This year, I have read 277 books, 268 of them for the first time:
Majority world 132 (though only 64 by women)
Straight white men writing in English 118
Multi-authored or otherwise don’t fit 27
Of those 268 titles, here are my top 21 (or 29) books
Fiction
Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (2015)
Geoff Ryman, Him (2023)
and then in alphabetical order:
Nina Allan, Conquest (2023)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859–1860)
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
Jessie Greengrass, The High House (2021)
Lauren Groff, Matrix (2021)
Sarah Hall, Burntcoat (2021)
Daniel Mason, North Woods (2023)
Benjamin Myers, Cuddy (2023)
Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea (2022)
Abraham Polonsky, The World Above (1951)
–. A Season of Fear (1956)
Max Porter, Shy (2023)
Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, The Book of Elsewhere (2024)
and somewhat to my surprise, John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Chronicles (1906–1933), most especially every moment spent in the company of Soames Forsyte.
Non-fiction
Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, Chokepoint Capitalism (2022)
Dan Hassler-Forest, Fast and Furious Franchising (2025)
Paul B. Preciado, Can the Monster Speak? A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts (2020)
Steven Shaviro, Fluid Futures: Science Fiction and Potentiality (2024)
Julie A. Turnock, Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of the 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetic (2015)
And, should anyone care, here’s the complete list of titles
John Joseph Adams, ed., Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction (2015)
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023)
Roma Agrawal, Built: The Hidden Stories Behind our Structures (2018)
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
–. Good Wives (1869)
Nina Allan, Conquest (2023)
Nicolò Ammaniti, Anna (2015)
Anonymous, ed., The New Economy Starter Pack (2019)
Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (2009)
Anushka Asthana, Taken as Red: How Labour Won Big and the Tories Crashed the Party (2024)
D.A. Baden, ed., No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet (2022)
Neil Badmington, Perpetual Movement: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (2021)
Arturo Barea, The Forge (1941)
–. The Track (1943)
–. The Clash (1946)
Becky Bartlett, Badfilm: Incompetence, Intention and Failure (2021)
Giorgio Bassani, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (1958)
H.E. Bates, Love for Lydia (1952)
Kate Beaton, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022)
Ned Beauman, Venomous Lumpsucker (2022)
William Beckford, Vathek (1786)
Hannah Berry, Adamtine (2012)
Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler and Sherryl Vint, eds, The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2024)
Chris Beckett, America City (2017)
–. Beneath the World, a Sea (2019)
–. Two Tribes (2020)
–. Tomorrow (2021)
Guy Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian: A Romance (1899)
Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (2005)
Ken Bruen, Galway Girl (2019)
Gary Budden and Marian Womack, eds. Invite to Eternity: Tales of Nature Disrupted. (2019)
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903)
Season Butler, Cygnet (2019)
Josef and Karel Čapek, The Insect Play (1921)
Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (1920)
J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country (1980)
B. Catling, The Vorrh (2015)
Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries (2013)
Christophe Chambouté, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (2014)
Anton Chekhov, Ivanov (1887)
–. The Bear (1888)
–. The Proposal (1889)
–. The Festivities (1891)
–. The Seagull (1896)
–. Uncle Vanya (1897)
–. The Three Sisters (1901)
–. The Cherry Orchard (1904)
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
Steen Ledet Christiansen, Drone Age Cinema: Action Films and Sensory Assault (2017)
Edmund Crispin, The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944)
Kateřina Čupová, R.U.R.: The Karel Čapek Classic (2020)
Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement (2016)
Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street (1973)
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Joël Dicker, The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer (2018)
Thomas M. Disch, ed., The Ruins of Earth (1971)
Cory Doctorow, A Place So Foreign, and Eight More (2003)
–. Eastern Standard Tribe (2004)
–. With a Little Help (2009)
–. Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century (2011)
–. Homeland (2013)
–. Attack Surface (2020)
–. How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (2020)
–. The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (2023)
Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021)
Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 (2013)
Arthur Conan Doyle, His Last Bow (1917)
Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (2014)
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
David Ellis, Byron in Geneva: That Summer of 1816 (2011)
Percival Everett, Assumption (2011)
Rupert Everett, Vanished Years (2012)
Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke, Nigerian Speculative Fiction: The Evolution (2025)
