Books – Mark Bould

My top 27 books of 2025

This year, despite all the shit going down, I read 284 books, 255 of them for the first time. Of those 255, these are my top 27 reads of 2025:

My top 18 novels in roughly this order:
Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965)
Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1949)
Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009)
Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943)
H.T. Tsiang, The Hanging on Union Square (1935)
Pepetela, The Return of the Water Spirit (1995)
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953) – the one Chandler I’d never read because I hate the Altman film so much
Andrei Bely, Petersburg (1916)
Maxim Gorky, The Life of a Useless Man (1908)
José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons (2004)
Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise (1933), which I suspect works so well cos I was reading them all in order for the first time and this is the odd one out
Geoff Ryman, Animals: A Tale of Terror (2025)
Benjamin Myers, The Gallows Pole (2017)
Ian McGuire, The North Water (2016)
Andrea Barrett, The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998)
Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Four Hands (1990)
Ira Wolfert, Tucker’s People (1943)
Gypsy Rose Lee, The G-String Murders (1941)

Jacek Dukaj’s Ice (2007, translated 2025) would probably have been in second place but events this shitty December conspired to prevent me finishing it yet.

My top 8 non-fiction books in roughly this order
Paul B. Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi (2025)
Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024)
Samuel R. Delany, About Writing: 7 Essay, 4 Letters, 5 Interviews (2005)
Jordan S. Carroll, Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2024)
Amiri Baraka (as LeRoi Jones), Blues People (1963)
Ben Sidran, Black Talk (1971)
Hallie Rubenhold, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (2019)
Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (2022)

My top poetry collections in exactly this order
Tony Harrison, Collected Poems (2007)

Here, for the curious, is the full list

The majority world = 145 (75 women)
Straight white men writing in English = 110
Multi-authored or otherwise don’t fit = 29

Kia Abdullah, Those People Next Door (2023)
Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990)
José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons (2004)
Nikil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel, eds, The Promise of Infrastructure (2018)
David Andress, The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution (2005)
Robbie Arnott, The Rain Heron (2020)
Ashley Audrain, The Push (2021)

Amiri Baraka (as LeRoi Jones), Blues People (1963)
Andrea Barrett, The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998)
Andrei Bely, Petersburg (1916)
Cyprian Bérard, The Vampire Lord Ruthven (1820)
Earl Derr Biggers, The House Without a Key (1925)
Rob Boffard, Tracer (2015)
–. Zero-G (2016)
Mark Bould, Solaris (2014)
–. The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture (2021)
André Brink, Devil’s Valley (1998)
Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead (2006)
Tobias S. Buckell, Shoggoths in Traffic and Other Stories (2021)
Eugene Burdick and Eugene Wheeler, Fail-Safe (1962)
W.R. Burnett, The Asphalt Jungle (1949)
Brendan C. Byrne, Accelerate (2021)
Lord Byron, The Giaour (1813)

Juan Díaz Canales, Juanjo Guarnido et al., Blacksad: They All Fall Down, part one (2021)
–. Blacksad: They All Fall Down, part two (2023)
Jordan S. Carroll, Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2024)
Vera Caspary, Laura (1942)
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950)
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939)
–. Farewell My Lovely (1940)
–. The High Window (1942)
–. The Lady in the Lake (1943)
–. The Little Sister (1949)
–. The Long Goodbye (1953)
–. Playback (1958)
John Christopher, The Year of the Comet (1955)
–. The World in Winter (1962)
George Makana Clark, The Raw Man (2011)
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996)
Ralph Cooper with Steve Dougherty, Amateur Night at the Apollo: Ralph Cooper Presents Five Decades of Great Entertainment (1990)
Susan Cooper, Over Sea, Under Stone (1965)
–. The Dark is Rising (1973)
–. Greenwitch (1974)
–. The Grey King (1975)
–. Silver on the Tree (1977)
Caroline Corcoran, The Baby Group (2020)
Julio Cortázar, Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampire: An Attainable Utopia (1975)
Bernard Cornwell, Crackdown (1991)
Mia Couto, Under the Frangipani (1996)
Jessica Cuello, Yours, Creature (2023)

