I read 314 books this year, the fourth highest of the twenty-two years that I have been keeping count, and 77,700 pages, which is ninth highest of the twenty-two. That’s about average for my current circumstances.

118 (38%) of those books were by non-male writers, which is the fourth highest number and sixth highest percentage in my records.

44 (11%) were by non-white writers, which is the fourth highest number and fifth highest percentage of the twenty-two years.

My top author of the year was H.G. Wells; as I worked through his less well-known fiction, and a couple of others as well, I read ten of his books.

SF

I read 120 sf books this year, the sixth highest number and tenth highest percentage in my records.

Best of the year
Emily Tesh’s second full novel, The Incandescent, is a brutal look at what a magic school would really be like in today’s England. (Review; get it here.)
I Who Have Never Known Men, by the Belgian writer Jacqueline Harpman, got rediscovered by a lot of people this year, including me. It’s a great creepy post-apocalyptic feminist story. (Review; get it here.)

Welcome rereads
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. (Review; get it here.)
Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke. (Review; get it here.)
The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, by Ted Chiang. (Review; get it here, at a price.)

Honourable mentions
Three collections of short fiction by women.
Five Ways to Forgiveness, by Ursula Le Guin, has five stories linked by a common setting and shared characters, about revolution and social justice on a twin planet system. (Review; get it here.)
Spirits Abroad, by Zen Cho, is a set of excellent short stories reflecting Malay Chinese culture, some set in Malaysia, some in Britain, some elsewhere, all great. (Review; get it here.)
And back to the classics with The Birds and other stories, by Daphne Du Maurier, six very spooky stories by the author of Rebecca, the title story also made into a Hitchcock film. (Review; get it here.)

The one to avoid
In The Undying Fire, H.G. Wells attempted to rewrite the Book of Job for an English audience in 1919. For the love of God, why? (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
As I worked through the 2020 Hugo packet, five years on, one book particularly jumped out: Dark Winds Over Wellington, a collection of short stories by T.L. Wood, set in New Zealand’s capital. A great read. (Review; get it here)

Non-fiction

I read 79 non-fiction books (25%) this year, the fifth highest number and eighth highest percentage of the twenty-two years that I have counted.

A lot of this non-fiction was very good – I went a bit overboard, actually, and I’ve given five stars out of five to 22 non-fiction books on LibraryThing. So whittling these down to a few was quite a tough choice. In the end, I think my top recommendation goes to:

Best of the year
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi, is an Albanian autobiography. Albania has changed a lot in Lea Ypi’s lifetime, and indeed it is changing rapidly now, as I saw when I was there only a month ago. It’s a fascinating story of social control followed by disintegration of old dogmas. (Review; get it here.)

Honourable mentions
Of many good books about history, especially Irish history, I think the best was The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925, by Charles Townshend, which looks at how the division of the island became inevitable. (Review; get it here.)
It’s an old collection, and you can get all of the contents for free online, but I hugely enjoyed Decline of the English Murder, and other essays, by George Orwell, published by Penguin in 1965. (Review; get it here.)

Two to avoid
The Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb, attempts to unfold Celtic history and prehistory but descends into boring conspiracy theory. (Review; get it here)
Improbable History, ed. Michael Dobson, is a collection of historical essays celebrating “the weird, the obscure and the strangely important”. I tried the first three and they were very dull. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, eds. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton, is a jewel of a book: sixteen substantial essays with lovely plates and illustrations, and none of them is a dud, which is really unusual for any book with separately commissioned pieces by that many authors. All of them address the proposition that there are many interesting things to say about Ireland and the Renaissance. (Review; get it here)

Doctor Who

Almost all the other numbers for this year are above my average, but the stats for Doctor Who books are on the lower side; this is simply because I have read almost all of them, and am now mainly just keeping up with new publications, with a little retrospection. My total for all Doctor Who books this year is 57 (18%), the sixteenth highest number and nineteenth highest percentage of all years. For Doctor Who fiction, excluding comics, the number is 31 (10%), the eleventh highest number (thus slightly above the median) and sixteenth highest percentage.

Best of the year
Andrew Orton’s Black Archive analysis of the first Peter Davison story, Castrovalva, takes all the things that intrigued me about it and digs deeper, taking my appreciation to a new level. The best this year of a (mostly) excellent series. (Review; get it here.)

Honourable mentions
BBC spin-off merchandise: The TARDIS Type 40 Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker, is a real delight from 2018. (Review; get it here.)
Novelisations: As I had hoped, Doctor Who: Lux, by James Goss, takes the televised story and gives it new depth and warmth. Excellent stuff. (Review; get it here.)
Other non-fiction: Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who, by John Higgs, is a nice chunky book about the history of Doctor Who, from 1963 to 2024, Doctor by Doctor, in the wider political context. (Review; get it here.)

