Favorite Books of the Year: 2025

Every year, I post a list of the books I liked best the previous year, early on the New Year's morning. Some years I've read less, and kept it simple, but usually I pick a book as a favorite for each month (and some also-rans worth mentioning) and pull them all together at the end into a list.

First, though, I like including long lists of links, so here are all of the previous installments: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

And then, before I get into the list: I'm idiosyncratic, and I feel the need to explain those idiosyncrasies every year, so....

Rules & Explanations:

• This list is finalized on December 31 on purpose; it includes everything I read this year. I occasionally cast shade on people who do "best of the year" lists as early as Halloween; they are slackers and will get theirs eventually.
• These are favorites, not "best." I can't define "best." I can define "favorite."
• This is not separated or compartmentalized by genre; it's based on everything I read. Maybe that means I'm lazy, maybe it means I reject tired genre dichotomies: you decide.
• Each month gets some also-rans; the bolded book is the favorite.
• I try to chose new(ish) books for the favorites, so this is roughly similar to the big fancy lists; it doesn't always work. My reading is not at all focused on newly-published books, to begin with - that would be nice, and the part of me that used to work in publishing wishes I was still doing that, but I just don't read enough anymore, or in that focused a way.

But Why?

I didn't have some specific reason, originally, for making my list this way - it seemed like a reasonable way to organize a list, maybe a little idiosyncratic, certainly, but defensible. As the years have gone on, making those weird, particular choices for each month loom larger, and have become a more central part of the process. For example: if I read only books that vaguely annoyed me in a given month, how do I pick a "favorite?"

I'm ambivalent about the idea of literary standards to begin with - they've been used as a cudgel often against the kinds of books I like (not to mention all of the other problems with canon-making, starting with which groups are allowed to be part of it and how they get in) - while at the same time I do think there are aspects of a work that can be clearly done badly or well. There are standards, on some level, which I do think serious readers can identify and note. 

At the same time, lousy things can on occasion be a lot of fun, and well-executed works can be tedious, horrible bilge not worth reading. (cf. Henry James) And I didn't have any interest in celebrating the worthy but dull.

So I wanted to do a list, and I wanted it to have rules that constrained it - but not the same rules as anyone else. These rules grew up as I was doing it, mostly that first year, and have been tweaked since then but are still recognizably the same. So that's why there's twelve, and why each month is its own little competition - because listing favorites for a year is already artificial to begin with, so why not emphasize that artificiality?

January

The last few years, I've been reading a lot of older books - that's good for my reading things I actually enjoy (at least most of the time), but it's bad for this list. Maybe some year I'll break down and say some of my favorite books of a given year are decades old, but I don't think I'm there yet.

Still - I did read a bunch of older, excellent books this year. I started the year reading about a corrupt political establishment and a weird, twisty election in A.J. Liebling's classic book of reportage The Earl of Louisiana, for reasons I think I can leave unstated. Later in January, I got to Stewart O'Nan's first novel, the seasonally appropriate Snow Angels, and also continued a vague project to re-read a lot of Jack Vance, starting his "Tschai" novels with City of the Chasch. (I read the rest of the Tschai books and the three Alastor novels in 2025.)

I also noticed that George O'Connor had started what will be a four-book series of graphic novels (officially for younger readers, but don't let that scare you) and got to the first one, Odin, in January and two more (the ones already published) before the year ended.

But the favorite for the month was a new graphic novel by the unique Carol Lay, My Time Machine, which also - to loop back to Liebling - had a lot of relevance to the world we find ourselves in.

February

Starting with old things again, I continued a re-read of Raymond Chandler's novels (as I type this, I'm just a bit into The Long Goodbye, which I should finish before the year ends) with Farewell, My Lovely this month. They're favorites, but, again, it's not fair to claim anything seven decades old for this year.

Not quite as old, and just as much a favorite, was Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's Batman: Year One, which sent me, a bit later in the year, into re-reading Miller's Daredevil as well.

Even newer - only about a decade old, and new to me - was a fine and visually stunning graphic novel about Brian Epstein, Vivek J. Tiwary and Andrew C. Robinson's The Fifth Beatle. I liked it but didn't love it, and thought it had more than a bit of special pleading.

Two other things that I can't quite call my favorites, for different reasons: Axelle Lenoir's fun collection What If We Were.... is enough not-quite-new that I have to make it an also-ran, and Cathy Malkasian's Percy Gloom is both a bit too old to be a 2025 favorite and quirky in ways that sometimes set my teeth on edge (which I'm finding common with Malkasian - she's a very particular creator with definite strengths, so I want to both read her books closely and argue with them intensely).

The favorite for the month is partly a sentimental favorite - Daniel Pinkwater had a new novel this year, the middle-grade story Jules, Penny, and the Rooster. I don't want to say that any new Pinkwater book would automatically be a favorite, but it's close to that - he's such a unique writer, who I've been reading since I was a middle-grade myself, and this is yet another fine bit of Pinkwateriana for brighten the world a bit.

March

My list of possibilities this month is entirely "old," so my favorite will end up being not as new as I would like. Maybe the way to figure out which one it should be is to start from the oldest books. 

I dug back into a big omnibus of Evelyn Waugh travel books by reading Remote People, the story of his trip to see Haile Selassie crowned King of Abyssina, and read a bunch more in that book later in the year - most of it deeply entertaining, even as Waugh was full of opinions and ideas I can't quite bring myself to agree with.

I re-read David Goodis's fine noir novel Down There, which I think I read in a big bunch of Goodis twenty-five years or so ago, so it was time enough to get back to it.

I found and read two good books of memoir this month: Louise Brooks' collection of essays about her time making movies, Lulu in Hollywood, and the newspaperwoman Helene Stapinski's memoir about her childhood in Jersey City, Five-Finger Discount.

I've been reading Julian Hanshaw's graphic novels as I've found them - he's a quirky, specific creator with something new to say in each book so far, which I appreciate. This month, I made my way back to his 2018 book Cloud Hotel.

And I've been spending the year reading the fine Freddy Lombard books of Yves Chaland, who died unexpectedly and far too young around thity years ago. The one that's the most impressive is right in the middle, and that will take pride of place for this month: Freddy Lombard, Vol. 3: The Comet of Carthage.