Joanna Davis-McElligatt, Black Aliens: Kinship in the Cosmic Diaspora (2026)
Len Deighton, The IPCRESS File (1962)
Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)
–. About Writing: 7 Essay, 4 Letters, 5 Interviews (2005)
Philip K. Dick, Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975)
–. Puttering About in a Small Land (1985)
–. In Milton Lumky Territory (1985)
–. Mary and the Giant (1987)
Dilman Dila, Where Rivers Go To Die (2023)
Isak Dinesen, The Angelic Avengers (1946)
Bryony Dixon, 100 Silent Films (2011)
Jules Dornay, Lord Ruthven Begins (i.e., Douglas le Vampyre 1865)
Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style (2019)
Alexandre Dumas, The Return of Lord Ruthven (i.e., Le Vampire 1851)
Masha du Toit, Crooks & Straights (2014)

Robert Edric, Salvage (2010)
Junius Edwards, If We Must Die (1963)
Bernardine Evaristo, Mr Loverman (2013)
Percival Everett, James (2024)
Hans Fallada, Alone in Berlin (1947)
Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (1974)
Paul Féval, The Vampire Countess (1856)
–. Knightshade (1850, 1875)
–. Vampire City (1867)
C.S. Forester, Mr Midshipman Hornblower (1950)
–. Lieutenant Hornblower (1952)
–. Hornblower and the Hotspur (1962)
Athol Fugard, Tsotsi (1980)

Alan Garner, The Owl Service (1967)
–. Red Shift (1973)
Cecily Gayford, ed., Murder in a Heatwave (2023)
Peter George, Red Alert (1958)
–. Dr Strangelove: or, How I Learned Not to Worry and Love the Bomb (1963)
Sam George and Bill Hughes, eds, The Legacy of John Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and Its Progeny (2024)
Aaron Gerow, A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan (2008)
Rumer Godden, Black Narcissus (1939)
Tao Leigh Goffe, Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (2025
Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (1910)
Witold Gombrowicz, Possessed (1939)
Maxim Gorky, The Life of a Useless Man (1908)
Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (2011)
Stefan Grabinski, The Dark Domain (1918/22; 1993)
Barry Keith Grant, 100 Science Fiction Films (2013)
Jen Green and Sarah LeFanu, eds, Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind (1985)

Lotte and Søren Hammer, The Girl in the Ice (2010)
Dashiell Hammett, The Continental Op (1975)
Elizabeth Hand, A Haunting on the Hill (2023)
Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness (2003)
Nick Harkaway, Titanium Noir (2023)
MacDonald Harris, The Balloonist (1977)
Tony Harrison, Collected Poems (2007)
Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train (2015)
Lily Herne, Deadlands (2011)
Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas (1923)
Jim Hillier and Alastair Phillips, 100 Film Noirs (2009)
Jim Hillier and Douglas Pye, 100 Film Musicals (2011)
Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (1969; 2000 edition)
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994)
Nalo Hopkinson, Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions (2024)
Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (2022)
Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (1993)
Charlie Human, Apocalypse Now Now (2013)
Leon Hunt, Danger: Diabolik (2018)
Andrew Michael Hurley, Devil’s Day (2017)

Mehita Iqani and Wamuwi Mbao, eds, Flow (2023)
–. The Night Sky (2024)

Vicki Jarrett, Always North (2016)
Gayl Jones, Corregidora (1975)

Franz Kafka, The Castle (1926)
John Kessel, Pride and Prometheus (2018)
Joseph Kessel, Belle de jour (1928)
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (1988)
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts (1976)
Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024)
Ailton Krenak, Life is Not Useful (2020)
Rebecca F. Kuang, Yellowface (2023)

