January 2025 – how was it for you? I’m just so excited that we’re finally in February – which is my book birthday month!!! Reviews are pouring in and it’s so incredibly exciting to see the photos and tags on socials. Please keep them coming!
This month seemed to stretch out forever, I barely read for the whole last week and still managed to knock out 12 books. Luckily they were almost all excellent.
Glorious Exploits - Ferdia Lennon
Starting the month off strong with a book I meant to read all last year – Glorious Exploits tells the story of a couple of Sicilian fishermen who decide to put on a production of Sophocles’ Medea acted by Athenian prisoners of war in a quarry outside the city. I love when historical fiction explores areas that aren’t WW2, the Tudors or the Romans so I snapped this up and finished it in a day or so. It’s much more lyrical than I was expecting, but overall I enjoyed the prose and the characters managed to toe the line of being sympathetic and historically accurate.
The Heroes - Joe Abercrombie
Somehow this is the first time I’ve read this book (well, listened to) and it quickly became one of my favourites from Abercrombie. I love a book that focuses on one battle or siege and this covers just three days in the fight between the North and the Union. There are old favourites in the cast: Black Dow, Dogman and lots of new faces to love: Wirrun of Bligh forever! This was a really great read and I think that I can call the title of Fictional Character Most in Need of Intensive Therapy now. It’s Bremer dan Gorst by a country mile!
Chain-Gang All Stars - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
My run of unbelievable books continues with this instant classic. Set in an America only slightly worse than what we currently have where death row prisoners fight to the death for the entertainment of the masses. I really don’t read enough mainstream ‘literature’ and this inspired me to occasionally trust the NYT when they say a book is incredible and pick it up. This book was so easy to read and so hard to process – I would recommend it to anyone.
Sorcery and Small Magics - Maiga Doocy
Being an author who writes cosy-adjacent fantasy I am very picky about the genre, and it took me a while to pick this book up from my tbr pile. But on a sunny day just after New Years I packed a bag for the beach and grabbed this to read on the train. Eight hours later, sunburnt and entirely content I finished it and immediately went to rate it five stars. Sorcery and Small Magics manages to be cosy and charming but also interesting and complex – with a magic system that made immediate sense to me. I had such a good time reading this book and will reread before the next in the series comes out – hopefully on another lovely beach day.
Uprooted - Naomi Novik
One of my all time favourite books! This is my fourth or fifth re-read and I enjoyed it as much as ever. Novik really knocks it out of the park in prose, characters, ideas, plot. Just a great time.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects - Ted Chiang
Novella following a software engineer who develops pet AIs for a cyberspace company and then has to reckon with the consequences of raising a new form of sentient being. Very thought provoking and an easy read.
House of Open Wounds - Adrian Tchaikovsky
My god this was a great book. I read a review that said that it was an odd choice for Tchaikovsky to follow up his fantasy take on Les Miserables with a fantasy take on MASH and that’s about half of why this book was so much fun. There’s a much closer focus on a few characters than on the previous book in the series but you still get the sense of scale, of a huge war that still has very personal effects. For the first three quarters of the book I was really enjoying the read but I didn’t think there would be much resolution. The fact that the author managed to braid every single loose end into the perfect conclusion literally blew my mind and I absolutely loved it.
White Cat, Black Dog - Kelly Link
Short story collection. I am trying to read more short fiction and have been meaning to try out Kelly Link for a while. I found this very mixed. Some of the stores were wonderful, some bafflingly bad. Highlights for me were The White Cat’s Divorce, Prince Hat Underground and The White Road. The others were all good to fine, with the exception of the dire The Game of Smash and Recovery. I definitely want to dig into more Link now and check out some of her longform novels.
Island of the Blue Dolphins - Scott O'Dell
Short children’s book about a woman living alone on an island off the coast of California after her tribe is evicted/murdered. Sweet enough account of living in the wilderness and connecting with nature with a hopeful ending that was rather ruined when I looked up the real story.
The Angel of the Crows - Katherine Addison
Addison wrote an all time favourite of mine: The Goblin Emperor, so I had high expectations of this supernatural pastiche of Sherlock Holmes. It almost met them. It borrows heavily from both the original text and from various adaptions, so that it never feels quite original but the various magical denizens of London were laid out in an interesting way and I did like the idea of the angels as Addison writes them. My complaint would probably be that if you are going to trail that Fallen Angels are the ultimate big bad then they should really appear in the text! This book also had me exclaiming “Is anyone in this story not secretly a woman?” at multiple junctures.
The Tricky Business of Fairy Bargains - Reena McCarty
I was given an advance copy of this book, which is due out next year, and enjoyed it a great deal. Full review to come closer to release date but definitely add this to your list if you liked Sorcery and Small Magics.
The Company - KJ Parker
My latest Parker, but the first one he wrote under this name. I found this less enjoyable than some of his later work but a bit more thought provoking. The Company is a group of five men, once elite soldiers, now retired and somewhat at a loose end. Their old commander pulls them out of their mundane lives and takes them off to a deserted island to set up a colony. It hits all the classic Parker notes: logistics, backstabbing, competent people messing up, but there is a strong theme of the different types of destruction that war can wreak. Almost no one falls in battle but instead farmers are ruined by corpses rotting on their land, survivors never really leave the war behind and everyone is damaged. I might have enjoyed this more in a less glorious reading month but among the abundance of excellence it didn’t stand out.
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