April

A few years later than I expected, I re-read Gene Wolfe's quirky sequel to his "Book of the New Sun" series, The Urth of the New Sun, which I found just as quirky this time around.

Also a few years old, but new to me, was Daria Tessler's semi-wordless (there's no dialogue, but a lot of in-world text) graphic novel Cult of the Ibis, which is deeply quirky in its own way.

For newer things, I read two very different, interesting, good graphic novels: Michael Avon Oeming's moody medieval supernatural tale William of Newbury and Craig Thompson's massive autobiographical Ginseng Roots.

The most impressive book of the month - it's a tough read, and about horrible things at times, so I don't want to say "favorite" quite as strongly for this month - was the new collection of Kayla E.'s stories about her childhood, Precious Rubbish.

May

I listed Chandler's The High Window in my first cut for this post, but I don't want to keep mentioning re-reading old things in the same series, so let me instead call out Chester Himes and The Real Cool Killers, about a decade more current and still as cool and smart and electric as it was sixty years ago.

I read two excellent novels - very different from each other - for the first time this month; both are over a decade old. Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog is the fourth of her novels about Jackson Brodie, which have been championed by crime-fiction readers but are bigger and more encompassing that that. (For all that "crime fiction" is already a very large bucket that can include a vast number of stories.) And William Kotzwinkle's The Midnight Examiner was a fever dream of an '80s tabloid.

I read a bunch of good graphic novels this month, and am finding it difficult to pick one as a favorite. All had strengths, but all also had things I disliked. So I can't quite make Eric Drooker's Naked City or Noah Van Sciver's Beat It, Rufus or Laura Pérez's Ocultos or Grant Snider's Thinking About Thinking or even Mia Oberlӓnder's Anna as my "favorite."

I will give pride of place to All My Bicycles by Powerpaola, a book and a creator I'd never heard of before I picked them up, a distinctive and interestingly framed memoir of a specific, quirky life, a book that was fun and energetic and colorful and wonderful.

June

On the old side, I read Evelyn Waugh's Scoop again, after twenty-some years, and found it just as cynical and nasty and cutting as the first time.

For newer things, I actually read a first novel around the time of publication! There was a decade or so where I did that several times a month, but times change on us. This time around, it was Auston Habershaw with a fine contemporary fantasy, If Wishes Were Retail.

And my favorite of the month was a graphic novel: Love Languages by James Albon, a fine love story by a creator whose work I need to dig into more deeply.

July

I mentioned a Julian Hanshaw book earlier, so, under my rules, I'm not supposed to say that I also read Free Pass this year. Pretend I didn't.

For old books, I read a few - another Evelyn Waugh travel book that I shouldn't mention, for one. I also re-read Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which I think I got a lot more out of than when I first read it, as a teenager. (But isn't that always the case?) 

The favorite was a no-brainer. Jaime Hernandez had a new collection of his Love & Rockets stories: Life Drawing. 

August

August is a complicated one. If I hadn't already picked a Carol Lay book for this year's list, I'd be happy to give the nod to her Murderburg, which is a fun, zippy collection of great stories about a small-town (island) where killing people is something of a local hobby. But I had, so I couldn't.

I've been watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 a bunch the last year or so, with my kids, and this year dug into a few books about it, because that's the kind of over-intellectualizer I am. Best of that bunch, no surprise, is the book by the cast & crew themselves, The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide from the mid-90s.

I should throw the "old" books in somewhere around here: I re-read William Goldman's classic fantasy novel The Princess Bride, which is as bright and cutting as ever. New to me, but nearly twenty years old, was the cultural history How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman, which was smart and full of interesting details of everyday life for a lot of people over close to a century.

And then there were two books that could have been the favorite. One was "new," but largely reprinted old work by a great, now-dead master - so I think I'm going to take half a point off for that and list it first. Richard Sala was a massive talent who died much too soon, and his first book Night Drive was a quirky gem to begin with and made vastly better by the additional material added to the recent posthumous edition.

That leaves pride of place to Jeff Lemire's big, detailed memoir of his life in comics: 10,000 Ink Stains.

September

There were a lot of OK books in September, but not many I want to drag back out here. I got to another Cathy Malkasian book, The Heavy Bright, which I enjoyed and argued with in almost equal proportions. (I've seen reports that she's planning to stop making books, which would be sad: she's a unique, distinctive voice, and I say that even as I argue with almost every page of hers I read.)

I could also mention the fun but slight Who Killed Nessie? by Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith and the gorgeous but weirdly-ending Betty Blues by Renaud Dilles.

And the favorite for the month was another surprise: Smoking Kills by Thijs Desmet, an afterlife fantasy by a creator I've never heard of.

October

I've been reading or re-reading P.G. Wodehouse books, about one every second or third month, for several years now - he wrote about a hundred of them, so I have a lot to get through. I read several this year, all entertaining, all uniquely Wodehousian, but the only one I'll mention was this month: The Mating Season.

Also old, also a re-read, also the end of a re-read project: Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man. I was less-impressed by his middle novels, but this one is still zippy and bright.

Two random graphic novels worth mentioning: the stylish spy thriller Bang! by Matt Kindt & Wilfredo Torrres, and the major French biography George Sand: True Genius, True Woman by Séverine Vidal & Kim Consigny.

And one more, which almost became the favorite: The Interview by Manuelle Fior, an excellent SFnal story about a decade old now.

But I actually read a big non-fiction prose book, only a few years after publication, and it was full of insights and research and details about forty-some years of underground cartoonists and their followers, so that will take the slot: Brian Doherty's Dirty Pictures.

November

At this point in the year, my links start to give out, since the posts haven't gone live yet. I might go back later in '26 and add them in, but I suspect I won't remember to do that.

To start with the old: this year I finally read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, which was mostly familiar from a million adaptations but full of specifics that strong originals always have and their adaptations never quite include all of.

I also read the excellent '70s SF novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D.G. Compton, also for the first time. Vaguely related - since it's about old SF - is the oral history Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!, edited by Richard Wolinsky from several decades of a San Francisco radio-interview program.

On the comics side, I found two excellent books by European creators from earlier this century: Naomi Nowak's Graylight and Ludovic Debeurme's Renée.

For newer comics, also worth noting were Walker Tate's debut Laser Eye Surgery and two books of an unexpected triptych of women cartoonists making memoirs about their relationships with food and eating: Jennifer Hayden's Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner and Debbie Tung's My Perfectly Imperfect Body. (I'll mention the third a section down, under December.)

The favorite was a big new book by Bill Griffith, covering the long, complex, fascinating life of his photographer grandfather: Photographic Memory.

December

In the last month of the year, I read a weird old book worth mentioning: Mister Pye, the other novel by Gormenghast author Mervyn Peake. It is light in tone and amiable and utterly its own odd supernatural thing, in a Christian vein unlike anything else I've ever read.

I mentioned Jaime Hernandez's new Love & Rockets collection above, so, out of fairness, I should also mention the similarly new collection by his brother Gilbert, Lovers and Haters. There: I have now mentioned it. I make no claims for favorites or quality.

Reading Jeff Lemire's 10,000 Ink Stains inspired me to make a list of the books of his I'd missed, and I got to his excellent, recent, mostly horror/crime Fishflies this month.

I need to mention John Allison somewhere in this list, though I seem to mostly read his stuff online these days. I did get to the collection of his recent series with Max Sarin, The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt, which is full of his great dialogue and sparkling plots - plus Sarin's fine cartoony drawing, too.

The third of the three memoirs by women cartoonist about cooking and eating - and the one that made me notice there were three of them, published almost on top of each other, was the smart and insightful The Joy of Snacking by New Yorker cartoonist and standup comic Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell.

And the favorite for the month, to close out the year, was another collection of laconic genre stories told sideways by the inimitable cartoonist known only as Jason, Death in Trieste.

Top 12 of 2024

• Love Languages by James Albon
• Freddy Lombard, Vol. 3: The Comet of Carthage by Yves Chaland 
• Smoking Kills by Thijs Desmet
• Dirty Pictures by Brian Doherty
• Precious Rubbish by Kayla E.
• Photographic Memory by Bill Griffith
• Life Drawing by Jaime Hernandez
• Death in Trieste by Jason
• My Time Machine by Carol Lay
• 10,000 Ink Stains by Jeff Lemire
• Jules, Penny, and the Rooster by Daniel Pinkwater
• All My Bicycles by Powerpaola

I read 207 books last year - less than 2024, more than the four years before that, less than my Book-A-Day Years but more than the ones between. I seem to have found a pattern that works for me.

I don't know if you're like me, but I need to find ways to embed reading - like so many other things that I want to make sure I do regularly - into the fabric of my life, so that it just happens. Years ago, I read for myself while commuting and for work (when I was an editor) in long stretches every weekend and many evenings. Losing the editorial job freed up my weekends, though I sometimes miss that life. Losing the commute sent me into a reading tailspin, and it took me years to figure out how to replace that time regularly.

What I mean to say is: think about the things that matter to you. If you read this far, "reading books" is probably one of them. Embed those things in your life regularly. Make time for them, structurally. Don't let the things you really want to do become contingent and secondary.

And, of course: read good books. I recommend the ones above; you'll have others based on your own tastes. 2026 is as good a time as any. Today is the best time to do anything, to start any project.

The Heavy Bright by Cathy Malkasian

I'll confess up front: I really don't like it when a work of fiction has a glorious past Golden Age, and explicitly says the point of the world is to get back to that Garden of Eden-ish state. Some creators try to do that in a way that doesn't immediately push all of the reactionary buttons, and Cathy Malkasian certainly tried here, but it inherently reinforces that old sour human sense that everything always gets worse, so there's no point in ever changing or trying to make anything better.

Cathy Malkasian specializes in long, fabulistic comics stories, set in quirky, unrealistic worlds, full of Improving Lessons and buffoonish, obvious villains. She also has a weird aversion to writing about adults, people in the middle of their lives: her protagonists often skip from young to old, and that's very obvious here.

The Heavy Bright was her 2023 book; like all the Malkasian books I've seen, it's not quite a formal allegory but tends in that direction. In the Glorious Before Times, all people lived in peace and harmony and talked with their dead relatives so much that they hadn't even invented writing. (Everyone also, apparently, had perfect memories and the dead are explicitly said to be unable to lie, because we're doing the fuzzy origin myth thing.)

But then a bunch of glowing eggs fell from the sky, amplifying everyone's emotions, but then turned black and fell to the ground, which brought evil into the world. Malkasian never gives a reason or source or point to this: it's a thing that happened, and it ruined the world. Presumably, other equally bad things could also happen at any time - maybe next time there's a rain of tetrahedrons that make everyone greedy.

A group of people who come to be called the Commanders witnessed this, and grabbed the eggs, which allowed them to wipe out entire villages with the power of aggression and anger - the mechanism isn't the same as in Temperance, but it's a very similar thing. These men - they're all men, and I'll get into the sexual politics later - use their power to foment chaos and death to gather political power, which goes on through an unknown number of generations.

We get this story from the dead Commanders, who lose their gender - this is a big deal for Malkasian in this book; there's a lot of talk about "groins" not being important at the same time her main character is explicitly a lesbian in a world hostile to them - after they die, and also, maybe, come to see that the system they devoted their lives to is horrible and evil. There's one woman in this afterlife - Old Bird, who discovered the first egg, way back when, and is on the one hand the keeper of all of the things the Commanders forgot or destroyed and on the other hand the main driver of the plot. Old Bird has realized that the "heavy" black eggs can be converted back into "bright" glowing ones by being whacked with objects with emotionally resonant memories tied to one's ancestors (or something like that), and she recruits a living human to do this.

Arna is the main character, though we don't meet her until after a long introductory Old Bird section. She's the tween daughter of an itinerant puppeteer; they travel around, tell stories to get some coin, and move on. She's not exactly pretending to be a boy now, but as she grows up she's going to have to - girls are commodities in this world, sold cheaply. But then they next place they come to has a Commander lurking about, which means random pointless violence and death. Arna survives; her father does not. And, almost randomly, she finds an egg and tries to eat it with a spoon she keeps on a chain around her neck, an old thing with a long history. This transforms the egg back to brightness - it doesn't seem as if anything can subsequently change it back to dark again, for no stated reason - and also seems to make it go away, out of the world or at least the narrative.

