Six from Six – First Half of 2025
Jun. 29th, 2025 02:26 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
reader_of_else_feedThe halfway point of 2025 approaches!
Of the forty-nine books I’ve read in 2025 so far, there have been seven 5 star reads – this is, for me, unusual (though it does make it easier to cut down for a six from six format). I had been getting a vague sense that 2025 hasn’t been a great year before I properly looked into it, but the stats bear out that feeling:
This is obviously only comparing half of 2025 vs the whole of previous years, but I think it would be a little strange for all my bangers to be concentrated in the latter half of the year. I’m not sure I can construct a reason for this shift (which seems to be an extension of a trend since 2019), but there’s a number of plausible reasons. Maybe I’m getting pickier, the more I read? Maybe increasingly more of my reading is driven by factors outside of “I chose it”? Maybe it’s to do with what I’m reading? I don’t know.
I am leaning towards the me being pickier theory, simply because all of the excess is clearly getting dumped into 4 stars, so it’s not that I’m reading bad books, just that the absolute top tier is being shaved off.
On the flip side, it does look as though there’s a bump in 1 star, but that is just an artefact of being less through the year than previous ones – that bump is a single book, and is operating as I would expect, because there is nearly always one absolute clanger in my awards season reading.
Theorising aside, and for all that there were fewer options to choose from than I might expect, I have read some genuinely fantastic books so far this year. Some of them are throwbacks, but some of them are 2025 releases, and ones that I expect to be fully yelling about come awards season when it rolls around next year, which is at least a promising thing to hold onto. Fingers crossed the rest of 2025 delivers some extra bangers (and there are forthcoming releases I have my eye on in hope), but I have something to go in prepared with, at least.
Running through them chronologically, here are my pick for the six best books from the last six months:
Kalyna the Cutthroat by Elijah Kinch Spector – review here
I finished this one on the 1st of January, which makes it predominantly a 2024 read, I will admit. But it was really good.
I read and enjoyed Kalyna the Soothsayer back in March 2024, but not a full 5 stars enjoyed. It was a good – and, more importantly, interesting – read, but it didn’t fully capture me. In a rare feat, the sequel absolutely did. Elijah Kinch Spector has taken everything that was good about the first book – the interesting character perspective, the creative use of immersion, the politics, the voice that brims over out of the book and charms the reader, warring with the behaviour of the character – and finessed it all. Not only that, but made the sequel shine precisely as a sequel. It’s very hard to talk about Kalyna the Cutthroat because a lot of what it does well is relational. It takes things presented in the first book and complicates them, or turns them on their head to examine them from a new angle. The most obvious of these is the shift in character perspective. We go from being submerged in Kalyna’s voice and thinking patterns, to viewing her from the outside, from someone specifically resisting her charming nature and the way that changes it all. I spent a lot of the time of reading this book looking back at the first and having to reassess sympathies, because it made clear just how much of Kalyna’s voice was what charmed me and defined the narrative. That’s… I mean it’s just great.
And it operates at levels other than just character. EKS is using perspective purposefully, and weaving it all in with a book that is, at its most fundamental level, about how people (and peoples) view one another, and the falsehoods that can sit within those assumptions. I cannot help but love a book where everything it does bends round to support its central thesis, where every choice in plot, form, tone, voice, whatever, is a tool used to the furthest extreme. This is a series that seems to be being slept on so far, and I really think it deserves more love, because it’s doing a hell of a lot and well.
Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins – review here
Another January read, another 2024 book that has mostly been slept on.
This is a story told in obituaries. I expected it to be a little grim, and a lot sad, but mainly what it felt was, in the end, hopeful. There’s a lightness and playfulness to it that bonds well with the optimistic view of humanity at an individual level – and what level could one view but the individual when telling a story through obituaries.