Lady Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon (2016)
Joe R. Lansdale, Sam Keith et al., 30 Days of Night: Night Again (2011)
Károly Lathjay and Mihály Kertész (Michael Curtiz!) (?) and László Tamásfi, Dracula’s Death (1924, 2020)
Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon, The Virgin Vampire (1825)
John le Carrè, A Murder of Quality (1962)
–. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)
–. The Looking Glass War (1965)
–. A Small Town in Germany (1969)
–. The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971)
Gypsy Rose Lee, The G-String Murders (1941)
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961)
–. Highcastle (1975)
Lilian Le Mesurier, The Socialist Woman’s Guide to Intelligence: A Reply to Mr Shaw (1929)
Maja Lunde, The End of the Ocean (2017)

Ed McBain, Heat (1981)
Andrew McCoy, The Insurrectionist (1979)
Amy McCulloch, Midnight aka The Girl on the Ice (2023)
Ian McGuire, The North Water (2016)
Peter McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (2016)
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas aka Epitaph of a Small Winner (1881)
Charles Eric Maine, The Tide Went Out (1958)
–. The Darkest of Nights (1962)
Clarence Major, All-Night Visitors (1969; restored 1998 version)
Alberto Manguel, ed., Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature (1983)
Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre, The Several Lives of Chester Himes (1997)
Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959)
Richard Matheson, Hell House (1971)
Seichô Matsumoto, Tokyo Express (1958)
Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957)
Charles Mingus, Beneath the Underdog (1971)
Octave Mirbeau, Diary of a Chambermaid (1900)
Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle, eds, The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (2012)
Michael Moorcock, An Alien Heat (1972)
–. The Hollow Lands (1975)
–. The End of All Songs (1976)
C.L. Moore, Jirel of Joiry (1934–39; 1977)
John P. Moore et al, The Martian Trilogy (2025)
Ward Moore, Greener Than You Think (1947)
–. Bring the Jubilee (1953)
Bob Mortimer, The Hotel Avocado (2024)
Benjamin Myers, The Gallows Pole (2017)

Kris Neville (and uncredited, despite Neville’s protests, Mel Sturgis), Invaders on the Moon (1970)
Marie Nizet, Captain Vampire (1879)
Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965)
Charles Nodier, Smarra, or the Demons of the Night (1821)
Charles Nodier, Achille de Jouffroy, Toussaint Merle and Carmpouche, The Vampire (1820)
Masande Ntshanga, Triangulum (2018)

Lizzie O’Shea, Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us about Digital Technology (2019)
Joyce Carol Oates, Jack of Spades (2015)
Brandon O’Brien, Can You Sign My Tentacle? (2021)
Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Warrior (2017)
Chibundu Onuzo, The Spider King’s Daughter (2012)

Pepetela, The Return of the Water Spirit (1995)
–. Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent (2001)
Chris Petit, The Psalm Killer (1996)
Gary Phillips, Violent Spring (1994)
Pierre-Alexis Ponson du Terrail, The Vampire and the Devil’s Son (1852)
Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations (1991)
–. Playground (2024)
Paul B. Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi (2025)
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, The Ice Limit (2000)
–. Beyond the Ice Limit (2016)
Stephen Prince, A Year in the Country: Wandering through Spectral Fields (2018)

Ann Quin, Berg (1964)

Mark Rascovich, The Bedford Incident (1963)
Olga Ravn, The Employees (2020)
Mack Reynolds, Tomorrow Might Be Different (1960/1975)
Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man (1971)
John Rieder, Truth, Lies, and Speculative Fiction: Confronting Dogmatism, Demagoguery, and Disinformation (2026)
Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism (1938)
Sally Rooney, Intermezzo (2024)
Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox (2018)
Hallie Rubenhold, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (2019)
Geoff Ryman, Animals: A Tale of Terror (2025)

