For the last two years I’ve done a mid-year reading report on this blog with the best books I’ve read so far in the year. You can read the 2024 and 2025 posts here. Is this accompanied by an end-of-year reading report? No, everything I read after July remains a mystery to the internet. 

Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes | I love learning about human evolution! This book about Neanderthals is great because Sykes is so tender towards her subject, and has little vignettes and illustrations really inviting the reader to walk beside their Neanderthal ancestors. It’s quite technical at times but her passion and compassion makes the descriptions of stone flake analysis interesting.

We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky by Mara Kardas-Nelson | This is essentially my favourite genre (‘reported non-fiction about how ordinary people are impacted by big political ideas’) although Kardas-Nelson dilutes it by interspersing chapters about women who have taken microloans in Sierra Leone with a history of how microloans became big business. I was always desperate for these chapters to be over to get out of acronym land and back to real people trying to sell yoghurt in Freetown. I liked that Kardas Nelson had a clear argument about how microloans became popular and why they fail to solve poverty. The bristling frustration at i.e. private companies getting into microloans because they can charge higher interest makes the precision of facts even better. Minor complaint: the title is taken from some random report from Nepal not Kardas-Nelson’s reporting!

Dayswork by Jennifer Habel and Chris Bachelder | This is the ‘literary fiction’ I’ve enjoyed most this year. Funny and wry on the work of writing, about a creative writing teacher who becomes obsessed with Hermann Melville in the middle of the pandemic. Convinced me that Moby-Dick should be my next Big Book… and then I went and read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Anna Karenina first so this is still the case.

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik | This year I’ve read Novik’s short story collection Buried Deep, her novella The Summer War (if you like Tamsyn Muir’s Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower you’ll enjoy this), reread Uprooted (great, great book) and also reread Spinning Silver, for the first time since 2018. What makes this story shine is the character development combined with very great settings. Final line is a cracker.

Five Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula LeGuin | I’m on a good old sci-fi kick and saw this recommended – I haven’t read much LeGuin, just The Word for World is Forest and A Wizard of Earthsea. Five Ways to Forgiveness is great – five interlinked stories which asks hard questions and offers genuine conclusions about life after war. It’s set on two planets where there had been a system of slavery and then a civil war. It’s honestly electrifying, seeing these interlinked short stories with really distinct voices. I especially liked the themes of education and feminism. 

The Warrior’s Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold | I didn’t really know why I picked this up but it was just a rollicking good time, and I have now requested heaps more Bujold books from the library. Miles, the main character, has a disability which prevents him from following his father and grandfather into the Bayarran military… so he goes to his grandmother’s planet and ends up finding a classic ragtag crew of people who he has to take with a ship full of weapons to a planet in the middle of a civil war. It’s basically about confidence and tactics, but has some quite sophisticated emotional reactions to not getting the girl and an incredibly satisfying final scene. 

The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner | I also had a ‘eleventh to thirteen century England’ kick this year, reading Matrix, Doomsday Book and The Corner That Held Them in quick succession. Doomsday Book would have been the best of them if it didn’t have a really stupid time travel plotline (but incredible outbreak of disease scene considering it was written in the 1990s!). Matrix is excellent and better to read if you are short on time but almost too glossy and perfect as a narrative (I liked it way more than Groff’s Fates and Furies though). The Corner That Held Them is harder work but the best of the lot – the relationships between the villagers and the nuns was especially compelling. I felt very convinced by its depiction of poverty, helped by its long timeframe. It’s really slow but by the last third I was riveted – and there is a joke about the Bible verse “the poor will always be with you” which made me laugh out loud.

The Witch of Prague by JM Sidorova | I supported the Kickstarter for this book because I loved how weird it sounded: set in Prague in the 1960s, about a young woman who ends up apprenticed to a witch (or is she?). And it totally delivered, with a bizarre kind of magic (all dreaming) and a setting of frightening bureaucracy. It’s pitched as a story about bodily autonomy and the Prague Spring, but it’s really a story about different types of power. My other favourite magical book set in Prague is obviously Daughter of Smoke and Bone. 

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls | I should have recommended this in my post about China! Lots to love about this grandmother-mother-daughter graphic novel about mental illness, freedom, and the Cultural Revolution. I liked it for its ambition. It’s very wordy for a graphic novel and very self referential; Hulls has said (and I believe!) that she doesn’t want to write another book because this one took so much out of her. I wish she’d written more about her bikepacking trips, and (despite this post) about the men in her life; it felt like there were parts of her she resolutely left out of the book and it did the narrative a disservice. But the use of visual space and language is so incredible. 

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy | I finished this the day before we got back to Aotearoa after reading it slowly throughout June. I had been enjoying the Russian settings of The Bear and the Nightingale (similar fairytale vibes to Naomi Novik but weaker character development) so picked this up. I really loved the set up, found the middle a bit of a slog, and the end incredibly compelling (the last 100 pages are essentially perfect). I love how 19th century novels are like ‘yeah we are going to spend several chapters describing Russian agricultural policy and regional politics’ – the space for discourse about real stuff in the book makes it so much richer, even if the role of the serfs in agricultural production isn’t that relevant to me right now. But the scenes of Levin in the field, and the intense and complex theology at the end is sublime.

Bad books: Bog Queen by Anna North. The premise was great but the execution dreadful and incurious. Very sad I wasted a book voucher on this one. I’ve read a few other mid books but none that were quite as disappointing. If you’re interested in stories written from the perspective of non-human creatures, read When I Sing Mountains Dance; women-focused deep history, read Dark Earth ; the painstaking process of archeology, read Kindred; environmental protesters against the wealthy and influential, read Birnam Wood.

Good music: you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love by Olivia Rodrigo

Favourite podcasts: Origin Stories (about human evolution, see above – great archive); Decoder Ring (again, great archive – love the episodes on protein and experimental archeology).