The one to avoid
In general I am very supportive of the Black Archive series; however the volume on The Mysterious Planet, by Jez Strickley, is a rare but definite miss, filled with incomprehensible jargon. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
I have been very much enjoying Cutaway Comics’ return to classic Doctor Who stories, exploring both the before and after of the plots; the best for my money is Inferno, by Gary Russell and John Ridgway, looking at how the parallel universe got to be like that. (Review; get it here)

Non-genre

I read 43 (14%) non-genre fiction books this year, which is the seventh highest number, but only the thirteenth highest percentage.

Best of the year
Margaret Atwood’s short story collection, Old Babes in the Wood, is full of jewels, and is my top recommendation from a crowded field. (Review; get it here.)

Honourable mentions
Not So Quiet…, by Helen Zenna Smith, is the story of a nurse’s experiences in the first world war, one of the most visceral portrayals of trench warfare that I have read, with also reflections on gender and class. (Review; get it here.)
I can’t decide which of Zen Cho’s contemporary romances to choose, so have both of them, brilliant, funny and moving stories of love between young Asians in today’s London: The Friend Zone Experiment (review; get it here) and Behind Frenemy Lines (review; get it here).

The one to avoid
Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon, has Ancient Greeks in Sicily being brutal to each other while talking with Irish accents, and that seems to be the point. I gave up. (Review; get it here)

The one you may not have heard of
I loved Our Song, a Dublin-set romance novel by Anna Carey, but it has less than ten owners on LibraryThing so I feel it ought to be better known. It’s doing better on Goodreads, with over 500 ratings as of this writing. (Review; get it here)

Comics

Including Doctor Who comics, I read 36 (11%) comics and graphic novels this year. That’s the same number as last year, equal third highest in my records, and the eighth highest percentage.

Best of the year
One old, one new here.
Alison Bechdel is still on form, with her loosely autobiographical Spent taking a humorous look at life on a goat refuge in rural New England, as the tentacles of fame and social media influencing insert themselves into her world. (Review; get it here.)
I had not previously read Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, based on research in 2002 and 2003 on the 1956 massacres of hundreds of unarmed civilians in Gaza by Israeli forces. It is a vivid portrayal of life and death in the Strip both at the start of this century and in the middle of the last. (Review; get it here.)

Honourable mentions
Two of this year’s Hugo finalists particularly appealed to me. (Review.) The winner, Star Trek Lower Decks – Warp Your Own Way, by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio, preserves the parent TV show’s humour and adds a cheeky breach of the usual format for graphic choose-your-own-adventure books. (Get it here.) And The Deep Dark, by Molly Scott Ostertag, is a queer coming-of-age story with a monster in the basement. (Get it here.)

The one to avoid
Charlotte impératrice, Tome 1: La Princesse et l’Archiduc, by Fabien Nury and Matthieu Bonhomme, takes a rather minor figure from nineteenth-century history and fails to make her very interesting, while also distorting the historical record. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
In Who Killed Nessie?, Paul Cornell and Rachael Wood, both of them creators whose other works I have enjoyed, come together to solve a murder at a convention for mythical creatures. Great fun. (Review; get it here)

Plays and Poetry

I read four works of poetry (counting an anthology which was more poetry than anything else). I strongly recommend Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad. (Review; get it here), Also a shout out for Oliver Langmead’s sf novel in verse form, Calypso.(Review; get it here.)

I read one book of scripts this year, The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston, vol 3: Radio and Television Plays which includes two theatre plays omitted from the two previous volumes. Some of them are good, some have aged less well. (Review; get it here.)

Top book of 2025

I found this a terribly difficult choice. In the end I’m going for Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, with its reflections on violence, history, experience and truth. Examining events in 1956, researched in 2002-03, published in 2009, it remains horribly relevant today. Strongly recommended. (Review; get it here.)

Previous Books of the Year:

2003 (2 months): The Separation, by Christopher Priest (review; get it here)
2004: (reread) The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto (review; get it here)
2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea (review; get it here)
2007: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel (review; get it here)
2008: (reread) The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray (review; get it here)
2009: (had seen it on stage previously) Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (first volume just pipped by Samuel Pepys in 2004) (review; get it here)
2010: The Bloody Sunday Report, by Lord Savile et al. (review of vol I; get it here)
2011: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (started in 2009!) (review; get it here)
2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë (review; get it here)
2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (review; get it here)
2014: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (review; get it here)
2015: collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel (review; get it here).
– Best book I actually blogged about in 2015: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot (review; get it here)
2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light (review; get it here)
2018: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling (review; get it here)
2019: Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (review; get it here)
2020: From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull (review; get it here)
2021: Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins (review; get it here)
2022: The Sun is Open, by Gail McConnell (review; get it here)
2023: Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman (review; get it here)
2024: The Cazalet Saga, by Elizabeth Jane Howard (reviews; get them here)

I read 287 books this year, the ninth highest of the twenty-one years that I have been keeping count, and 70,000 pages, which is thirteenth highest of the twenty-one. My reading pace has accelerated in the last few years, though this year it was braked a bit by being the Hugo administrator. (Not as much as in 2017 or 2019, though; I guess I’m getting used to it.)

