria)

GOOD

Epitaph for a Tramp (David Markson)
Last Days (Brian Evenson)
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (George Higgins)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson)
Run Man Run (Chester Himes)
Fevre Dream (George RR Martin)

BETTER

Swallowed (Rejean Ducharme)
Impatient with Desire (Gabrielle Burton)
Hollow (Brian Catling)
Tender Is the Flesh (Agustina Bazterrica)

MY S*** FOR REAL

Black Wings Has My Angel (Elliott Chaze)
Mean Business on North Ganson Street (Craig S Zahler)
92 in the Shade (Thomas McGuane)

COULD'VE DONE WITHOUT

Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (Gary K Wolf)

Tried to read more this year.

Non fiction:
1. Sapiens / H****Deus by Yuval Noah Harari
2. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
3. My Heart Will Cross This Ocean by Kadiatou Diallo
4. The Chronicles of Doom by S.H. Fernando Jr.
5. We Need New Stories by Nesrine Malik
6. The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale

Fiction:
1. Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
2. The Alchemist (reread) by Paulo Coelho
3. The Centaur by John Updike
4. The City and its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami
5. The Postman Always Rings Twice James M. Cain
6. Say Youre One of Them by Uwem Akpan

1. Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
2. Underworld by Don DeLillo
3. The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
4. The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustovsky
5. Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
6. Ubik by Philip K. D***
7. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore
8. Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada
9. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
10. Close to Home by Michael Magee

I never wanted lonesome dove to end

70 books this year, tried to read a little more non-fiction as that's out of my usual and I tend to struggle with them. I'm continuing with my read through of the Star Wars New Jedi Order series (they're mostly not good).

My top few reads in no particular order:
1. Clandestine in Chile by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2. Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us by Joseph Andras
3. Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin
4. The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
5. Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
6. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
7. A Long Day's Evening by Bilge Karasu
8. Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
9. The Honditsch Cross by Ingeborg Bachmann
10. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé