December Site Update and 2025 Reading Year In Review

Well, that was a year that felt like a decade... At long last, though, 2025 has come to an end (on the calendar; the damage will last lifetimes). So, in addition to the usual monthly update of the main Brightdreamer Books site, it's time once again for my Reading Year in Review, where I look back over highlights and lowlights. (Note that I don't touch on every title I read; any omissions are more about lack of time and/or energy than a specific commentary.)

I went into January knowing that this would be a trying year at best (and it was not, at all, best); on a personal level, my father was in home hospice care for late-stage dementia and other health issues, while on a national level my country had opted to slam the self-destruct button rather than even attempt to progress past the worst parts of our own history. So perhaps it was little wonder that my first review of the year, Libba Bray's peculiar metaphysical young adult romp Going Bovine, disappointed me, though not as deeply as a classic that had a very deceptive description on Libby, Herman Melville's Billy Budd. I was more impressed by P. Djèlí Clark's first foray into middle-grade fantasy, the African-inspired tale Abeni's Song, though my top read - and one of my best of the year - turned out to be a surprise, the contemporary middle-grade fiction title The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise by Dan Gemeinhart... a book I found less than a week after my father passed away, which spoke so clearly to family and grief I couldn't not give it top marks.

February continued the year's trend of being cruddy (you can pretty much assume at this point that the best 2025 managed was "not quite as terrible as the month before"; I don't think I can point to one week, let alone month, where I could honestly say something was actually, quantifiably, without any mitigating asterisks and qualifications, "good"), but the reading improved somewhat. Henry. H. Neff's humorous take on family curses and demons in modern Appalachia, The Witchstone, started the month off on the right foot for reviews, while Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant series continued its impressive streak with Death Bringer. I ventured into a little history with All Blood Runs Red by Phil Keith with Tom Clavin, the remarkable tale of a young Black man who fled Jim Crow and America in the early 1900's to become a soldier, war pilot, boxer, spy, and more in France. Ray Nayler's The Tusks of Extinction explored a near future where resurrected mammoths are helped by the uploaded mind of a scientist who was murdered by poachers while trying to protect some of the world's last wild elephants, a thought-provoking tale. The short month ended with Ghostdrift, the fourth and final novel in Suzanne Palmer's highly enjoyable Finder series of sci-fi adventures. In between were a few more middling, sometimes mildly disappointing reads, but no outright clunkers.

The early reads of March were adrift in the three-star doldrums, from Holly Gramazio's deconstruction of love and marriage and the notion of a "perfect" life mate in The Husbands through the surreal dystopian future of Djuna's Counterweight, though it ended on a somewhat brighter note with Fundamentals, an exploration of some of the fundamental concepts of physics by Frank Wilczek. High points were Devin Elle Kurtz's delightful picture book The Bakery Dragon and Derek Landy's seventh Skulduggery Pleasant book, Kingdom of the Wicked, while I dabbled in yet another classic with Oscar Wilde's famed tale about a man whose portrait bears the mark of his depravity and sins in The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was enjoyable but couldn't help showing its age.

April opened with the surreality of Welcome to Night Vale, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, which had some fun and intriguing parts but ultimately skewed too random and vague for my tastes. I had better luck with Ta-Nehisi Coates's fascinating essays in Between the World and Me, chronicling his experiences as a Black man grappling with the omnipresent specter of American racism. David LaRochelle's silly picture book 100 Mighty Dragons All Named Broccoli still has one of my favorite titles of all time, while Amber McBride's poetic young adult tale Me (Moth) felt like a strange and sometimes beautiful, if poignant, dream of grief and acceptance and love found too late. The rest of the month had a mixed-to-good assortment, from tales of peculiar experiences on the Navajo reservation in Stanley Milford, Jr.'s memoir The Paranormal Ranger to a tale of a shapeshifter finding unexpected love with two-legged prey in John Wiswell's Someone You Can Build a Nest In, concluding with Anne Rice's iconic tale Interview with the Vampire, a trendsetter that also aged a little poorly around the edges.