J. Jefferson Farjeon, The Z Murders (1932)
Anna Feigenbaum, Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today (2017)
Gretchen Felker-Martin, Cuckoo (2024)
Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two (2024)
Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not . . . (1924)
–. No More Parades (1925)
–. A Man Could Stand Up–– (1926)
–. The Last Post (1928)
E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Undine (1811)
Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It (2022)
Anthony Galluzo, Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today (2023)
John Galsworthy, The Man of Property (1906)
–. In Chancery (1920)
–. To Let (1921)
–. The White Monkey (1924)
–. The Silver Spoon (1926)
–. Swan Song (1928)
–. Maid in Waiting (1931)
–. Flowering Wilderness (1932)
–. Over the River (1933)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1853)
Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, Chokepoint Capitalism (2022)
William Godwin, Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794)
Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
Jon Greenaway, Capitalism, A Horror Story: Gothic Marxism and the Dark Side of the Radical Imagination (2024)
Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966)
Jessie Greengrass, The High House (2021)
Lauren Groff, Matrix (2021)
Andrea Hairston, Archangels of Funk (2024)
Sarah Hall, Burntcoat (2021)
Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude (1947)
Indrek Hargla, Apothecary Melchior and the Mystery of St Olaf’s Church (2010)
–. Apothecary Melchior and the Ghost of Rataskaevu Street (2010)
Dan Hassler-Forest, Fast and Furious Franchising (2025)
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1941)
Mick Herron, The List (2015)
–. The Drop (2018)
Ben Highmore, The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House (2014)
Susan Hill, The Woman in Black (1983)
E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Devil’s Elixir (1815)
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself: With a detail of curious traditionary facts and other evidence by the editor (1824)
Matthew Holness (as Garth Marenghi), Garth Marenghi’s TerrorTome (2022)
Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt (1867)
–. The Pillars of Society (1877)
–. A Doll House (1879)
–. Ghosts (1881)
–. An Enemy of the People (1882)
–. The Wild Duck (1884)
–. Rosmersholm (1886)
–. The Lady from the Sea (1888)
–. Hedda Gabler (1890)
–. The Master Builder (1892)
–. Little Eyolf (1894)
–. John Gabriel Borkman (1896)
–. When We Dead Wake (1899)
Rachel Ingalls, Mrs Caliban (1982)
Kotaro Isaka, Three Assassins (2004)
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (2015)
N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became (2020)
Alexia Kannas, Giallo! Genre, Modernity and Detection in Italian Horror Cinema (2020)
Jan Kaplinski, The Same River (2007)
Malaika Kegode, Body Buffet (2023)
Kim Bo-Young, I’m Waiting for You, and Other Stories (2021)
Jessie Kinding, Mark Krotov and Marco Roth, eds, There Is No Outside: Covid-19 Dispatches (2020)
Lucy Kissick, Plutoshine (2022)
Paul Klee, On Modern Art (1924)
–. Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925)
Naomi Klein, The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists (2018)
Bill Krohn, Letters from Hollywood, 1977–2017 (2020)
Jaan Kross, The Ropewalker, book one (1970?)
–. The Ropewalker, book two (197?)
–. A People without a Past (197?)
–. A Book of Falsehoods (1980?)
R.F. Kuang, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution (2022)
Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake (2024)
Jake Lamar, Viper’s Dream (2021)
Francis Lathom, The Midnight Bell, A German Story, Founded on Incidents in Real Life (1798)
Isiah Lavender III, Critical Race Theory and Science Fiction (2025)
D.H. Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories (1930)
John Le Carré, Call for the Dead (1961)
Ann Leckie, Translation State (2023)
Roger Luckhurst, Gothic: An Illustrated History (2021)
Aric McBay, Kraken Calling (2022)
Ross Macdonald, Blue City (1947)
Martin MacInnes, In Ascension (2023)
Sir John Mandeville, The Book of Marvels and Travels (c.1357–1371)
Florence Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire (1897)
Helen Marshall, The Migration (2019)
Daniel Mason, North Woods (2023)
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915)
So Mayer, A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (2020)
Gavin Miller, Anna McFarlane and Donna McCormack, eds, The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities (2025)
Denise Mina, Gods and Beasts (2012)
David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks (2014)
Michael Moorcock, Byzantium Endures (1981)
–. The Laughter of Carthage (1984)
–. Jerusalem Commands (1992)
–. The Vengeance of Rome (2006)
Glyn Morgan, ed., Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of the Imagination (2022)
Mark Morris, ed., I’m with the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet (2011)
Benjamin Myers, Cuddy (2023)
Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea (2022)
–. The Tusks of Extinction (2023)
Annalee Newitz, The Terraformers (2023)
Gregory Norminton, ed., Beacons: Stories Four Our Not So Distant Future (2013)
Malka Older, Null States (2017)
–. State Tectonics (2018)–.