James Sallis, The Long-Legged Fly (1992)
–. Sarah Jane (2019)
Albert Sánchez Piñol, Cold Skin (2002)
Dorothy L. Sayers, Whose Body? (1923)
–. Clouds of Witness (1926)
–. Unnatural Death (1928)
–. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928)
–. Strong Poison (1930)
–. The Five Red Herrings (1931)
–. Have His Carcase (1932)
–. Murder Must Advertise (1933)
–. The Nine Tailors (1934)
–. Gaudy Night (1935)
–. Busman’s Honeymoon (1937)
Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace, The Documents in the Case (1930)
John Sayles, To Save the Man (2025)
Paul Scheerbart, The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention (1910)
Steven Jay Schneider, ed., 100 European Horror Films (2007)
Eugène Scribe and Mélesville, The Vampire (1821)
Ousmane Sembene, Niiwam and Taaw: Two Novellas (1987)
Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1949)
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Zastrozzi (1810)
Kim Sherwood, A Spy Like Me (2024)
M.P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (1901
Ben Sidran, Black Talk (1971)
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977)
Herbert Simmons, Corner Boy (1957)
Lillian Smith, Strange Fruit (1944)
J.E. Smyth, Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood (2018)
Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland (2021)
Dickon Springate, ed., 1816: The Year Without Summer – 12 Original Stories of Lovecraftian Horror (2019)
Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943)
Harry Stein, Malt Leav et al, The Heap, volume one (1942–48; collected 2013)
–. The Heap, volume two (1948–50; collected 2013)
–. The Heap, volume three (1951–1953; collected 2013)
James Stephens, The Charwoman’s Daughter (1912)
Fred Strydom, The Raft (2015)

Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Four Hands (1990)
Shaun Tan, Tales from the Inner City (2018)
Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Doors of Eden (2020)
–. Alien Clay (2024)
Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009)
B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927)
Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun (1939)
H.T. Tsiang, The Hanging on Union Square (1935)
Two Fingers and James T. Kirk, Junglist (1995)

Herbert van Thal, ed., The Pan Book of Horror Stories (1959)
Jules Verne, The Underground City (1877)
–. The Castle in Transylvania (1892)
Harl Vincent, The Doomsday Planet (1966)

Dave Wallis, Only Lovers Left Alive (1964)
Rosie Warren, ed., Salvage 15: Bewitched and Distorted (2024–25)
David E. Weaver, Black Diva of the Thirties: The Life of Ruby Elzy (2004)
James White, Hospital Station (1962)
–. Star Surgeon (1963)
–. Major Operation (1971)
Paul Wild, Akira Kurosawa (2014)
Kate Wilhelm, The Mile-Long Spaceship (1963)
Ally Wilkes, All the White Spaces (2022)
Charles Willeford, Cockfighter (1972)
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944)
D. Harlan Wilson, Strangelove Country: Science Fiction, Filmosophy, and the Kubrickian Consciousness (2025)
–. A Scanner Darkly (2026)
Ira Wolfert, Tucker’s People (1943)
Jason Woods, 100 American Independent Films (2004)
Cornell Woolrich, The Bride Wore Black (1940)
–. I Married a Dead Man (1947)
Helen Wright, A Matter of Oaths (1988)
Jonathan Wright, ed., Adventure Rocketship! Let’s All Go to the Science Fiction Disco (2013)
Richard Wright, Black Boy (1937)
John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (1951)
–. The Kraken Wakes (1953)
–. The Chrysalids (1955)
–. The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
–. The Trouble with Lichen (1960)
–. A Plan for Chaos (2009)
John Wyndham and, well, John Wyndham (as Lucas Parkes), The Outward Urge (1959/1961)

Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965)

George Zebrowski, The Omega Point (1972)
–. Ashes and Stars (1977)
–. The Monadic Universe (1977)
–. Mirror of Minds (1983)
Sarah Zettel, Kingdom of Cages (2001)

The stuff what I done in 2025 (with a long preamble justifying doing so little in 2025)

This is the first year since 1994 that I’ve not published a single thing, and it’s been a tough year so 2026 might go the same way.

My seizures remain undiagnosed. My heart monitor continued to reveal nothing so I had it cut out of my chest (he said, melodramatically). My neurologist decided to treat my condition as if it were epilepsy. So ten weeks of spring and summer were spent slowly increasing the dosage of meds that gave me brain fog, lethargy, depression, and – more so than usual – a tendency to do self-evidently stupid things. At least I didn’t get the side-effect where you lose a third of your skin and die. Once I got used to the meds, the side-effects mostly vanished, apart from the aphasia around names/titles and certain kinds of words. Students quickly got used to my abrupt mid-sentence interregna, visible brain strain, angry mutterings about ‘these fucking meds’ and vain attempts to triangulate an elusive word.