Old Bird has a long conversation with Arna in the afterlife, saying it's now Arna's mission to transform all 100 eggs - whack them all with her spoon, which each time makes her fly into the air briefly and kills the Commander associated with that egg.

Arna sets off to do this, and soon meets another young woman she falls in love with, Sela. Old Bird tells her not to reveal any secrets to Sela, but Arna wants to include her. Now I need to get back into the very particular sexual politics - and the way that Malkasian very deliberately excludes adults from this book.

Arna and Sela are on the verge of adulthood - Arna "buds" (has her first menstruation) when she meets Sela; that hasn't happened to Sela yet. As often with women in oppressive male-dominated societies, Sela dreams of never "budding," of staying just as she is. We don't see men that are young and strong - no obvious warrior types. The Commanders are older, and the trading of women is explicitly by "old men" - both in this section and later in the book. Women in their fertile years are talked about, but don't really enter the narrative.

To be blunt, Heavy Bright is a book about controlling women's fertility that fanatically avoids showing any women in their fertile years, and also has a mania in its afterlife scenes (and elsewhere) about insisting that "groins" - the difference between sexes - are utterly unimportant. It comes across almost as if there's something icky about sexuality - maybe just heterosexuality - and that everyone would be better off either as pre-sexual children or post-sexual menopausal women.

Anyway, what happens is that Sela "buds," which sweeps her up into the sky with a gigantic clamor and Close Encounters-esque light. This ends a section; the action shifts to several decades later.

Arna is now menopausal - again, we don't see her as an adult in the book. First she's a child, and then has her first period just a short time before the end of that section. Then we return to her after her menses have ended, thirty or so years later. Again, for a book about controlling women's sexuality, the women who are actually controlled are never present in their own story - our heroines are all children or post-fertile women.

Anyway, Arna is now chasing the last few eggs. Society has changed somewhat, though it's still lousy and sexist. All women now disappear, like Sela did, at their first period. Girl children are sold like animals, I suppose because everyone knows they'll disappear before long. Violence is much less common - in this world, the eggs initiate violence, and it might not be possible without them. But there's a sexist philosophy that's popular among men, and adult women divided into fertile (good "vessels") and infertile (bad). Although, after thirty years with no young women, I find it hard to believe there's been much fertility recently.

Arna does destroy the last eggs, after some more quirky scenes, and the world is then perfect and special - people can laugh (apparently they couldn't before? Malkasian didn't mention that earlier in the book) and talk with their ancestors again, and Arna is reunited with Sela and her dead father.

Heavy Bright is a positive, mostly uplifting story about fighting evil by whacking it with a spoon. It has goofy, broadly-drawn characters, as might be expected from a creator who spent decades making children's animation. Its allegory is at least muddied, but it has its heart in the right place, more or less. (Though it does seem to have an bone-deep aversion to sex and sexuality that is also somewhat congruent with children's animation.) And Malkasian's pages are lovely and organic, with her usual soft watercolors.

I can't tell you it means anything coherent, but even a vague message of "be nice to other people" and "women are also people" and "remember your past" and "violence is bad" is worth hearing.

Books Read: September 2025

I do this every month, and it's boring this time as always before. This is what I read; once the posts go live, I'll add links. I don't know if this is actually as useful as an index to the blog as I say it is, but it's a thing I do consistently, and I'm old and set in my ways enough to be very fond of consistency.

Cathy Malkasian, The Heavy Bright (digital, 9/1)

James Thurber, The Seal in the Bedroom (in Writings and Drawings, 9/1)

James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times (in Writings and Drawings, 9/1)

Thijs Desmet, Smoking Kills (digital, 9/6)

Tony Millionaire, Drinky Crow Drinks Again (digital, 9/7)

John Updike, Bech: A Book (in The Complete Henry Bech, 9/7)

John Lustig, Last Kiss: Casual Fridays (digital, 9/13)

Roger Langridge and Andy Hirsh, The Baker Street Peculiars (digital, 9/14)

Evelyn Waughh, Waugh in Abyssinia (in Waugh Abroad, 9/14)

Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith, Who Killed Nessie? (digital, 9/20)

Renaud Dilles, Betty Blues (9/21)

Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister (in Later Novels & Other Writings, 9/21)

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol. 2 (digital, 9/26)

James Kochalka, Quit Your Job and Other Stories (9/27)

Patrick Wirbeleit and Uwe Heidschötter, Box (9/28)

Next month I will probably read more books.

Temperance by Cathy Malkasian

I don't necessary want to connect Cathy Malkasian's comics work back to her long career as an animator on projects for children - and there isn't a clear, obvious, through-line - but the parallels and comparisons keep shoving their ways forward in her comics work. I don't see how I can avoid it.

Temperance was Malkasian's 2010 book; I'm mostly working forward from the beginning of her career. It has a title that is odd for a book focused on interactions among people - temperance is a personal, internal virtue, the desire or urge to not do things. And Malkasian's characters, to my mind, are always intemperate - balls of emotion running about at high speed, emoting madly and expressing their roles in the plot and theme at top volume. Temperance is close to being a formal allegory, but it's not an allegory of temperance: it's an allegory of wars of choice and tribal allegiance and hatred of the other. Yes, if all of her characters were much more temperate, the plot of this book would never have happened, but I have to think that they wouldn't be Cathy Malkasian characters in that case.

Descriptions of the book I've seen tend to start with the second section, eliding details of the setup that Malkasian makes very clear and stark - possibly to play up the allegory. But Malkasian does come from children's animation; she's always very clear. Her villains are hugely monstrous, undeniable. Her heroes are damaged, at least half-broken, tentative, whimsical, confused. All of them are odd, in most terms of the word - Malkasian's worlds are fabulistic constructions filled with quirky people, like something you stumble across on an obscure channel one early morning by accident.