Robins uses obituaries to build a picture in whose background one can slowly discern a story, told out of order, across a wide span of time and space, about a robot who had a human daughter and lost her. But around all that is also the stuff of the story. Not filler to hide the “real” plot behind, but a vast swathe of life – not all of it human – told in the intimate details of those close, or the remove of an obituarist, or from a plethora of other perspectives. It’s humanity telling humanity, in the story of a robot seeking to understand the same.
In many ways, it’s a hard one to discuss, because so much of what it does well is in the cumulative. Each individual obituary (and the occasional intrusion of other things like etymologies) are interesting on their own. You can discuss them, mine them for clues about the robot’s story, analyse them. But it’s only when they echo with all the other individual stories that the magic happens, and that’s much harder to pin down – Robins has the knack of just the right amount of subtlety (at least for me), so that the story builds in the subconscious rather than being smacked into the reader’s face. It’s there. It’s unmissable. But it’s not insistent about it. There are various thematic threads that crop up again and again, about loss and death and forgetting/remembering, and about personhood, whose exploration is made all the more sensitive by this choral approach.
It’s a book I loved wholeheartedly, and know I will come back to read again. I’ve been desperately trying to foist it on anyone I can, so consider this yet another nudge.
The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar – review here
This one is an interesting one – the fun of looking back is in reassessing how time has changed your view of a book, and this one has been rendered into a pleasant haze. I remember loving it. I remember enjoying the lyricism of the prose, and how that captured the sense of folk songs from which the story draws its inspirations. I remember thinking about how artfully done that was.
Can I remember the plot though? Not… really. There are a couple of salient points that have stuck, but on the whole, it has drifted away from me. I don’t have the clarity I have with the previous two, where there are moments from the stories captured in amber in my brain, that I could talk about on and on. I think what this speaks to is what my experience of the story lingered on – what I enjoyed was the process, the experience, the voice and the vibes, rather than the linear progression of plot beats and sequence of events. If it were a folk song, say, I liked the singer and the vocal effects more than the tune and lyrics. I couldn’t hum it for you the next day.
Does that make this one less good? I don’t know. Does something have to stick in my memory for it to be worthwhile, or can a story be ephemeral and still excellent? Certainly for music, I do tend to think that if I can’t hum a bit of it later, it’s probably not stuck with me because it was less good. But for stories, I’m less sure. I do remember being intensely charmed by it in the moment, and that is something I value. It’s just impossible to hold that up in contest with things I have a full recollection of.
Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou – review here
And in precisely that contrast, Sour Cherry succeeds on many of the same levels as The River Has Roots – lyricism, voice, drawing on folk tales – but has stuck in my memory. I read it less than a month later, but there are shards of imagery that are just as bright and sharp as they were the day I turned the last page.
What drew me to this one most is the extent to which it is about the process of storytelling. There is a lot of dwelling in it on what is and is not said, and how. The narrator speaks directly to the reader, and engages them – makes them complicit in – the changing of details and setting in order to make the story work better, or be more convincing. Right from the first page, the stall is set out that the story is being told in another register than it “truly” is, and the reader is left to work out exactly what the story beneath this story is. And some parts of that mystery are never fully resolved. There’s a give and take that is extremely skilfully managed, as well as the use of different voices, different ways of looking into and out of the narrative.
I am increasingly wary of myth and folklore retellings, but this is the pattern for what they should look like. Theodoridou is constantly in dialogue with his source material, taking nothing for granted, and using it purposefully, rather than simply reviving and refreshing something without making clear why it was necessary to work with an existing story at all. I do not believe I have ever read a retelling – or a story – quite like it, and it is beautiful.
Foreigner by C J Cherryh
No review for this one, and a big ol’ throwback in contrast to two 2024 and three 2025 books on this list.
Foreigner is a book I’ve been meaning to read for a long time, after learning how many of my faves (not least A Memory Called Empire and Ancillary Justice) have it counted amongst their antecedents in genre and that a number of people whose taste I vibe with and respect adored it.
As is usual with “book a bunch of reviewers love”, it turned out to be great. Book people know what they’re doing talking about books, who knew?