Mum had a bad fall in June, was released from hospital, had a week of deteriorating health at home, was readmitted, spent another ten-and-a-bit weeks in hospital, returned home permanently bed-bound, and became increasingly frail over the following months.

Then one of our ducks, Sarah Jane, was sick.

And then, at the start of December, dad had some CT scans; a week later we were told to get him to hospital as quickly as possible because they’d incidentally revealed a pulmonary embolism. Next day, it was confirmed he has pancreatic cancer, which has spread too far for surgery; and he is not robust enough for chemotherapy.

And then mum caught the flu, followed by a chest infection and then pneumonia. She died on Xmas Eve.

We’re waiting for dad’s treatment plan, but it will only be palliative care. We’ll probably lose him in the next few months.

Mum and dad on their wedding day – 23 October 1965

So Climate Monsters, my sort-of sequel to The Anthropocene Unconscious, remains almost completely unwritten, and I’ve not written anything else this year beyond drafting three (pretty sketchy) research presentations, two of which should eventually be developed into something publishable:

‘In the Chinks of the Wyndham Machine’, A Very British Catastrophe: John Wyndham Then and Now, School of English Colloquium, University of St Andrews, 7 June 2025

‘Nuoc 2030 and Climate Change Cinema’, Apocalypses: Expected, Imagined, Dreaded, University of Warwick, 24–25 June 2025

‘The Geographies of Monsters are the Geographies of Climate Change’, Weathers of the Future, University of Katowice, Poland, 3–4 September 2025, which meant we got to spend a week in Poland with our old friend Karolina (and have a drink at the deepest bar in Europe, at the bottom of a now-disused coal mine)

I did do some media stuff, though:
my first ever DVD/Blu-ray extra: a half-hour feature of me talking about sf and communism and things, called Blast Off, included in the Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA boxset from Eureka

my first ever appearance in a documentary feature film, The Big Picture (Arthur Cauty 2025), about the re-opening of the Bristol IMAX (now Bristol Megascreen), where it premiered

my first full-spectrum dominance* of a four-part TV documentary series, Wonderland – Science Fiction in the Atomic Age, episodes 1–4, Sky Arts, 3–24 April 2025

and half a dozen podcasts:

Guest on Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever, Episode 43 – La Jetée: French New Wave’s 1962 Sci-Fi Classic (14 September 2025) with Lisa Yaszek

Guest on Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever, Episode 41 – Village of the Damned: Creepy Kids and Cosy Catastrophe (17 August 2025) with Roger Luckhurst

Guest on The Climate Pod (2025) discussing The Anthropocene Unconscious

Guest on Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever, Episode 34 – The World, The Flesh, and the Devil: Harry Belafonte, Race and Apocalypse (11 May 2025) with Stéphanie Larrieux

Guest on Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever, Episode 28 – Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space: The Worst Movie Ever? (3 February 2025) with Rodney F. Hill

Guest on Brainland – Solaris: Probing the Lem/Tarkovsky Masterpiece (21 January 2025)

A sketch of me by *Brainland* host Ken Barrett; you need to raise your game, Ayesha

And I did some conference- and event-organising:
I was a Member of Programme Committee for The Future is Here: Fictions in the Age of Climate Change, University of Rijeka, Croatia (May 2025) but I don’t recall actually doing anything other than lending my name

I co-organised Psychobiddies, Harpies and Hags: Interrogating Ageing and Gender on Screen, at the Watershed, 3 May 2025. I was only responsible for the admin stuff but used the opportunity to arrange an accompanying screening of All About Eve (Mankiewicz 1950) at the Watershed and, on the following day and in collaboration with 20^th Century Flicks and Horror Without End, A Psycho Biddy and Hagsploitation Double Bill: The Nanny (Holt 1965) and X (West 2022) at Bristol Megascreen. We’ve done nukesploitation and hicksploitation before; HWE want to do snacksploitation next but I’m holding out for hatsploitation (not that I’ve managed to convince anyone that that’s a thing).