So: Temperance begins with two young women in a wood. Minerva is real: short, homely, conflicted. Peggy, on the other hand, is only ambiguously real, less so as the book goes on: tall, beautiful, focused. They are watching their "Pa," who is the actual father of neither of them. He's a large, seemingly middle-aged man: bald, angry, energetic, massively destructive. He travels to local villages, declares that "the enemy" is attacking, whips the locals into a fervor, and recruits them for his great civilizational project. He's building a gigantic "ship" out of stone - so, a castle, actually - to be called Blessedbowl, where his chosen people will be free forever from the obviously horrible depredations of these unknown enemies.

There are no enemies, obviously. Any atrocities they supposedly did - murders, burning of villages, rape of maidens - were all done by Pa. In Malkasian's world, he's essentially a force of nature, not a person: he can't be directly stopped or contradicted; no one even seems to be able to realize he's the one who does all of this.

People in Malkasian's books, I'm coming to believe, are all pretty dumb, to make her plots work. Maybe I should say "easily led" or "blind to their own faults," but they're bone-deep stupid on top of that, with  massive abilities to ignore or misunderstand the clearest things standing right in front of them.

Pa cuts down trees, rants and rages, and fights a young man who tries to save or protect the two women. The young man is beaten nearly to death, but spared, after a maiming, by Minerva's intervention. She drags him into Blessedbowl, nurses him back to life, names him Lester, tells him stories to replace the memories he lost in the attack.

The book skips forward thirty years, and is narrated after that short initial chapter by a block of wood. (I'm not joking, and it's thematically relevant. But it is yet another bit of quirk in a story already loaded down with quirk.) Pa is nowhere to be seen - like Moses, he did not enter Blessedbowl, but unlike Moses, he's said to be still out there, fighting the enemy and sending back dispatches from his war.

Minerva invents all of those dispatches; she's the internal head of this society, under only Pa. Most of the people in Blessedbowl are stupid and easily led; a few are stupid and power-hungry and cunning, plotting to take Minerva's power for their own deeply stupid and destructive ends. None of them have two brain cells to rub together; none of them seem capable of going outside in the rain without looking up and drowning.

The bulk of the book follows the parallel tracks of Lester and Minerva. Lester is finally getting some of his memories back, which are vastly different from the self-serving stories Minerva has been telling him for thirty years. If this were a realistic world, he'd also have severe brain damage from the gigantic dent in his skull, so he's lucky in that if nothing else. Minerva is trying to hold together her society of the just-stupid and the stupidly-destructive, and her ways of doing so are running down.

Oh, and our narrator, the block of wood, is first Lester's artificial leg, without any agency. But then Minerva carves it into a little doll, and it can run and have its own adventures - yet another kids-animation touch.

Eventually, several characters leave Blessedbowl, and Pa re-enters the narrative, seemingly no older and obviously no different than he was a generation before. (Well, of course. If he's not really a human being, if he's a personified spirit of war or whatever, why would he age?)

I said Temperance was close to an allegory, but what I mean is is that Pa is clearly allegorical, and Peggy tends strongly to the allegorical, and the wooden doll and Blessedbowl, too. But all of the other pieces don't slot in neatly, especially Minerva and Lester, who are somewhat Everypeople but too specific and too much leaders for that to work well. I can't quite explicate how those elements come together in the ending, but the wooden doll, Pa, and Peggy (possibly the spirit of learning or knowledge or just actual information rather than lies and destruction) have a very symbolic multi-page sequence that leads to the end of Blessedbowl.

But most of the people of Blessedbowl are completely blindered: they have no useful skills, no knowledge of reality, no shown ability to cope with anything whatsoever. Their capacity for creating food falls apart in the course of the book. As far as I can tell, they'll probably all die - either slowly of starvation or quickly by battling in ever-smaller factions over this massive upheaval in their lives. They are very stupid.

So, yay! The wooden doll has a happy ending, and Pa is somewhat banished after destroying all of the "books" in Peggy's "library" - whatever that one last fit of pique and mindless destruction really means - and Minerva and Lester reunite. They also have no skills to survive in this new world, so let's end the book quickly before they starve to death, too.

It's fairly easy to be allegorical but very hard to be an actual allegory. Everything has to map precisely for the latter; it's a finnicky, rigorous form that has vanishingly few successes and piles of half-baked failures. Temperance doesn't try to be a formal allegory, which is good. But it comes closer than most allegorical things do, which is not necessarily good. Malkasian's art is lovely and organic here, soft pencil lines and mostly amusingly-drawn elements, and that covers over a lot of the gaps in her allegorical project - we readers want Lester and Minerva and the doll to find happiness, want Pa to be finally destroyed or beaten, so we'll fill in the bits in our own heads as needed to get to that point on the page.

I found Temperance deeply frustrating. I wanted to figure out what these allegorical elements meant - what the idea side of the allegory was - but I don't think Malkasian built the book that way. I think this was a somewhat delayed rant against the Gulf War, and the us-against-them mindset in general, and that Malkasian's anger and disgust curdled many of the elements here - those deeply stupid people, the ways her main characters are nearly useless, the senseless, aimless, unrelenting destruction. In the end, I don't think it works as an allegory, only partially because Malkasian didn't want to make it all neat and clear.

Books Read: June 2025

The monthly index returns again - as always, I really doubt anyone other than me ever looks at these posts. But here's what I read last month:

George O'Connor, Asgardians: Thor (6/1)

Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne, How to Be a Motorist (6/5)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 7: Gen's Story (digital, 6/7)

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (6/7)

Philiipe Riche, Bad Break, Vol. 1 (digital, 6/8)

Paco Roca and Guillermo Corral, The Treasure of the Black Swan (digital, 6/14)

Auston Habershaw, If Wishes Were Retail (6/14)

Cathy Malkasian, Temperance (digital, 6/15)

Frank Conniff, Twenty-Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever (6/15)

John Lustig, Last Kiss: Sex Day (digital, 6/19)

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (in Complete Novels, 6/19)

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol.1 (digital, 6/20)

Yves Chaland, Freddy Lombard, Vol.4: Holiday in Budapest (digital, 6/21)

Hope Larson and Tintin Pantoja, Who Is AC? (6/22)

Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls (6/22)

Annie Goetzinger, The Provocative Colette (digital, 6/28)

James Albon, Love Languages (digital, 6/29)

Next month there will be more books. And some of the names above will have links added once my posts go live.

