I’m way behind as I intended to post this in late 2024 but … better late than never! I read a total of 55 books in 2025. I read a bit more in Russian than I did the previous year, caught up on some long-overdue classics and kept up with some of my favorite authors.
My overall favorite was Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle. The strongest debut I’ve read in a long time, this fantasy novel is a mix of Ghost the movie and Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, but it’s really a lot more than that and I encourage everyone to check it out. Another standout was Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. And from the older books, I thoroughly enjoyed Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell – how did I manage not to have read this book before? It may well be the best fantasy novel of the 21st century so far.
Elder Race – Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Night Gaze – Daria Bobyleva (R)
Pony Confidential – Christina Lynch
The Accidental War – Walter Jon Williams
Fleet Elements – Walter Jon Williams
Imperium Restored – Walter Jon Williams
The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde
Laozi’s Dao De Jing – Ken Liu
The Inevitable Ruin – Matt Dinniman
Maya: Seed Takes Root – Anand Ghandi & Zain Maman
Sin du Jour – Matt Wallace
Alien Clay – Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Will of the Many – James Islington
The Tower of Silence – Larry Correia
When the Moon Hits Your Eye – John Scalzi
Unholy Land – Lavie Tidhar
Howling Dark – Christopher Ruocchio
Fox’s Laughter – Shamil Idiatullin (R)
The Forest – Svetlana Tyulbasheva (R)
The Black Hut – Anna Luneva & Natalia Kolmakova (R)
Martian Sands – Lavie Tidhar
Tabiya Thirty-Two – Alexei Konakov (R)
Ancestral Night – Elizabeth Bear
The Sorceress Comes to Call – T. Kingfisher
Gun Runner – Correia & Brown
School of Shards – Maria & Sergey Dyachenko (tr. Julia Hersey)
Machine – Elizabeth Bear
Tales of the Wondering Mists – Oleg Veretskiy
Dogestan – Vitaliy Terletskiy (R)
The Shadow of What Was Lost (1) – James Islington
From the Land of Robots and Golems – ed. Julie Novakova
Amerika – Lavie Tidhar
Kharkiv-A War City – Victoriia Grivina
The Echo of Things to Come (2) – James Islington
Love Will Tear Us Apart – CK McDonnell
Relight My Fire – CK McDonnell
Julia Z book 2 – Ken Liu
All My Birds collection – K.A. Teryna (R)
The Light of All That Falls (3) – James Islington
The Death of Janosik – Jean Botto (tr. Ivan J. Kramoris)
Katabasis – R. F. Kuang
The Man With One of Those Faces – Caimh McDonnell
The Day That Never Comes – Caimh McDonnell
The Shattering Peace – John Scalzi
Angels in the Moonlight – Caimh McDonnell
The Downloaded 2 – Robert J. Sawyer
Punctilious Punctuation – Ian Randall Strock
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell – Susanna Clarke
Badasstronauts – Grady Hendrix
Mark and Ezra – Ragim Jafarov (R)
Future History award anthology (R)
Scale – Sergey & Marina Dyachenko (R)
Hot Moon – Alan Smale
Magpie on the Gallows – Eduard Verkin (R)
The Grimoire Grammar School – Caitlin Rozakis
Keeping this list helps me when it’s time to vote for the Hugos or talk about new books on convention panels, but I hope it may be of interest to some of you as well!
Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction 
It’s so refreshing to see another author reading lots of books! I’m a firm believer that it keeps my creative batteries going, and I’m definitely going to go over this list given some disappointing recent reads of mine.
My not-so-secret is audiobooks. There’s no way I’d be able to keep up with my reading otherwise, given my other responsibilities, deadlines, etc. They help so much!
Sorry you’ve had a streak of disappointing reading. I hope to help fix that within the next couple of weeks….. 🙂