And since Gale Ann Hurd was in town as the Forbidden Worlds film festival’s Guest of Honour, she suggested doing an event for film students and young filmmakers, so I ended up organising and hosting In Conversation with Gale Anne Hurd at the Watershed, 31 May 2025

I examined a PhD: Marta Alvhild Mboka Tveit, Earthrise: An Ecocritical Study of African and Norwegian Speculative Fiction, which included not only few days’ break for us in Oslo but also remuneration so handsome that, for the first time ever, I must have got close to making minimum wage.

I became second-supervisor for a PhD at Freie Universität Berlin on domestic noir.

Oh, and on 5 December, just four days before everything went completely to shit, I finally did my professorial inaugural lecture – My Favourite Thing Is Monsters – at the Bristol Megascreen. Trust me: seize any chance you ever have to do a powerpoint on an old school IMAX screen – not one of the pissy little multiplex ones, but a proper one from before Hollywood started using the format. Doesn’t even matter what you say: the ppt alone bludgeons the audience into awed submission, like a bunch of Romantic poets seeing an alp for the first time…

* In this instance, ‘full-spectrum dominance’ means I was the first person interviewed – for a whole day – when they clearly still had no idea what the series was really about, so although I do appear in each episode there are about six hours of footage of me on the cutting room floor (i.e., a couple of drives that have been wiped and used for something else).

The asburd reading challenge of 2025

Each year, I come up with an absurd reading challenge, such as reading books published in unnecessarily large formats (2023) or by specific authors (2023 and 2024) or in specific series (2024) or for completism’s sake (2024). For 2025, something a little different:

To be unsystematic.

To not work through lists.

To choose randomly, according to whims, sudden enthusiasms and the rediscovery of books I’d forgotten I had.

To not plough through everything at the same relentless pace.

To take time to pause, to relish, to reflect.

To see how long I can persist in such hippy nonsense.

My top 21 (or 29) books of 2024

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 21^st 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)

David Gaffney, Out of the Dark (2022)

Thanks to a mutual friend (also called David), David Gaffney sent me a copy of his new novel about a traumatised man obsessed with an obscure British film noir.

Set primarily in the Midlands of the 1980s, Out of the Dark falls somewhere in the terrain triangulated by Mike Hodges’s Get Carter (1971), Chris Petit’s Radio On (1979) and Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006).

It is also under the influence of JG Ballard. But its motorways are not London’s near-future-but-never-happened orbitals, nor are its high-rises desublimating enclaves of bourgeois acquisitiveness and hierarchical obsession. Rather, it all takes place in actually-existing concrete landscapes of marginalisation, disconnection and dereliction – ‘neither in Walsall nor West Bromwich’ and thus ‘equally inconvenient’ in all directions. And it is rather more grungily quotidian and irreal-adjacent than anything in Ballard – closer, perhaps, to M. John Harrison or Ramsey Campbell.

And while the story it tells is full of twists and turns, genre-playfulness and sharp observations – as is the story within the story – what I loved most about Out of the Dark is something much more personal. I was born in Staffordshire, in a small-now-swallowed-in-the-conurbation Staffordshire village, but all my family were from Birmingham, from the Perry Barr/Perry Beeches parts of Great Barr, with outliers in Handsworth and West Bromwich; and behind my paternal grandparents mid-terrace two-up/two-down (with an outside loo), on the far side of the allotments onto which the garden backed, was an aerial stretch of the M6. And although we moved down to Devon when I was four years old, there is something ineffable about the litany of place names threaded through the novel: in chapter five alone, Perry Barr, Great Barr, Sarehole Mill, Kings Heath, Cotteridge, the impossibly distant Worcester, Bourneville, Harborne, Dudley Road, Perry Barr Island, Aston Lane, Swan Island, Billesley, Walsall…

And if this is nostalgia, it is not inappropriate for a novel enamoured of noir – especially when, for me, it is so oneiric and bittersweet.