Percy Gloom by Cathy Malkasian

Reading a second book by the same creator gives you some parallax: you start to realize what's just how she does things and which are the concerns and angles you can expect going forward. The quirkier and more specific the creator, the more interesting the process is.

Cathy Malkasian, I think, is a very particular and quite quirky creator. She's made half a dozen graphic novels over the past decade and a half, but I've only read two of them so far: first Eartha, her 2017 book and I think at least a bit of a breakout hit. And now Percy Gloom, her first book from 2007. (Because, if you're going to read multiple books by someone, it makes sense to try to start as close to the beginning as you can.)

Malkasian's work, I'm coming to think, is deeply constructed, at its core fabulistic, and is not concerned at all with verisimilitude or depicting worlds anything like the ones a reader lives in. Her main characters - at least in the two books I've seen - are childlike figures, tossed about by complex and challenging worlds, taught Lessons by their experiences, and making their worlds better by their inherent good qualities. The work is didactic at its core, but trying to teach tangled, complex morals, not simple ones.

Percy Gloom the book is all about Percy Gloom the character, a small man who seems to be quite old and whose lifetime dream is working for the Safely Now Cautionary Writing Institute, an institution that tests all manner of products to find all of the ways that they may harm people. They are incredibly baroque in this: their unstated goal is clearly to highlight how deadly every last thing in the world is, and to make everyone scared of everything all the time. But they seem to be mostly unsuccessful and unheeded.

Percy has, after what seems to be many years of trying, finally gotten an interview with Safely Now. So he's traveled to the unnamed city where they are headquartered. Since he's a Malkasian character, he both has complicated needs - he can only eat muffins and drink lemon juice, and apparently needs to do so with great regularity or else his guts make unpleasant noises and he is distracted, confused, and weepy - and is borderline incompetent to do anything or function in society. So he meets some well-meaning kids - who are themselves attempting to find the one magical stone that will make the whole city fall down by its removal - gets sidetracked, and then is caught up in an unpleasant scene at the muffin shop with a deeply grumpy, nasty woman named Tammy.

Those are most of the elements of the early book - shrieking Tammy, well-meaning but rambunctious kids, a blustery and imperious Safely Now interviewer, and the deeply sad-sack Percy Gloom cringing and whimpering at the center of it all. Percy does get a position at Safely Now, where he has a differently imperious manager, but his actual work there is only a minor thread in the book.

Because this is a book about Living. Not in the hairy-chested Hemingway style, but in the just-not-dying sense. Percy is immortal, we learn: from his father's side, he can do a particular thing that lets him die instantly, but, otherwise, we think he'll just go on forever. (Well, he almost certainly can be killed, and he's a small, milquetoasty sad-sack of a guy, so doing so would not be difficult, and he's also the kind of fellow who might just trip over his own shoelaces and fall into a corn thresher.)

Malkasian had a long career in animation, and that shows up in her stories, both the weird complications (Percy's diet, the Safely Now offices and activities) and the vague didacticism, as if teaching a lesson is both the most important thing and something that needs to be buried deeply enough that the kiddies won't notice it too much.

This is a book with a lot of events and hugger-mugger; I've only covered lightly the first of the three main sections. A lot more happens to Percy, but it's all the same sort of thing, and all vaguely didactic, as if the book is always urging its readers to pull up their socks, straighten their collars, sit up straight at their school-desks, and be better citizens. It is a very particular tone and style; no one else I've seen makes comics anything like Malkasian.

I like the way she draws - it's very soft and organic, but filled with detail and life. And I can take the didacticism, since it's so weird and strangely muted a lot of the time, as if she absolutely wants to teach a lesson, but it is a lesson so complex and nuanced that she can barely get to it through all the complications. Most of all, Malkasian is a deeply individual cartoonist; I can't think of anyone else who does anything even remotely similar. And that is a wonderful, special thing, something to be cherished.

Books Read: February 2025

This is basically an index, and it's mostly for my benefit, which is why I bury it on a weekend and usually post it dated in the past. Links will be added once the posts go live; I'm running about 6 weeks ahead at the moment, which is where I like to be.

This is what I read in February:

Axelle Lenoir, What If We Were.... (2/2, digital)

Lucy Knisley, Woe: A Housecat's Story of Despair (2/8)

Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (2/8, in Stories and Early Novels)

Derek Evernden, Bogart Creek, Vol. 2 (2/9, digital)

P.G. Wodehouse, A Prefect's Uncle (2/9)

Vivek J. Tiwary and Andrew C. Robinson, The Fifth Beatle (2/15, digital)

Kris Wilson, Rob Den Blyker, and Dave McElfatrick, Cyanide and Happiness: Twenty Years Wasted (2/16, digital)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 6: Circles (2/17, digital)

Tim Powers, My Brother's Keeper (2/17)

Zach M. Stafford, Good Comics for Bad People (2/22, digital)

Daniel Pinkwater, Jules, Penny, and the Rooster (2/22, bound galleys)

Cathy Malkasian, Percy Gloom (2/23, digital)

Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, Batman: Year One (2/24, digital)

In March, I have continued to read books.

Favorite Books of the Year: 2024

Every year, I post a list of the books I liked best the previous year, early on the New Year's morning. Some years I've read less, and kept it simple, but usually I pick a book as a favorite for each month (and some also-rans worth mentioning) and pull them all together at the end into a list.

(I'm somewhat shakily back on this horse for the past three years after a couple of disastrous ones - disastrous for my number-of-books-read, which I trust many of you will appreciate is truly disastrous.)

First, though, I like including long lists of links, so here are all of the previous installments: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

And then, before I get into the list: I'm idiosyncratic, and I feel the need to explain those idiosyncrasies every year, so....

Rules & Explanations:

1. This list is finalized on December 31 on purpose; it includes everything I read this year. I occasionally cast shade on people who do "best of the year" lists as early as Halloween; they are slackers and will get theirs eventually.
2. These are favorites, not "best." I can't define "best." I can define "favorite."
3. This is not separated or compartmentalized by genre; it's based on everything I read. Maybe that means I'm lazy, maybe it means I reject tired genre dichotomies: you decide.
4. Each month gets some also-rans; the bolded book is the favorite.
5. I try to chose new(ish) books for the favorites, so this is roughly similar to the big fancy lists; it doesn't always work. My reading is not at all focused on newly-published books, to begin with - that would be nice, and the part of me that used to work in publishing wishes I was still doing that, but I just don't read enough anymore, or in that focused a way.