121 (42%) of those books were by non-male writers, which is the third highest number and second highest percentage (only just – 42.16% this year, 42.17% last year, 41.89% in 2021).

30 (10%) were by non-white writers, which is the fifth highest of the twenty-one years in both cases.

Science fiction and fantasy

89 (31%) of these books were science fiction or fantasy, not counting Doctor Who books which I tally separately. This is the lowest number since 2019 (the last time that I was Hugo administrator) and the lowest percentage since 2017 (the first time that I was Hugo administrator).

Top SF book of the year:
My favourite sf novel in general this year was The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty, a Hugo finalist about a pirate queen in a fantasy medieval Indian Ocean. I always say that the Indian Ocean is a corridor, not a barrier. (Not reviewed; get it here.)

Welcome rereads:
My absolute favourite Terry Pratchett novel is Small Gods which combines his typically well-aimed shafts of wit and satire with an actual growth narrative for the two main characters. (Review; get it here.)
Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest retains the passion of its attack on colonial wars of conquest, and seemed a particularly timely reread. (Review; get it here.)

Honorable mentions:
I had not previously read Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, which is actually set in 2024 and 2025, also has a dire political situation with an extreme right-wing candidate getting elected president of the USA, but ends with a glimmer of hope. (Review; get it here.)
Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh, is a great thoughtful anti-fascist novel, which won the Hugo to much acclaim. (Not reviewed; get it here.)
Among the other award finalists, I particularly liked Liberty’s Daughter by Naomi Kritzer, a full-spirited critique of libertarianism. (Not reviewed; get it here.)

The one you haven’t heard of:
Lost Objects, by Marian Womack, a collection of short stories many of which examine human reactions to environmental catastrophe. She has another collection coming out soon. (Review; get it here.)

The one to avoid:
What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah. Conservative wet dream written in 1907, about the overthrow of Socialism in England in 1918. (Review; get it here)

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Non-fiction

I read 86 (30%) non-fiction books, the same number as last year, equal third highest number and fourth highest percentage of the years I have recorded. As I go through the backlog of books acquired in previous years, it’s often the non-fiction that has sifted to the bottom of the pile; also I’m tallying the Black Archives and other Whovian lore here.

Top non-fiction book of the year:
The best non-fiction book I read this year was A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, by Samuel Hynes, which looks in impressive and fascinating detail at the impact of the conflict on all branches of the arts in Britain, and vice versa. (Review; get it here.)

Welcome rereads:
Hiroshima, by John Hersey, the searing account of the consequences of the first atomic bombing of a civilian population. (Review; get it here)
1066 and All That, by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman: Perhaps not strictly non-fiction, but presented as a hilarious reading. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions:
I’m being a bit self-indulgent with three honorable mentions in this category, but I read a lot of good non-fiction this year.
Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, by Steve Silberman, a really good compilation of what is known about autism and how and when we knew it. (Review; get it here)
Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis, which Bronte experts regard with some suspicion; I found it really charming. (Review; get it here)
Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922, by Ronan Fanning, which examines the process of Irish independence from the Westminster policy point of view. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:
I got a lot out of the post-colonial critiques of science fiction and fantasy from the collection Ex Marginalia: Essays from the Edges of Speculative Fiction, edited by Chinelo Onwualu. Nigeria is especially well covered, but the scope is global. (Review; get it here.)

The one to avoid:
Ten Years to Save the West, by Liz Truss. This is a not very good book written by a person who was completely unsuited to the job which she had so ruthlessly pursued. (Review; get it here.)

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Doctor Who

Only 34 (12%) Doctor Who fiction books this year, which is a little below the average; but 65 (23%) Doctor Who books of all kinds, which is almost bang on the average, tenth out of 21 in both counts.

Top Doctor Who book of the year:
Simon Guerrier’s masterful biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, tells us about the life of one of the original show-running team in 1963, who wrote several of the best-remembered stories but died at only 51. (Review; get it here.)

Top Black Archive of the year:
It’s difficult to choose here, and I’ll give shout-outs also to Lewis Baston on The Sun Makers, Ian Z. Potter on The Myth Makers, Simon Guerrier on The Edge of Destruction and Philip Purser-Hallard on Midnight. In the end I vote for Dale Smith’s analysis of the flawed classic Talons of Weng Chiang, which confronts the problematic racism of the story head-on. (Review; get it here.)