And it was a fun exercise precisely because I was looking at it as an antecedent to some of my more modern favourites. My experience with older SF has often been that, because I’m familiar with the later versions that have messed around and built off its ideas, it feels like the original is a bit hollow. Not so here. I can see the rich vein of what was drawn on for later stories, but they haven’t made this all the lesser for their later entries in the same lineage.
I am always a sucker for good politics in fiction, because politics in fiction is fundamentally about people, and that’s always what I’m most here for reading. Cherryh has done politics excellently, and simultaneously done it while exploring a cultural clash between two sets of worldviews, assumptions and modes of operation that may even go right down to the biological. These are two sets of people who simply cannot examine the world – and their relationships – in the same way. They are fundamentally incapable of shifting view to overlap in that way! And that is the sexiest of all possible people stories. It is also the sexiest of all possible stories because its political context is not solvable by the events of a single book, and the choices of a single person. He can operate on the small scale parts, but there’s an acknowledgment of a wider world and problems that exist outside of the scope of a hero, and I love those books too. Complex systems! Complex people! That’s how you get me to read things.
Much like reading an Ursula K. LeGuin book, I closed the final page with an internal cry of “damn“, because I knew it meant that there was more catching up to do. But, as with LeGuin, it will be worth it.
Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman – review here
This might be hyperbole. Maybe I will eat my words in six months time. If I do, it will say great things about the rest of the year. But at the moment, I feel very comfortable in saying this is my best book of 2025. It will take genuine miracles to shift this off my top spot.
I am a sucker for everything Fellman does, and this is Fellman doing all that at intensity. There’s the prose (delicious, haunting). There’s the characters (complex, flawed, tragic). There’s the world (tantalising). But above all, there’s an emotional core to the story that I struggle to pin down but which is what has stuck with me since reading it.
There are several stories being told here. One is of a boy’s – Griffon’s – escape from an oppressive home to new parents. Another, the one in which he reconstructs the story of those parents by using diary entries and other texts written by his new father, as they lived in a distant city during a revolution. That constructed story steadily reveals a world both familiar and strange (is it science fiction or fantasy? I would answer simply, yes), whose parameters operate differently but are never exchanged, and form an alluring backdrop for a revolution whose lasting impact is most prominently on the people Griffon came to only after they were shaped and hurt by it. Stephensport, the strange city, is a sucking hole in the narrative, source of mysteries both to Griffon and the reader. We can only construct it by the effects it has on people, those unwilling to answer questions about it, but how it nonetheless shaped their lives forever, and their ability to function out in the world beyond it.
It’s a story about relationships had by flawed people, shaped by their circumstances, but loving and rich with it. And it is, above all, a story about love in all its forms, for people who have been through many things, who carry the scars on body and soul. It’s a portrait, painted so we see the brush strokes – the way Fellman uses the different narratives to highlight how people are portrayed in their own words and others – and I love it the most for that. For being, resolutely, a book. It’s embedded in its method of storytelling, and I was unable to stop appreciating the craft of words as I read it.
Basically, it’s great at everything and you should read it, even if Tor makes it really hard to get hold of in the UK.
So, for all there were fewer to choose from, this year has had some properly stunning books in the first half nonetheless. Still, I hope I have a harder job of narrowing things down when I reach December. In the intervening months, I have a big pile of novellas to get through, a fair chunk of non-fiction and some novels I’ve had my eye on for, in some instances, years as well as the LeGuin shortlist to finish up and the usual run of reviews. There is cause for optimism. But if not, I hope at least I can figure out what it is that’s driving this downturn of bangers.
But I’m not quite done…
I didn’t read it this year, so it doesn’t truly count, but it only came out in May (and I’d have included it if I’d read it then), so I am adding in The Incandescent by Emily Tesh as a bonus extra treat. I reviewed it here, and I loved it for its approach to class as a core component of the dark academia subgenre, and for the way the main characters so fully embodies a type of person I found intensely sympathetic in all her flaws and skills.