January

I read several good old books this month: Jack Vance's The Star King kicked off a re-read of the whole "Demon Princes" series this year, which I won't mention every time but do recommend as smart SF adventure that hasn't dated much at all. I also read a lot of P.G. Wodehouse this year - like most years - and won't mention them all, but I will mention the short-story collection A Few Quick Ones. And I went back to Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently Holistic Detective Agency, which does still read a bit like outtakes from Doctor Who (which it was), but not in a bad way.

A lot of what I read this year, and in general these days, was comics-format, so that will fill up a lot of this last. Notable ones this month were two true stories: the biographical Anaïs Nin: A Sea of Lies by Léonie Bischoff,  and the autobiographical A Fade of Light by Nate Fakes.

And the best thing, I think, was Elizabeth Pich's Fungirl. It was also comics, and so uniquely itself and transgressively funny that I wouldn't dream of putting anything above it.

February

Let me start with the old stuff again - and it's really old this month. I'm still not sure if I ever read James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice before, but I'm happy I got to that noir classic this year. I know I never read Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises before, despite having an English degree from a well-respected college. But I think hitting it much later in life was better for both of us.

Over to comics, for two very different memoirs that are both compelling, personal, and intensely imagined: Tessa Hulls's generational investigation Feeding Ghosts and Zerocalcare's Forget My Name, which I insist is deeply confabulated, because otherwise lies madness.

For an actual contemporary genre book I read and liked, there was Jeffrey Ford's short and atmospheric fantasy Out of Body.

My favorite of the month was the unique, wacky YA series-ender (I'm 99% sure) Making Friends: Together Forever by the inimitable Kristen Gudsnuk.

March

I read the moderately old (from my own youth) Yobgorgle by Daniel Pinkwater, the sage of weird kids for the last generation or three. And I also read the vastly older (100+ years) The People of the Abyss, by Jack London in best rabble-rousing mode.

I also saw a couple of solid comics projects, both of older material originally in strip format: Jeff Smith's Thorn, collecting the college-strip version of stories he later reworked massively into Bone; and Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell, collecting the late-Aughts webcomic by Sophie Goldstein & Jenn Jordan.

And my favorite of the moth is the hard-to-describe, imagistic, deep graphic novel Totem by Laura Pérez.

April

More old books - I sense a theme this year - with Gene Wolfe's first great work, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, a SFnal fix-up of three novellas that is greater and more mysterious than the sum of its parts. And with the even older - I've been reading a bunch of books around a eighty or a hundred years old, for whatever reason - They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, a masterpiece of closely-examined rock-bottom life by Horace McCoy from the depths of the Depression.

Let me also mention a book I liked, but not quite as much as I hoped: the new SF novel from Lavie Tidhar, The Circumference of the World.

And then comes the tough choice. I read two great graphic novels this month, both by women, both long in coming - and very different from each other. And I think I need to come down on the word "favorite" here to make the decision and let one pull ahead, ever so slightly on points.

Leela Corman's Victory Parade is intense and precise and deep, a WWII homefront story unlike any you've ever seen before, but it's not the kind of book that engenders love.

So I'm going to give the laurel to a happier book - not entirely happy, but with more happiness and forward looks to it - the young-adults-exploring-NYC Roaming by cousins Jillian and Mariko Tamaki.

May

Stewart O'Nan's Ocean State was a fine literary novel about real people that I found just slightly derivative of earlier O'Nan books. Nate Powell's big graphic novel Fall Through, about rock 'n roll and endless days and the road and (just maybe) alternate universes, also didn't quite hit the things I was most intrigued about the premises.

Jesse Lonergan's, Hedra was a wonderful, wordless, visually exciting SF graphic novel, hitting a whole lot of my buttons brilliantly. Lewis Trondheim's Ralph Azham 4: The Dying Flame ended a big, complex fantasy series well, in what was retrospectively both the only way and the perfect way.

My favorite was a surprise: a book by a creator I'd never read before, that I picked up randomly. (Take that as a nudge to do the same in your own life, when you can.) It was a comics memoir, searingly honest and told with precise words and lines: Time Under Tension by M.S. Harkness.

June

The obligatory old book was another really old one, Jack London's John Barleycorn, in which he unconvincingly argues for several hundred pages that he's not an alcoholic for various reasons.

A book I respected the hell out of - especially its ambition and scope - but couldn't believe in its fictional vision of Hollywood for a second: Erased by Loo Hui Pang and Hughes Micol.

And then there was a graphic novel I'm not ashamed to say I didn't entirely understand but thought was awesome: Daria Tessler's Salome's Last Dance.

A couple of more conventional graphic novels were also really good: Sophie Adriansen and Mathou's semi-autobiographical story of post-partum depression, Proxy Mom, and Jeff Lemire's dark fictional story Mazebook, also about a parent and a child (he said, elliptically).

Hey, another random SFF book I read and loved! Steven Brust had a new book in he Vald Taltos series, and it was Lyorn.

My favorite for the month was another one that surprised me, and another graphic novel: Yves Chaland's Young Albert, collecting a series of half-pagers from Metal Hurlant about a kid who is more radical, in a world that is darker, than it seems at first.

July

It's mostly comics this month, starting with the creepy (and older than I thought) Ripple by Dave Cooper. Also older - because it's a career retrospective - is Ed Subitzky's Poor Helpless Comics!, with what seems like thousands of tiny little boxes fileld with people doing neurotically funny things.

Valérie Villieu and Raphaël Sarfati delivered a thoughtful, true-as-far-as-I-know story of one woman suffering from dementia, and how Villieu, a visiting nurse, helped care for her, in Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces. Cathy Malkasian told a fable mostly about social media in Eartha. Jesse Lonergan had another excellent SFnal graphic novel (also a few years old; I'm catching up) in Planet Paradise.

And this is another month where I have two options two choose from: two genre novels, each a decade old. Will it be the SF or the mystery?