Top novelisation of the year:
Doctor Who: Rogue, by Kate Herron and Briony Redman (the original TV writers), gives lots of new context to the TV story, which I already liked a lot anyway. Probably the best Fifteenth Doctor book of any kind so far. (Review; get it here.)

Top other novel of the year:
Warmonger, by Terrance Dicks – I had read this before, but failed to blog it. A really interesting reimagining of the Fifth Doctor / Peri relationship, drawing perhaps on Terrance Dicks’ own experience with the military. (Review; get it here.)

Top short fiction of the year:
In a very attractive set of six novellas published last year by Puffin, the outstanding contribution is The Angel of Redemption, by Nikita Gill – told from the point of view of a Weeping Angel, in verse. (Review; get it here.)

Best Doctor Who comic of the year:
I’ve had a good run of mostly Eleventh Doctor comics, and especially liked the most recently read, When Worlds Collide, by Tony Lee et al, which has an Ancient Britain story and then a doppelganger theme park thread. (Review; get it here.)

The ones you haven’t heard of:
Two lovely volumes reminiscing about the Blackpool exhibition – I read the first last year, but I think I should treat them as a pair. (Reviews here and here; get them for free here and here.)

What to avoid:
I won’t single out any particular Doctor Who book that I read this year as being worse than the others; there were a few disappointments, but nothing as bad as in the other sections of this post.

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Comics

36 comics and picture books is the third highest of my annual tallies, though 13% is only the sixth highest percentage. (I’m counting in Ara Güler’s Istanbul, which is pretty visual.)

Top comic of the year:
Shubeik Lubeik, published as Your Wish is My Command in the UK, by Deena Mohamed; an alternative contemporary Egypt, where wishes are natural resources to be exploited. On the Hugo ballot; didn’t win. (Not reviewed; get it here.)

Welcome reread:
L’Affaire Tournesol / The Calculus Affair, by Hergé; one of the great Tintin albums, with action in Switzerland and the Balkans and also the first appearance of the annoying Séraphin Lampion / Jolyon Wagg. (Review; get it here in English and here in French.)

Honorable mentions:
Barnstormers: A Ballad of Love and Murder, by Tula Lotay and Scott Snyder, about two crazy kids flying across America in 1923 (review; get it here)
Monica, by Daniel Clowes, a much more serious tale of lost parents and shattered identity (review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:
Return to Kosovo / Retour au Kosovo, by Gani Jakupi with great art by Jorge González, an even-handed exploration of a traumatised society. The English version is very difficult to get hold of, but the French original was published by mainstream firm Dupuis. (Review; get it here in French.)

The one to avoid:
Bea Wolf, by Zach Weinersmith and Boulet, a pointless tale of little girls and boys re-enacting Beowulf. Also an unsuccessful Hugo finalist. (Not reviewed; get it here.)

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Non-genre

I had the sense during the year that I was reading more non-genre fiction than usual, but in fact the total number at 35 is spot on the median, and the percentage at 12% is a little lower.

Top non-genre fiction of the year:
The Cazalet Saga – see below.

Honorable mention:
Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang, short, grim, gruesome, funny and vicious about the reception and appropriation of Chinese culture in the US. (Review; get it here.)

Welcome re-read:
Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne; It’s rambling, self-indulgent, full of references to things I know nothing about; and at the same time I love it. (Review; get it here.)

The one you haven’t heard of:
Creed Country, by Jenny Overton. Two teenagers do local history research in a corner of south-eastern England in the late 1960s. Their friendship, and their relationship with the past of their neighbourhood, are both beautifully drawn. (Review; get it here.)

The one to avoid:
The worst book of any kind that I read all year was Pook at College, by Peter Pook, a dull, sexist tale of the only male student at a teacher training college. No link for buying this, but here’s my review.

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Plays and poetry

I read a total of eight of these, which is more than usual.

Top poetry or play of the year:
The best poetry I read all year was Emily Wilson’s thought-provoking translation of The Odyssey, by Homer, bringing a new and broader perspective to an exceptionally well-known work. (Review; get it here.)

Honorable mention:
The Cure at Troy, a verse playscript by Seamus Heaney, about engaging with and overcoming conflict and the past. (Review; get it here.)

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Top book of 2024

My top book of the year is actually five books, of which I read two in 2023 and three this year: the Cazalet Saga, by Elizabeth Jane Howard, a gripping tale of an extended English family in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, as the previous certainty of inherited wealth slips away in the tide of social and political change: superb stuff and strongly recommended.

