Five books I enjoyed, Summer/Winter 2025 edition

Published: 30 June 2025
Tagged: reading

Part of a series: Ten books I enjoyed

It's the time once again to write about books I've read. The new book-tracking format I mentioned last time is doing me well - I have half a blog post in draft form about the process of building small CLI tools for just this kind of job - and making it really easy for me to review which books I've read, and which I want to talk about.

The past six months have been a real dive into genre fiction, to the extent I haven't managed for a few years now, brought on by a few recommendations I've received recently. It's been nice.

The Starless Sea - Erin Morgenstern. Sometimes an author just writes a book that's very clearly a love letter to books, and this is one of them. Morgenstern builds a fantasy world hidden just below ours, like Borges but more romantic, perhaps, full of factions and secret societies and masked balls.

The world-building is wonderous, only enhanced by the fact that the main narrative arc takes place in a ruin of the place, long after all its inhabitants have left. In fact, I can't help but wonder if half the magic of this book is the fact that Morgenstern gives with one hand while taking with the other - showing us what wonders this place used to be, but never actually pointing the camera at the Starless Sea in its heyday.

A book this elaborate needs to be a masterpiece to stick the landing, and this is something I don't think Morgenstern quite handles. The climax and denoument just don't seem to hit quite right.

The Dawnhounds - Sascha Stronach. Obligatory New Zealand author inclusion. Possibly the most New Zealand things about The Dawnhounds was the way I found out about the series - a colleague mentioning that a friend of theirs had published a book.

The Dawnhounds starts off as a murder mystery police procedural set in a weird fantasy mid-future Pacific city, and how you react to that is, I feel, a good determinant of whether or not you'll like the book. The thing quickly switches pace into queer near-future fantasy, and I was saddened by this only because of the potential in the murder mystery space.

The book is weird and queer and revels in both of those areas. There is a sequel and I've yet to see if it continues that through to the second book.

Moominpappa at Sea - Tove Jansson. I read several of Jansson's books as a teenager, but I could swear she'd written more than the nine novels she actually wrote. My mind has whole cloth invented several scenes I could sear happened in Moomin books, which (upon re-reading) I've found never existed - six months ago I'd have bet real money that there was a novel where the Moomins go on a proper holiday to something akin to the Riviera, for example. My own personal false memory.

Regardless, Moominpappa at Sea was actually one of the Moomin books that I skipped over as a child. It's a real pity^[1]

because this feels like a real tour de force. The earlier books, while they show some of their essential melancholy, are generally upbeat and cozy. In comparison, this book feels like...not quite a horror novel, but something akin. Each character appears to be battling their own inner demons, somehow isolated from one another just as the characters themselves are isolated from the rest of their world through the sea. Even at the end it feels less like they conquer their issues, and more that they come to terms.

A Deadly Education - Naomi Novik. I got a few recommendations for books recently from a friend, and this was one of them. A Deadly Education grabbed my pretty rapidly thanks to its weird Battle Royale-esque setup coupled with a nice riff on what I've come to refer tongue-in-cheek as the Zauberkindbildungsroman (lit.: "Magical child coming of age story").

I cannot help but shelf this series alongside Lev Grossman's Magicians series in my head. Tone-wise, the two books are quite different, but they both have a number of similarities beyond just their focus on magical high schools, the kind of people these places would produce, and what happens after these folks graduate.

All Systems Red - Martha Wells. Another recommendation to me. I'd previously read (and not particularly enjoyed, I don't think?) some of Wells' fantasy work, so it took a couple of recommendations for me to pick this series up.

All Systems Red is a great conceit well-executed: a security construct, basically a human being modified Robocop style into a mobile sentient weapons platform and leased out as a service, goes rogue, but rather than kill everyone, it just wants to watch TV all day.

As the series continues, Wells executes a competent pivot from gag novel to introspective series about what it means to be human. But I'm not sure that it really quite recaptures the frictionless joy-in-the-conceit of the first book or so.