Derek Landy had two solid entries in May: the eighth chronological entry in his Skulduggery Pleasant series, Last Stand of Dead Men, and the short story collection (that also contained "spoilers" for later entries due to weird series chronology labeling by the publisher) Armageddon Outta Here. Overall, it was a good reading month, including a new Wayward Children novella from Seanan McGuire (Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear), the surprisingly touching tale of an imaginary friend finding his own way in the world (Michelle Cuevas's Confessions of an Imaginary Friend), and Chuck Tingle's brutal takedown of Hollywood's problem with algorithmically-controlled entertainment and non-hetero representation in Bury Your Gays. Another top read was Maya Angelou's recollections of her childhood in the Deep South during Jim Crow years, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Weaker reads included Sung-il Kim's Asian-flavored fantasy Blood of the Old Kings and E. E. Knight's epic dragon adventure Dragon Champion.

June had few standouts. While the Skulduggery Pleasant wrapped up its original run with the ninth book, The Dying of the Light, in spectacular fashion, other titles that I had high hopes for, such as Peter S. Beagle's I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, left me disappointed or nonplussed. I did enjoy Tochi Onyebuchi's novella Riot Baby, and Alex Bledsoe's melding of private investigation with a fantasy world, The Sword-Edged Blonde, had potential. The month ended with a DK Smithsonian book, Dinosaurs, that suffered mostly from iffy and inconsistent editing and a sometimes-frustrating mix of what was explored and what was glossed over or ignored, though as with most DK titles the pictures were (usually) intriguing enough to make up for weakness in the text.

I had hoped to start July off right with yet another Derek Landy book, but Resurrection not only couldn't quite strike a balance between the familiar Skulduggery Pleasant characters and the "next generation" brought in to keep the titles middle-grade/young adult, but suffered from an unfortunate bout of bad timing, as it featured a minor baddie with parallels to a monster currently (literally) demolishing the highest house in my country with impunity. I also had very high hopes for Scott Reintgen's spacefaring dragon romp The Last Dragon of Mars, but my suspension of disbelief was knocked out of orbit and burned up on re-entry. Jim C. Hines offered a fun middle-grade fantasy adventure as a girl tries to rescue her missing friends from a dangerous portal fantasy world in Tamora Carter, Goblin Queen. I ventured into nonfiction and politics with a few reads - Emmanuel Aoki's Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man and Democracy in Retrograde by Sami Sage and Emil Amick - because I'm very tired of feeling ignorant and helpless (and hopeless) about All The Things that are destroying... well, all the things, and the future along with them. To finish off the month, I ventured into thriller territory with Elizabeth Elo's North of Boston.

August was a lean month for reading, for various non-reading-related reasons. Far and away the best book was Daindreth's Assassin by Elisabeth Wheatley, though the rest were generally serviceable. Hannah Whitten's tale of a princess bound to be sacrificed in a cursed forest (that, of course, is not all that it appears) and the sister who will destroy the kingdom if need be to save her, For the Wolf, didn't quite live up to its promise, but was still fairly good. I was somewhat disappointed by a story of Puerto Rican storytellers and the teen girl unexpectedly inheriting a family gift (and burden), Ann Davila Cardinal's The Storyteller's Death. The Kate Elliott novella Servant Mage didn't quite deliver, either. I ventured into teen romance with the anthology Serendipity, edited by Marissa Meyer. Adrian Tchaikovsky wrapped up the month with an interesting subversion of tropes in his tale of a post-apocalyptic Earth threatened by total annihilation when the "gods" return from their space utopia to "fix" a planet they broke to begin with, The Hungry Gods.

I ventured back to a minor sci-fi classic, Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population, to start September, but it didn't quite live up to the hype for me. It was not the only classic of the month to let me down; I found Robert Sheckley's surreal Mindswap exceptionally dated. Jordanna Max Bordsky's imaginative spin on a prehistoric encounter between the Inuit and Norse explorers (and their respective deities) in The Wolf and the Whale proved much more intriguing. I breezed through Rob Renzetti's fun middle-grade Horrible Handbag trilogy and mostly enjoyed it, and snickered at Freida McFadden's satire of her own thriller genre in The Widow's Husband's Secret Lie. The best book of the month, however, was Kelly and Zach Weinersmith's speculation on space colonization, A City on Mars.