The Light Years (review; get it here)
Marking Time (review; get it here)
Confusion (review; get it here)
Casting Off (review; get it here)
All Change (review; get it here)

Previous Books of the Year:

2003 (2 months): The Separation, by Christopher Priest (review; get it here)
2004: (reread) The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto (review; get it here)
2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea (review; get it here)
2007: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel (review; get it here)
2008: (reread) The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray (review; get it here)
2009: (had seen it on stage previously) Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (first volume just pipped by Samuel Pepys in 2004) (review; get it here)
2010: The Bloody Sunday Report, by Lord Savile et al. (review of vol I; get it here)
2011: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (started in 2009!) (review; get it here)
2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë (review; get it here)
2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (review; get it here)
2014: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (review; get it here)
2015: collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel (review; get it here).
– Best book I actually blogged about in 2015: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot (review; get it here)
2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light (review; get it here)
2018: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling (review; get it here)
2019: Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (review; get it here)
2020: From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull (review; get it here)
2021: Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins (review; get it here)
2022: The Sun is Open, by Gail McConnell (review; get it here)
2023: Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman (review; get it here)

I read 351 books this year, the second highest of the twenty years that I have been keeping count. (The highest was 2008, when I read all of the Doctor Who novelisations and most of Shakespeare.) My page count was 86,900, which is only 6th out of 20, though the highest since 2014. Both tallies include a fair number of Clarke Award submissions which I ruthlessly set aside at the 50 page mark. I’ve also been reading some shorter books, notably Doctor Who comics and the Black Archives.

148 (42%) of those book were by non-male writers, which is a record in both cases (this year’s 42.2% is a smidgen above 2021’s 41.9%). 42 were by non-white writers, which is joint equal with 2021’s record, though the percentage (12%) is lower than three of the last four years.

Science Fiction

164 (47%) of these books were SF, not counting Doctor Who novels. That’s the highest number in 20 years, and the highest percentage since 2005.

Top sf books of the year:
I’m really proud of the Arthur C. Clarke shortlist:
Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman (Review; get it here)
The Coral Bones by E.J. Swift (Review; get it here)
The Anomaly by Hervé le Tellier (Review; get it here)
Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick (Review; get it here)
Metronome by Tom Watson (Review; get it here)
The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions to:
The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo; a re-telling of The Great Gatsby with a queer fantasy twist. (Review; get it here)
All the Names They Used for God, by Anjali Sachdeva; tremendous collection of short stories. (Review; get it here)

Welcome rereads:
Cart and Cwidder, by Diana Wynne Jones; first in the Dalemark Quartet series of YA fantasy novels, a very moral but exciting tale. (Review; get it here)
Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie; second in the series of Raadch novels, with a fierce core of justice and a protagonist who is more than human. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:
Appliance, by J.O. Morgan; set of short stories about the transformation of society caused by the invention of a teleporter. (Review; get it here)

The ones to avoid:
(from the Clarke slush pile)
The Hunt – for Allies, by David Geoffrey Adams; badly written and incomprehensible. (Review; get it here)
Harpan’s Worlds: Worlds Apart, by Terry Jackman; MilSF rubbish. (Review; get it here)

Non-fiction

86 (25%) of these books were non-fiction, the third highest number in twenty years (after last year and 2009) and 7th highest percentage. It’s boosted by the Black Archives, which I am reading at the rate of two every month. (I’ll catch up to current publication in the summer.)

Top non-fiction book of the year:
The January 6 report, by a special committee of the House of Representatives. Outlines in awful detail what happened on the day that Donald Trump incited his supporters to attempt to overthrow American democracy. A warning for what could lie ahead of us in 2024. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions to:
Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins; winner of the BSFA Award and the Hugo, a humane and detailed account of Pratchett’s life and writing style. (Review; get it here)
Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars, by Catherine Clinton; the best biography I have yet read of the fascinating nineteenth century actor, writer and activist. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:
Gifted Amateurs and Other Essays, by David Bratman; a lovely collection of thoughtful pieces on Tolkien, the Inklings and fantasy more generally. (Review; get it here)

The ones to avoid:
Dispatches from Chengdu, by Abdiel Leroy, and Charmed in Chengdu, by Michael O’Neal; two dreadful books in which American expats show their white asses while working in China. (Review; get them here and here)

Doctor Who

I read 37 Doctor Who fiction books this year (11%), which is the 12th highest number and 16th highest percentage of the last twenty years. But broadening out to include non-fiction and comics, the number goes up to 79 (23%), the 5th highest number and 10th highest percentage since I started keeping track. Again, the Black Archives add to the latter total.

