Five books I enjoyed, Spring/Summer 2025
- Published
- 2 January 2026
- Tagged
Gosh, it's been a whole six months and nothing on this blog except for "five books I enjoyed" posts. The winter was long and dark, I feel, and for a bit there it felt like doing anything outside of just existing and hitting the regular life commitments was a slog. We're well out of that, and I feel myself swinging back up - while I may not find myself inundated with energy, I do find myself with time to actually do things. I'm hoping the next few months, with a combination of both continuing sunshine and some changes to my life schedule, will give me a chance to put something else of substance up here.
The last part of winter, and the first part of spring, were entirely taken up by my sudden desire to read The Lord of the Rings, inspired in no small part by this dumb song. Finishing that up, and feeling like a treat, I ended up running through a bunch of recent Hugo Award nominees to finish off the year (with the occasional non-fiction book thrown in for good measure). Embarassingly, back from our summer vacation I've found that I left my Kobo e-reader on a bedside shelf in a bach. So it's paper books for me for the next week until I get it back.
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein. You don't need a synopsis of this one. I decided to re-read it after two decades (and with my memory warped by the movies), and found myself enjoying a real tome of a novel, familiar enough, but with enough of a twist from the films to make the whole thing refreshing and interesting.
Obviously there are elements that exist in the books and not in the movies - Tom Bombadil, the Scouring of the Shire, etc. - but even the stuff which exists in both is subtley different[1] This series of recaps gives a great breakdown of this, by the way.
Outside of comparisons with the movies, there's a real voice to Tolkein's work, that I feel echoes his familiarity with the tone and pacing of epic storytelling. It's not always there - a lot of the book feels written in a relatively everyday tone (at least for the time in which it was written), but then something happens - a scene changes, an event occurs, and a literary switch flips. It's not jarring in the least: it feels more like a director employing a particular film technique to signal to the viewer that this is a momentous occasion.
Alien Clay - Adrian Tchaikovsky. I read a couple of Adrian Tchaikovsky books as a result of my summer Hugo-chasing read, but this is the one that stood our the more. A political prisoner is sent to labour on an alien planet, an effective death sentence, but instead uses the opportunity to join up with his former dissident colleagues. As they plan rebellion, the alien planet itself - and its ecology - offer a few surprises of their own.
One definition of science fiction that I've often seen mentioned is that it uses scientific or technological progress as a lens through which we can examine human society. If we go by this metric, I think Alien Clay succeeds - arguably by putting forward such a strong metaphor for human cooperation that even I pick it up on a first read-through. But alongside this, Tchaikovsky does a great job of maintaining both narrative tension and internal consistency to make a satisfying read.
The Notebook - Roland Allen. A rambling journey through the development of the notebook in western civilisation. Early on, the book takes a relatively linear run through the development of paper, books, and the notebook in particular, but once we get into the Renaissance, the story starts diverging. Some interesting tidbits include the development of most western notebooks from Florentine accounting practices, as well as the impact of work books on the development of western art during the Renaissance.
I feel this is a niche read. As someone with a nice stack of (empty and filled) notebooks on my shelf, it appeals to me. If you have a bunch of them, it'll appeal to you. And if not, it probably won't? Idunno, that feels a little like damning with faint praise.
The Ministry of Time - Kaliane Bradley. Part science fiction thriller, part romance, this book follows a young British public servant as she becaomes a companion/monitor for a refugee from the past. The thriller part of this book is completely adequate, but it mainly serves as a vehicle for the collection of misfits the eponymous Ministry has to babysit, as they adapt to the twentieth century and, well, do what people do when left in each other's company for any amount of time.
Wikipedia informs me that Bradley started this novel during COVID-19 lockdown, writing vignettes of the main characters brushing up against the twentieth century. True to form, it's these sections that have the most depth of thought, the most character and charm.
I ended up buying this book as a present for two folks this Christmas. I would have only bought one, except for logistical reasons. The book I would have bought instead of this one would have been...
The Tainted Cup - Robert Jackson Bennett. A dark fantasy Sherlock Holmes, in which a young apprentice is teamed up with an eccentric investigator to uncover a string of strange murders, in a world where monstrous beasts threaten civilisation.
I feel the perfect murder mystery exists as a series of staged mini-mysteries: at each one, you have all the clues you need to solve it, if only you can put them together right, and the revelation leaves you going, "Of course! How could I have missed that?" I feel Bennett manages this extremely well in The Tainted Cup - not only does he manage it, he does so by incorporating the elements of worldbuilding which he's been layering throughout the book since the beginning.
When I put this on the end of my to-read list, it had not yet won the 2025 Hugo Award. Upon finishing it, checking the internet, and finding it had won, I cannot say I'm surprised.