October was another month that opened with a disappointment; after being suckered in by a shiny cover and intriguing early pages, Frances White's Voyage of the Damned just plain failed to deliver. I did my part to push back against the creeping, crushing grasp of book-banners and censors by checking a few frequently challenged titles off: The Complete Maus by Art Speigelman and Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers, both in their ways unflinching explorations of how terrible humans can be to other humans, and what war does to bodies and minds. Maus was easily the best read of the month, and among the best of the year. I also enjoyed Chuck Tingle's take on classic horror tropes (and examination of gatekeeping and internal schisms in nonhetero communities), Straight. A classic children's tale, Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, unfortunately let me down, though I could see how it was a groundbreaker in its way, and it had some intriguing parts, even if I never felt they gelled cohesively. I also felt let down by S. J. Morden's hard sci-fi space thriller One Way, where convicts are recruited to build a Martian colony. Katherine Addison presented a different slant on epic fantasy with The Goblin Emperor, where a half-goblin unexpectedly inherits the throne of the elf king and must navigate courtly politics that he was intentionally never trained to cope with. Adrian Bliss offered humorously offbeat perspectives on historic times and figures with the tales of The Greatest Nobodies of History. I finished off the month with Alix E. Harrow's southern gothic-flavored story of a cursed Kentucky coal town, Starling House.

I started November with a long-anticipated prequel, Christopher Buehlman's The Daughters' War, and enjoyed it, though the tone was darker than The Blacktongue Thief. From there, I ventured through a range of stories and ratings, from the abysmal time loop of Edge of Tomorrow by Hiroshi Sakurazaka to the middle-grade tale of an eventful family vacation in the wake of grief in Cliff Burke's An Occasionally Happy Family, the surreality of Nghi Vo's The City in Glass, and the peculiar tale of a man's terminal antigravity affliction in Elevation by Stephen King. Aldous Huxley's cautionary tale of a dystopian "Fordian" future, Brave New World, prompted an exploration of Henry Ford's draconian, paternalistic vision of "ideal" Americana in Greg Grandin's Fordlandia, which chronicled Ford's efforts to export that vision to the Amazon basin. J. A. White offered a sequel to the middle-grade tale of a boy who loves writing horror stories, Nightbooks, in Gravebooks, which proved just as good. I stumbled across a few surprises that I wound up enjoying, one in an alternate-history Chicago - Megaera C. Lorenz's tale of a former "spiritualist" con artist forced to confront a real haunting and his old colleagues in The Shabti - and another in an alternate postwar Japan in a world of dragon companions, Emi Watanabe Cohen's The Lost Ryū.

December... what to say about December. It was a year ago in December that my father went into the ER for what would turn out to be his last hospital visit, followed by the start of a month of home hospice (he came home the day after Xmas), and only a few months earlier this year other relatives experienced significant health crises, so I was already on a fraying mental rope. After about a year of the axe hanging over my head on the job front, the blade finally began its downward swing; the facility where I have worked for nearly twenty years is relocating out of range of my increasingly unreliable vehicle. It is because of this job and my familiarity with it that I manage to review so many books, as I can lose myself in an audiobook while my hands go through the familiar motions, so changing jobs will likely have a notable impact here (though at least I may have a job to change to, which is hardly a small thing in this economy, especially with my anemic resumé). Between that news and general holiday and year end frustrations, it was a lean review month. Jim Butcher offered a solid, if not exactly standout, tale of swashbuckling and steampunk and airships with a tinge of magic in The Aeronaut's Windlass, while Adam Rex delved into the peculiarities of dreams with the surreal A Little Like Waking. I ventured outside the fiction box with Surely You Can't Be Serious, about the making of the comedy classic film Airplane!, by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. Otherwise, there wasn't much particularly noteworthy in the month. Veronica Roth's tale of Eastern European monsters (and the "holy" knights who hunt them) hiding in plain sight in modern Chicago, When Among Crows, had some nice ideas but didn't quite click with me, while Margaret Rogerson's young adult fantasy romance An Enchantment of Ravens kept me interested through most of its length.

So... yeah, that was 2025. I anticipated a cruddy year going into it, and what I got was far worse, save some pretty good books along the way. (I'm not even getting into the local, national, and international horrors playing out...) Looking ahead, I'd be lying if I said I thought better things were awaiting in 2026, for the world or my nation, let alone myself. I'm not sure good things are even possible anymore; too much has been destroyed or poisoned, too little has been protected or gained. Hopefully I can at least find a few books to pass the time with between bad things and worse things.