Top Doctor Who book of the year:
Doctor Who: The Giggle, by James Goss; inventive and imaginative adaptation of the last David Tennant episode for the printed page. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions to:
(Black Archive) The Deadly Assassin, by Andrew Orton; almost all of the Black Archive monographs are very very good, but I think this was my favourite of the year, shedding more light onto my favourite story of Old Who. (Review; get it here)
(comics) The Weeping Angels of Mons, by Robbie Morrison et al; there have been a number of treatments of Doctor Who and the First World War, but this is one of the best for my money, featuring the Tenth Doctor. (Review; get it here)
(another novelisation) Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara, by David Fisher; brings a lot more to his TV script than we had previously seen. (Review; get it here)
(Faction Paradox) Erasing Sherlock, by Kelly Hale; I had already given up on the Faction Paradox sequence by the time I got around to reading this, but to my surprise it worked very well for me. (Review; get it here)

Welcome re-reads:
Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, by Malcolm Hulke; one of the best Old Who adaptations, the novel version of the Pertwee story Doctor Who and the Silurians. (Review; get it here)
Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, by Steven Moffat; adaptation of the two stories that closed off the Eleventh Doctor era, tightening up and filling out the story we saw on screen. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:
The Daleks, collection of strips from TV Century 21 magazine from 1965-67, told from the point of view of the malevolent pepperpots and really very enjoyable. (Review; out of print)

The one to avoid:
Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor, by Philip Martin. Apparently the book of a video which I haven’t seen, and don’t really want to. (Review; get it here)

Non-genre

I read 29 non-genre fiction books this year (8%), the 14th highest number and 16th highest percentage of twenty years. My selection procedure tends to favour Doctor Who and other sf these days.

Top non-genre book of the year:
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin; a well-told, gripping and moving story about two friends from California who end up writing computer games together. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions to:
Winter, by Ali Smith; a short but very intense novel about a family Christmas in England, the recent political past, and questions of identity. (Review; get it here)
The Cider House Rules, by John Irving; I had not read this before, but it’s a heart-breaking saga of a New England orphanage in the mid-twentieth century, situating abortion in its human context. (Review; get it here)

Welcome re-reads:
Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers; the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, one of the best known books still in circulation from 1923, and still a great read. (Review; get it here)
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald; short but very effective character study of the central character and of a whole society in New York State just after the First World War. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:
Jill, by Amy Dillwyn; of the half-dozen novels written in the 1880s by my distant cousin, a prominent Welsh feminist, this is the best, taking her title character all around Europe in search of female comfort and enlightenment. (Review; get it here)

The one to avoid:
Keats and Chapman Wryed Again, by Steven A. Jent; an attempt to write more Myles na Gopaleen-style anecdotes about the poet and the writer. Why? (Review; get it here)

Comics

A relatively low year for comics reading also, with 28 in total (8%), the 6th highest number and 12th highest percentage in my records.

More than half of those were Doctor Who comics, covered above. Of the other 13:

Top comic of the year:
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, by Tom King, Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes; I’m not hugely invested in the Supergirl / Superman mythos, but I thought this did great things with great characters. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions to:
The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechdel; reflections on fitness, literature and love. (Review; get it here)
Jaren van de Olifant, by Willy Linthout; dealing with a family member’s suicide, expanded by 25% from the first edition. (Not yet reviewed; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:
Neptune, vols 1 and 2, by Leo; a nice two-part taster for the work of the great Brazilian-French artist and writer, carrying on the story of Kim from the Aldébaran Cycle. (Review; get it here and here in French, here and here in English)

The one to avoid:
Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams, by Bartosz Sztybor, Filipe Andrade, Alessio Fioriniello, Roman Titov, and Krzysztof Ostrowski; won the Hugo, clearly vey popular in China, but I could not make head nor tail of it. (Review; get it here)

Others

I read four works of poetry, and one play. They are all very good. In the order that I read them:

• Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, by Frank McGuinness (review; get it here)
• Metamorphoses, by Ovid tr. Stephanie McCarter (review; get it here)
• Tales from Ovid, by Ted Hughes (review; get it here)
• Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles (review; get it here)
• The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran (review; get it here)

Book of the year

This is actually a fairly easy choice. The Arthur C. Clarke Award judging process is one of the most pleasurable sf-related activities I have engaged in (stop looking at me like that) and I’m very happy with the shortlist. I will be honest; I personally went back and forth between E.J. Swift’s the Coral Bones and the eventual winner, but on reflection I’m happy to name my book of 2023 as the glorious satire on environmental destruction, Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman, to which we gave the award. Here is my write-up, and you can get it here.

Previous Books of the Year:

2003 (2 months): The Separation, by Christopher Priest (review; get it here)
2004: (reread) The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto (review; get it here)
2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea (review; get it here)
2007: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel (review; get it here)
2008: (reread) The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray (review; get it here)
2009: (had seen it on stage previously) Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (first volume just pipped by Samuel Pepys in 2004) (review; get it here)
2010: The Bloody Sunday Report, by Lord Savile et al. (review of vol I; get it here)
2011: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (started in 2009!) (review; get it here)
2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë (review; get it here)
2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (review; get it here)
2014: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (review; get it here)
2015: collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel (review; get it here).
– Best book I actually blogged about in 2015: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot (review; get it here)
2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light (review; get it here)
2018: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling (review; get it here)
2019: Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (review; get it here)
2020: From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull (review; get it here)
2021: Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins (review; get it here)
2022: The Sun is Open, by Gail McConnell (review; get it here)

I read 298 books in 2022, two more than in 2021, the fourth highest of the nineteen years that I have been keeping track, and the highest since 2011.