The Mimicking of Known Successes (2023)
Chris Pallant, Beyond Bagpuss: A History of Smallfilms Animation Studio (2022)
Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettesse, Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics (2022)
Karen Pinkus, Subsurface (2023)
Frederik Pohl, Slave Ship (1956)
Abraham Polonsky, The Enemy Sea (1943)
–. The World Above (1951)
–. A Season of Fear (1956)
–. Zenia’s Way (1980)
Max Porter, Shy (2023)
Paul B. Preciado, Can the Monster Speak? A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts (2020)
Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance (1790)
–. The Romance of the Forest: interspersed with some pieces of poetry (1791)
–. The Italian, or The Confessional of the Black Penitents: A Romance (1796)
Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron (1777)
Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, The Book of Elsewhere (2024)
Keanu Reeves et al, Brzrkr, volume one (2021)
–. Brzrkr, volume two (2022)
–. Brzrkr, volume three (2023)
— Brzrkr Bloodlines, volume one (2024)
Alastair Reynolds, Blue Remembered Earth (2012)
–. On the Steel Breeze (2013)
–. Poseidon’s Wake (2015)
Phil Rickman, The House of Susan Lulham (2014)
Ben Rivers, ed., Collected Stories (2023)
Adam Roberts, The Real-Town Murders (2017)
Regina Maria Roche, The Children of the Abbey: A Tale (1796)
James Rose, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (2013)
Geoff Ryman, Him (2023)
–. The Many Different Kinds of Love (2023)
Sathnam Sanghera, Empireland: How Imperialism Shaped Modern Britain (2021)
George Saunders, Liberation Day (2022)
Miranda Sawyer, Mary Shelley (2000)
Friedrich Schiller, The Ghost-Seer (1789)
Walter Scott, Walter Scott, Marmion (1808)
–. Ivanhoe (1819)
Max Sexton and Dominic Lees, Seeing It On Television: Televisuality in the Contemporary US ‘High-End’ Series (2021)
Steven Shaviro, Fluid Futures: Science Fiction and Potentiality (2024)
R.C. Sheriff, Journey’s End (1928)
Scott Cutler Shershow and Scott Michaelsen, The Love of Ruins: Letters on Lovecraft (2017)
Vernon Shetley, Dark Film, Blood Money: The Economic Unconscious of American Neo-Noir Cinema (2025)
Lewis Shiner, Say Goodbye: The Laurie Moss Story (1999)
Georges Simenon, Pietr the Latvian (1930)
–. A Maigret Christmas (1951)
–. Maigret’s Memoirs (1951)
–. Maigret Sets A Trap (1955)
Greg Singh, Dark Mirror (2025)
Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz (2023)
Peter Stamm, To the Back of Beyond (2017)
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Jonathan Strahan, ed., Drowned Worlds: Tales from the Anthropocene and Beyond (2016)
Wole Talabi, Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon (2023)
Shaun Tan, Cicada (2018)
–. Eric (2008)
–. The Lost Thing (2000)
–. The Red Tree (2001)
–. Rules of Summer (2013)
Shaun Tan and John Marsden, The Rabbits (1998)
Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory (2023)
Josephine Tey, The Franchise Affair (1948)
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–8)
Rosemary Tonks, The Bloater (1968)
Francine Toon, Pine (2020)
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857)
Julie A. Turnock, Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of the 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetic (2015)
Gordon Van Gelder, ed., Welcome to the Greenhouse: New Science Fiction on Climate Change (2011)
Peter Van Greenaway, The Crucified City (1962)
–. The Evening Fool (1964)
–. Doppelganger (1975)
–. Take the War to Washington (1975)
–. Suffer! Little Children (1976)
–. ‘Cassandra’ Bell (1981)
–. Manrissa Man (1982)
–. Graffiti (1983)
–. The Immortal Coil (1985)
–. Mutants (1986)
–. The Killing Cup (1987)
Francesco Verso, Nexhuman (2013)
Tony M. Vinci, Ghost, Android, Machine: Trauma and Literature Beyond the Human (2020)
Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear (2012)
Nghi Vo, The Empress of Salt and Fortune (2020)
–. When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain (2020)
–. Into the Riverlands (2022)
–. Mammoths at the Gate (2023)
–. The Brides of High Hill (2024)
Edgar Wallace, The Feathered Serpent (1927)
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)
Ruth Ware, The Woman in Cabin 10 (2016)
Rosie Warren, ed., Salvage #14: Shrouded in Darkness (2024)
Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930)
Martha Wells, System Collapse (2023)
Mary Woodbury, ed. Winds of Change: Short Stories about Our Climate (2015)
Virginia Woolf, Kew Gardens and Other Short Fiction (2022; 1917–1929)
–. Reviewing, with a Note by Leonard Woolf (1939)
Mark Bould 