Again, I think I have to judge it on points. Jeff VanderMeer's Authority is brilliant and chilly and overwhelming, but is the middle book of a trilogy - it begins in the middle and ends in the middle.

So my favorite instead is the mystery, just because it's entirely self-contained: the brilliant, deep, amazing When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson.

August

Starting with the old - I finally caught up with Carol Emshwiller's quirky feminist fable Carmen Dog. And I re-read the hundred-or-so-year older The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, one of the great all-time grumps of the world.

I like to call out books that I thought were really interesting and knotty, even if I didn't quite like them as much as I wanted to - and one of those was Lisa Goldstein's fantasy novel Ivory Apples, which has a lot to say about art and creators and audiences and families, among other things. Another was the new graphic novel by Charles Burns, Final Cut - a big, mostly realistic work from a great creator that did some of the things I was hoping it would but not all of them.

I read two books by Julia Gfrörer this year, and the first one was Black Is the Color. I'm listing that because the impact of her work - dark, creepy, historical - is even stronger when you first see it.

Peter and Maria Hoey had another great graphic novel with In Perpetuity, using their unique chilly art style to tell the story of a Greek-style afterlife in modern America.

I got to Kelly Link's recent short-story collection White Cat, Black Dog, which was just as brilliant as I expected, and as her earlier stories were.

And my favorite was a graphic novel memoir - though not exactly the memoir of the creator. I won't tell you more than that Axelle Lenoir's Secret Passages: 1985-1986 is the story of a couple of years in a brilliantly imagined and deeply remembered and amusingly transformed life, and, I hope, only the first of several.

September

The old this month included the oddball afterlife fantasy The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien and the quirky travelogue novel The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay.

Similarly quirky, though newer, was the prose memoir - based on a stage show, I believe - Vacationland by John Hodgman, which was emotionally deeper than I expected.

More traditional was the very well-done alternate-worlds fantasy The Midnight Library by Matt Haig and the comics-biography Is This Guy For Real? (about Andy Kaufmann) by Box Brown.

Another pair of books, with nothing I can think of to link them: the crime graphic novel Two Dead by Van Jensen & Nate Powell and the how-animals-interact-with-human-laws non-fiction book Animal Vegetable Criminal by the always amusing Mary Roach.

My favorite - and I know this is getting to sound like a broken record - was a surprise, from a creator new to me. Tim Bird's Adrift on a Painted Sea was a small memoir, the story of his mother's love of painting and how that affected his own work - it's the kind of book that makes smallness and specificity the highest of virtues.

October

I couldn't make Kate Atkinson two of my favorites this year - well, I guess I could, I mean it's my blog and my rules, but it feels like cheating - so I'll mention that I also read her debut novel Behind the Scenes at the Library, a literary award-winner that's now about a quarter-century old, and so counts for the "old" slot this month.

Otherwise there's not as much to call out. I really liked the collection of Reza Farazmand's webcomics, Hope It All Works Out! - he's got a great sarcastic turn of phrase. And John Banville's mystery novel Snow was good but a little too obvious.

Speaking of breaking rules, my favorite for the month - and I've looked at the list for a while trying to figure out alternatives - is an old one. Jack Vance's 1981 SF novel The Book of Dreams ended his "Demon Princes" series brilliantly, and its last lines are still perfect.

November

I mentioned P.G. Wodehouse back in January, but I also read a surprisingly good novel of his towards the end of the year - Piccadilly Jim, which has a lot of great sentences and a wonderful impostor-pretending-to-be-himself plot. Also old, and somewhat more famous, is the minor fantasy classic Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirelees, which I finally read.

A couple of comics projects to mention: the second collection of the modern Nancy reimagining by Olivia Jaimes, Nancy Wins at Friendship, and a fun camp story by Axelle Lenoir, Camp Spirit.

And my favorite was an stuffed-to-the-rafters SF novella published as a book - I have my suspicions it originally wanted to be longer, so the author compressed it like a diamond - Alex Irvine's Anthropocene Rag. I love books, especially SF, bursting with concepts and characters and ideas, and this delivers massively.

December

The really old book I read and liked a lot - unsurprisingly - was Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, which is famous for a reason. But it is still worth reading (counts on fingers) eighty-five years later, which is a big deal. Not quite as old, but still closing in on forty years, was Paul Theroux's travel book about spending what seems to be most of a year, right after a divorce, paddling a canoe around the pacific: The Happy Isles of Oceania. (We read books, I firmly believe, largely to experience the lives we think we would love and know we'll never get.)

Susanna Clarke's short story published as a book, The Wood at Midwinter, is fine for what it is, but it is a very small thing, so I had to kick it out of contention for that.

In comics, there was the latest installment in Budjette Tan & KaJo Baldisimo's Philippines-set urban-fantasy series, Trese, Vol. 6: High Tide at Midnight, just as good - and getting deeper into its specific lore - as the previous books. Guy Colwell had a very interesting book about artistic creation, Delights, telling the story of how Hieronymus Bosch created his most famous painting. And there was the deeply creepy horror comic Everything Is Fine, Vol. 1 by Mike Birchall.

But my final favorite for the year is a book about books: Oliver Darkshire's Once Upon a Tome, the memoir of how he came to work at a famous London antiquarian bookseller and what that world is like, in prose as sparkling and self-deprecating as you could possibly expect from a smart bookish Brit.

Top 12 of 2024

• When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
• Adrift on a Painted Sea by Tim Bird
• Young Albert by Yves Chaland
• Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire
• Making Friends: Together Forever by Kristen Gudsnuk
• Time Under Tension by M.S. Harkness
• Anthropocene Rag by Alex Irvine
• Secret Passages: 1985-1986 by Axelle Lenoir
• Totem by Laura Pérez
• Fungirl by Elizabeth Pich
• Roaming by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki
• The Book of Dreams by Jack Vance

I read 217 books last year - not as many as back when I was reading for a living, more than some years. These are the ones I want to point other people to, the ones I'd mention if we were friends and talking about good stuff we've read recently. I hope there's something on this list that will spark your interest - and, even more so, I hope you find books, as serendipitously as I found a lot of my 2024 favorites, that you will love and find unexpected depths in.