I’m back for more end of year wrap up posting, this time taking a look at my book reading for 2025.
The Year is 2025
As has been the case for years now, I have been tracking my reading over at Goodreads.
There was kind of a push to get people to stop using the site since Billionaire Boss Baby Bezos now owns it. Billionaires are our primary problem here in the US, willing to ditch democracy if there is a buck in it for them. All cash, no spine, and all extremely thin skinned to boot.
I did try to us The Story Graph site for a bit. It is find I guess, just not as fleshed out feature-wise as Goodreads, and I am now about a decade into the latter and starting over from scratch doesn’t appeal to me. Yes, TSG says it will import your history. That feature didn’t actually work for me.
So we’re back to Goodreads and their annual summary.
They say I read 39 books this year, which is a big year for me. I used to read much more than that annually back in my teens and twenties, but then the internet, online games, and podcasts started biting into that time. Still, not bad for me.
My 2025 Reading Summed Up
Of course, there is a reason for my uptick, which is the need for escapism from politics. I rather over indulged in politics in 2024… and then everything got much worse, so it was time to bury my head in the sand for a bit.
Most years I try to pick out five books to highlight. This year I fell off the wagon on that front, as I am both trying to sum up and to cover a couple of things that started off as independent blog posts, then got roped in here. So I have a gallery array of ten books, but will mention more than that.
My Book Array for 2025
On to the highlights.
- Cicero in Three Acts
Stop me if you have heard this one. Some very rich citizens use their wealth to subvert the republic to make themselves a little bit richer and end up in a dictatorship. Sound familiar at all?
I decided that I wanted to distract myself from the real world so set off to read Robert Harris’ trilogy which dramatizes the life of Marcus Tullius Cicero. It is fiction, not history, and quite enjoyable in the same way I, Claudius and others in the Roman fiction genre are. But as I made my way through the three books, Imperium, Lustrum, and Dictator, I got a sickly feeling of familiarity. As I opened with, rich people willing to promote the downfall of the system that made them rich, people craving power for the sake of power, and the downfall of laws, norms, and the established order, all trucking along with little in the way because nobody can see past their immediate self-interest. Even Cicero, the protagonist, falls into that trap time and again, something that prolongs, but does not in the end preserve, his career or his life.
A good series, and I enjoyed it, but also something that would have been easier to feel good about during past administrations.
- The Andorization of Star Wars
With the success of the Andor series, Disney has jumped on board the idea that going in on political drama without so much *pew* *pew* is a viable path forward after trying to burn down the franchise with things like Solo and the chaotic third trilogy.
So the content mills were duly adjusted to begin to churn out titles based on that premise. I read two this year.
The first up was Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire, an attempt to give a broad sweep general history of the empire… at which it succeeds, but not well. It is a tepid and unengaging outing that does not seem to add one iota to the Star Wars lore that attempts to give the “feel” of a scholarly effort through a host of unhelpful and unnecessary footnotes. I am not saying it was written by an AI, but it could have been. I do not blame the author, as I suspect they delivered the assignment exactly as contractually required, but boy oh boy was that an effort to wade through.
Next up was The Mask of Fear, the first in a planned Star Wars: Reign of the Empire book series.
This effort was much better. It follows the path of two key players in the rebellion, Mon Mothma and Bale Organa, as well as extremist talking point Saw Gerrera. Two of those tales are worth the effort, and I am sure you can guess which is which. The whole thing is a bit goofy all the same, but it did escalate a bit the whole political drama aspect of the Star Wars universe.
- Other Science Fiction
Outside of that duo I picked up the Ann Leckie novel Provenance, which was a hit of the juice needed to sate the need for something more from her Ancillary series.
Wait, did I read the Ancillary series this year as well? Well, that was good and left me longing for more… and more showed up. I recommend the whole batch.
Provenance takes place in the same timeline and gets the right balance of interesting story and oddly alien views of the universe.
I also dabbled with some series starters, including Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, Blindsight by Peter Watts, and We are Legion from Dennis E. Taylor, all of which I enjoyed… just not enough to carry on to the next book. I tore though the last there quickly, it being something that would have appealed greatly to 13 year old me. However, at least check, I am no longer 13.
I also picked up the latest installment in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, The Shattering Peace, which reminded of both why I like his work and why I like it in small doses. I did not go back and pick up the rest of the series… okay, I did go re-read Old Man’s War, just to get in the mood, but that only reminded me how silly the whole thing gets.
I also picked up a couple classics to re-read, including Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and Kurt Vonnetgut’s Slaughterhouse Five.
- War… War Never Changes
I also dug out some military history, which is something I can happily dive into. The best on the list this year was The Allure of Battle by Cathal J. Nolan, which is a study of the cult of the decisive battle, which tempts smaller powers to take on larger neighbors with the idea that a huge opening blow will win them the war… and how that generally fails to work out.
On the list was Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle, the second in his three part exploration of the US Army and its fight in Europe, which focuses primarily on the fighting in Sicily and Italy and how the army evolved around that struggle.
Then I turned to more modern history… modern to me at least… with Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk, about being a US Army helicopter pilot in the First Cavalry Division in Vietnam and one of the better, more readable descriptions of the war. I read it when it first came out and have long since recalled where he was when I was reading about the war from other perspectives. He, like a number of other chroniclers of the war mentioned Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy, which I picked up as a follow on. Published in 1961, which explored the French experience in the First Indochina War between 1946 and 1954, many of the mistakes of which would be repeated by the US.
- A Year Gone By
There were obviously some other titles I read, including The Book of Ratings, the revised 2024 edition, by Lore Sjoberg, based on the series from the Brunching Shuttlecocks back at the turn of the century. That became book back in 2002. I have a copy of that on my bookshelf. Lore went back and did an annotated version of the book in 2025, which I now own in Kindle format… and was also my shortest and least shelved title of the year. I think I knocked it out in an evening on the couch.
Of course, if you’re dying to see the full list, there is my full list of books logged over at Good Reads. I kind of came up dry once I wrapped up Street Without Joy, my last title of the year, so I am not sure where I will start when the new year begins.
Past annual entries in this series:
The Ancient Gaming Noob 