Some prefatory notes (largely repeated from the first installment of 2025):

1. I have left off any books I did not finish, because not finishing a book implies, in some sense, a negative review, which is not always the case. Certainly, I have picked up books this year which I subsequently put down due to boredom or disgust; there were others, however, that appeared to be perfectly good books, just not the correct ones for me in that moment in time. I would prefer that any negative reviews I produce be grounded in a complete reading, rather than consisting of implication or omission alone.

2. I have also left out many books which I read, enjoyed, and declined to write about for unrelated reasons.

3. Books are presented in the order in which I started reading them. Reviews vary from actual reviews to series of disconnected associations or impressions.

4. In the interest of scale: I finished 8 books during this period of time, but started many more.

5. In the year as a whole: I started 112 books, and finished 68 of them.

Likes (2020), Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum

I acquired this book following Bynum’s visit to a forms class I took in 2022. Her class visit was one of the best I attended in eight years of grad school, and I still remember it happily: a mote of light. She was funny, personable, and happy to tell us everything we wanted to know about the composition process for Madeline, which, as it turned out, had started life as a work of interactive fiction during her time as a student at Brown. My clearest memory of the session is, unsurprisingly, of embarrassing myself: this time, by asking a question about a character in Madeline, and responding to her delighted ask as to whether I’d learned about the historical figure on which she’d based him from her book with no, I’m just a fan of these things. (These things being, in this case, a professional flatulant. I have often wondered, in the past few months, what Bynum made of The Glutton (2023), another phantasmagoric novel about a French sideshow performer, which I have been trying to read on and off since the summer.)

This is a long way of saying that I liked Bynum and her first book a lot, had many reasons to start reading Likes immediately, and then did not actually read it for another three years. In a futile attempt to reduce the number of books in my apartment, I made a pile of every volume I had owned for six months or more, but not yet read; I gave myself another six months to read them, with the idea that anything left at the end of that time would go directly to Half Price Books. Likes was on the top of the stack, and I read it cover to cover one night when I woke up at 3 a.m. and couldn’t go back to sleep.

It was bad timing for a good book, because Likes was one of the most unsettling things I read all year. Bynum’s stories are not horror, but they’re full of sly menace reminiscent of Shirley Jackson; “Erlking,” which opens the collection, had me getting out of bed to turn on an extra light. And, while I am usually put off by fiction about writers, “The Bears” is going in the small but unforgettable category of fantastically scary stories about residencies, alongside Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Resident.” There are recurring, more conventional, threads around adolescence, parenthood, and marital infidelity throughout the collection, but for the most part Bynum animates them with her signature version of the uncanny.

Molly (2023), Blake Butler

I can’t do better than Madeline Vosch’s recent essay on this book, so I won’t try. My small addition: when I told a friend that I had read Molly and had a complicated emotional reaction, and she asked because you found it exploitative?, I said. No. Because it’s so clear that he really loved her.

I wouldn’t hesitate to describe the relationship laid out in this memoir as abusive. For that matter, neither does Butler. But he doesn’t unilaterally paint his late wife as a villain, or skimp in describing his own shortcomings as her husband. That honesty, on both fronts, is the book’s finest and most difficult offering.

Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus (2012), Bill Wasik & Monica Murphy

This book is tied with The Monster’s Bones for the title of best nonfiction I read in 2025. I would happily have read another two hundred pages of it, had they existed; it’s my favorite kind of pop-science, tonally zippy but so thoroughly researched that, in places, nearly every paragraph drips with discursive anecdotes. For the structure, think picaresque David Grann, or maybe late-career Oliver Sacks. The chapter covering the arduous and frightening process of developing a working rabies vaccine was unexpectedly moving, and part of me wished the authors had spent longer there, but the book had other destinations it needed to reach before the end. That lack of a central narrative—or, at least, of a narrative coalescing around a central person—was my only real gripe.

The Starving Saints (2025), Caitlin Starling

So many fantasy novels lately are essentially tone poems. Also, there’s a lot of sexualized choking, which I found a bit much, personally. There’s cannibalism, which is fine. And the fae-like villains are very good, well-written and pretty scary. Thus quoth one of the owners of a local bookstore I frequent, when I spotted this novel on their shelves and inquired about his opinion (having started it myself the day before).

My own reading bore this out in every particular. All I have to add is that I’m pretty sure this novel started as a Locked Tomb fic, or was at the very least composed under that series’s influence. Though, in fairness to Starling, if you’re creating spooky sapphic SFF in a post-Gideon the Ninth landscape, it’s hard not to write under Tamsyn Muir’s influence. Muir singlehandedly established devoted sword jock + fucked-up little witch as the dynamic that launched a thousand ships, and Starling’s novel makes prominent use of that—while adding a third character, best described as vengeance-hungry opportunist, for an ambiguously polyamorous love triangle. Starling’s work also shares a fascination with the aesthetic and ritualized elements of religious practice with Muir’s, a love of decaying castles as a setting, and an interest in grotesque body horror.

The two things Starling doesn’t borrow from Muir are, ultimately, the things I most wish she had: a crackling, if fantastically dark, sense of humor, and a meticulous approach to worldbuilding. The setting here mostly consists of vibes—interesting vibes, ones that I like, but without the sense of an underlying logic of scheme. This novel would adapt well to the A24 school of horror film; I mean that as both a compliment and a criticism.

A New New Me (2025), Helen Oyeyemi

As usual, I have mixed feelings about the latest from Helen Oyeyemi. Her brand of irreality is precise, needle-sharp, and covertly funny; it’s also very emotionally reserved. What propelled me through the novel was the abiding sense that Oyeyemi was having fun, even if I wasn’t. The conceit, that seven versions of the same person all share a body and alternate custody of it across the days of the week, each writing in a daily journal in an effort to maintain narrative consistency within their shared life, is in a classic fabulist vein. But since I’ve read pretty much nothing but SFF all year, I had to fight myself every step of the way not to ask too many questions about it. The main plot, concerning a man who’s holding himself hostage in the narrators’ apartment, involutes on itself until I had largely lost track of it; things turn out surprisingly well for everyone involved, which I did not expect.

Scarlet Morning (2025), ND Stevenson

A delight, one that commits to the sincerity in both fancy and menace of a classic children’s book—hints of Joan Aiken, or Philip Pullman. It also falls into one of my favorite categories of story, best described as cursed boat journey, and incorporates a number of other things I’ve always enjoyed: doomed expedition, pirates, illness/injury/artifact that changes your relationship to time, void at the edge of the world, and something is Wrong about the ocean. Get out of my walls, Nate Stevenson.

Occasionally, it was too silly, or too predictable, for me. On those occasions, I reminded myself that it was in fact written for children, and not for thirtysomethings who have too many browser tabs related to the Franklin expedition open at any given time.