Page count for the year: 76,500, ninth highest of the nineteen years I have recorded, almost in the middle; there are some very short books in there.

Books by non-male writers in 2022: 109 (37%), second highest tally and fourth highest percentage of the years I have been counting.

Books by PoC in 2021: 39 (13%), second highest tally and third highest percentage since I started counting.

Most-read author this year: it’s a tie between two previous winners, Terrance Dicks and Kieron Gillen, with five each. The Dicks novelisations were all re-reads.

(previous winners: Neil Gaiman in 2021, Kieron Gillen in 2020, Brian K. Vaughan in 2019, Tove Jansson and Marcel Proust in 2018, Colin Brake and Leo in 2017, Christopher Marlowe in 2016, Justin Richards in 2015 and 2014, Agatha Christie in 2013, Jonathan Gash in 2012, Arthur Conan Doyle in 2011, Ian Rankin in 2010, William Shakespeare in 2009 and 2008, Terrance Dicks in 2007, Ian Marter in 2006, Charles Stross in 2005, Neil Gaiman and Catherine Asaro in 2004).

1) Science Fiction and Fantasy (excluding Doctor Who)

122 books (41%) – 4th highest total, 8th highest percentage.

Top SF book of the year:

I have to be a little coy here, because there are some very good Clarke nominees coming through the mix that I don’t yet feel free to discuss. Apart from that, I’m going to give a joint award to two books which were in the Hugo packet:

• A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, a novella that totally charmed me despite having a cute robot; you can get it here
• Swordheart by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon), fantasy romance between a young widow and a warrior who is mostly embodied in a sword; you can get it here.

Honourable mentions to:

• Goliath, by Tochi Onyebuchi, Earth abandoned by the white folks, Biblical tropes, sexuality and acceptance, rich prose; you can get it here.
• Fireheart Tiger, by Aliette de Bodard, Vietnamese-flavoured fantasy court politics combined with a g/g love story; you can get it here
• Half Life, by Shelley Jackson, a world where there are a lot more conjoined twins; you can get it here

Welcome rereads:

• Mort, by Terry Pratchett; you can get it here
• “Bloodchild”, by Octavia Butler; you can get the collection of the same name here

The one you don’t have:

• The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s, by Brian Aldiss, a talent coming to maturity; you can get it here

The one to avoid:

• Guy Erma and the Son of Empire, by Sally Ann Melia: leaden prose, poorly edited, childish premise and plot; but you can get it here

2) Non-fiction

95 books (32%) – highest ever number, third highest percentage. I think this has been driven upwards by the excellent Black Archive series of short books about Doctor Who stories, but that’s not the only factor.

Top non-fiction book of the year:

• Manifesto: On Never Giving Up, by Bernardine Evaristo, the autobiography of a brilliant writer; get it here

Honourable mentions to:

• Why I Write, by George Orwell, a lucid and clear set of essays; get it here
• The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, by Amia Srinivasan, asking all the right questions; get it here
• The Caucasus: An Introduction by Thomas De Waal, a comprehensive and clear survey of the region from before the most recent war; get it here

The one you haven’t heard of:

• A Radical Romance: A Memoir of Love, Grief and Consolation, by Alison Light, lovely and honest story of her relationship with a fellow historian, much older and from a very different background; you can get it here.

The one to avoid:

• Duran Duran: The First Four Years of the Fab Five, by Neil Gaiman, early stuff from a writer who went on to much better things; out of print.

3) Doctor Who

Fiction other than comics: 39 books (13%), 10th highest total (dead in the middle) of the last nineteen years and highest since 2017, 13th highest percentage

Including non-fiction and comics: 72 (24%), 7th highest total and 6th highest percentage, both highest since 2013

Top Doctor Who book of the year:

• Marco Polo, by Dene October, my favourite of this year’s Black Archive reading; get it here

Honorable mentions to:

• (More Black Archive) Hell Bent, by Alyssa Franke, gave me a new appreciation for a story that hadn’t especially grabbed me; get it here
• (BBC spinoff) The Doctor – His Lives and Times, by James Goss and Steve Tribe, one of the 50th anniversary books that I only now got around to reading; get it here
• (Short Stories) I Am the Master, by Peter Anghelides et al, lots of good stories about our favourite villain; get it here
• (Comics) Doctormania, by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson, Matheus Lopes and Marco Lesko, great fun with the Ninth Doctor, Rose and Jack; get it here
• (Lethbridge Stewart) The Daughters of Earth, by Sarah Groenewegen, the Brigadier trapped in a snowstorm with aliens and feminists; get it here

The one you haven’t heard of:

• Daleks’ Invasion Earth: 2150AD by “Alan Smithee”, (apparently Iain MacLaughlin), novelisation of the second Peter Cushing movie; get it (with three others) here.

