Best Books of 2025

By tradition, December is marked on the 25th by Christmas Day, on the 24th by Christmas Eve, on the 26th by Boxing Day, on the 31st by New Year's Eve, and by somewhere-around-now, the posting of a list of the best five fantasy/SF-adjacent books I read in the previous twelve months.

This year I found myself reading a lot less than usual. Imbued with an inextinguishable and undiminishable exhaustion deep in my bones brought on by work, parenthood, and the passage and weight of time, not to mention stupefied by the vast quantities of beer and fine spirits that I constantly guzzle for every second of the day, I am barely able to manage two or three pages of any given book each night before sinking into a drooling, snoring, nightmare-filled slumber punctuated by toilet breaks and the incessant barking of the neighbour's vast throng of anxious terriers and spaniels. 

However! I did manage to get through about twenty to thirty books, of which the top five (queue the CCS version of 'Whole Lotta Love' for background music and Mark Goodier for the readout, please) were:

5. The Horse and His Boy by CS Lewis. I read this (after having read it myself long ago, in my distant youth) to my eldest daughter and thought it one of the better Narniad stories - not as good as The Lion... or Voyage... but better than the rest, which can be a bit haphazard and weakly plotted. From my Goodreads review:

This is one of the more complete of the 'Chronicles'. It all resolves itself a little too easily and neatly at the end - there's very little sense that any of the 'good guys' is in any real danger - but the individual arcs for each of the characters are all nicely executed and the interplay between them has real charm.

4. The Spire by William Golding. I went on a bit of a William Golding bender this year and blasted my way through most of his oeuvre (The Inheritors is his best, along with Lord of the Flies, but I did not read either of them this year). The Spire is a relentless, beautiful and confusing masterpiece about a lunatic visionary trying to construct a too-big spire for a cathedral with predictable results. From my Goodreads review: 

An equally bizarre and beautiful book that trades on an odd mixture of allusions, gaps, and - let's be frank - a bit of over-the-top melodramatic romanticism. It is typically billed as being a fable about prideful folly, but I found as ever that Golding's portrayal of his main character is subtle and humane; he's by no means a villain, and indeed has many qualities to be admired. A great book, full of mystery.

3. Pincher Martin by William Golding. A dark and horrible work that will compel and dismay any reader. Ostensibly about a man shipwrecked and marooned on a desolate rock somewhere in the North Atlantic, and his struggles to survive, all is not as it appears. From my Goodreads review: 

Golding was a genius and a visionary and each of his books is a little miracle of inspiration - something no other author could have imagined, let alone written, and written so well. This is a modernist masterpiece: a depiction of the individual wrestling with the fact of his own existence - and easily the equal of anything written by Conrad, Bellow, Melville, or Greene.

2. The Day it Rained Forever by Ray Bradbury. I believe I have read almost all of Bradbury's short fiction, now - there is just one collection waiting on my shelf to finish off. There is something addictive about his writing, and this book (and another volume of his short stories) certainly bucked the trend in respect of me nodding off while reading. From my Goodreads review: 

As with all Bradbury collections there is a hit-and-miss element to these stories; the straight SF ones are nice ideas that are not fully realised, and there is some sheer flim-flam and dreadful schmaltz. But the average quality is high and there are some real peaches. I loved the almost Ligottian aspect present in 'The Little Mice' and 'The Scent of Sarsaparilla', the creepiness of 'Fever Dream', the twistedness of 'The Town Where No One Got Off', and the Carver-esque 'The Headpiece' and 'The Marriage Mender'. The best two stories, 'The Sunset Harp' and 'And the Rock Cried Out', are towards the end - both are moving examples of the best that well-executed short fiction can achieve.

1. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Bradley has what one might these days call a 'complicated legacy'. But separating the art from the artist, this is simply a Great Fantasy Novel, complete with capitalisation. It is a riveting read that I highly recommend, and I almost entirely endorse Asimov's own endorsement of the book as the best modern retelling of the Arthurian myth (I would put it second by a shade to TH White). No Goodreads review, though, as I've only just finished it.