The one to avoid:

• The Dreamer’s Lament, by Benjamin Burford-Jones, a disappointing entry in the generally good Lethbridge-Stewart series; get it here

4) Comics

20 (7%), 11th highest total and 12th highest percentage, both lowest since 2015.

Top comic of the year:

• Carbone & Silicium, by Mathieu Bablet, the history of the decline of humanity observed by two sympathetic robots; get it here in French and here in English.

Honourable mentions:

• Snotgirl Volume 1: Green Hair Don’t Care, by Bryan Lee O’Malley and Lesley Hung, an encouraging start to a new series; get it here
• Once and Future vol 3: The Parliament of Magpies and vol 4: Monarchies in the UK, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain, continues to delightfully and brutally subvert Arthuriana; get them here and here

The one you haven’t heard of:

• Scherven, by Erik De Graaf, a story of young people in the occupied Netherlands during the second world war; get it here in Dutch.

The one to avoid:

• Voorbij de grenzen van de ernst, by “Kamagurka” (Luc Zeebroek), Belgian visual humour which I mostly just didn’t grok; get it here.

5) Non-genre fiction

18 (6%); second lowest tally and lowest ever percentage of the nineteen years that I have been keeping track. Not quite sure why this is; perhaps as I work through the unread bookshelves more ruthlessly, I am getting through loads of previously unread sf, where I had already got to most of the non-genre fiction I had bought on a whim.

Top non-genre fiction of the year – joint honours to two very different books:

• Mr Britling See it Through, by H.G. Wells, a famous writer and public intellectual (a merciless self-portrait) adapts to the first world war; get it here
• Disobedience, by Naomi Alderman, a woman deals with her father’s death and the conservative Jewish culture in London which she left years before; get it here

Honourable mention:

• The Light Years, by Elizabeth Jane Howard, first in the Cazalets series, the rest of which I have now bought and must read; get it here

The one you haven’t heard of:

• A Ship is Dying, by Brian Callison, gripping account of a maritime accident in the North Sea; get it here

Nothing that was so awful that I would recommend avoidance.

6) Others: poetry and scripts

I read two excellent poetry collections by Northern Irish writers, Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney (get it here) and The Sun Is Open by Gail McConnell (get it here). I also read a very odd play, Juicy and Delicious by Lucy Alibar (get it here), which was the basis for the much better film Beasts of the Southern Wild.

My Book of the Year

This year’s winner of the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize was, for the first time, a book of poetry, The Sun is Open, by QUB-based writer Gail McConnell. In fact the 119 pages of text are one long poem broken into chunks, playing with text and with font colour, processing the writer’s reaction to going through a box of her father’s things, long after he died in 1984 at 35, shot dead by the IRA while checking under his car for bombs, in front of his wife and his then three-year-old daughter.

Gail McConnell barely remembers her father and has no memory of that awful day, but of course it has affected her whole life, and the poetry captures that disruption and the effect of engaging with her father through a box of personal souvenirs, most notably a diary and a Students Union handbook from his own time at QUB. There is some imaginative playing with structure – quotations from the box are in grey text, documents are quoted in fragments to let us fill in the blanks, at one point the page fills with vertical bars to symbolise the prison where her father worked. It’s provocative and unsettling, and meant to be. 

I thought it was incredible and it’s my book of the year for 2022. You can get it here.

Previous Books of the Year:

2003 (2 months): The Separation, by Christopher Priest (review; get it here)
2004: (reread) The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto (review; get it here)
2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea (review; get it here)
2007: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel (review; get it here)
2008: (reread) The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray (review; get it here)
2009: (had seen it on stage previously) Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (first volume just pipped by Samuel Pepys in 2004) (review; get it here)
2010: The Bloody Sunday Report, by Lord Savile et al. (review of vol I; get it here)
2011: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (started in 2009!) (review; get it here)
2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë (review; get it here)
2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (review; get it here)
2014: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (review; get it here)
2015: collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel (get it here). However I did not actually blog about these, being one of the judges at the time.
– Best book I actually blogged about: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot (review; get it here)
2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light (review; get it here)
2018: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling (review; get it here)
2019: Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (review; get it here)
2020: From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull (review; get it here)
2021: Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins (review; get it here)