The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing and Listening in 2025
by Niall Harrison
When I sat down to think about the pleasures I gained from this year's culture, I came up with three angles of attack.
The first is, simply, the pleasure of reading a wide variety of good work; every month gave me something to remember. (I'm going by my reading month here, rather than the month of publication.)
January: A Thousand Blues by Cheon Seon-ran (trans. Chi-Young Kim) is a generous, thoughtful portrait of near-future Seoul, and two sisters working to save an old racehorse from being euthanized. It is particularly good on plausible-but-different, trajectories for robotics and the suite of technologies grouped as "AI".
February: A Granite Silence by Nina Allan is a confounding, intricate, unsettling exploration of a murder that took place in 1930s Aberdeen (with occasional fantastic touches).
March: Debbie Urbanski's Portalmania is a superbly coherent collection of stories, psychologically acute and sharply told, about asexual and/or neurodivergent characters in fantastic contexts.
April: Madeleine Thien's The Book of Records is a rich and haunting meditation on how our understandings of past and future might shape our choices in the present.
May: Moderation by Elaine Castillo is a sly and funny romance in a technologically saturated world (Castillo's 2022 essay collection How To Read Now is well worth a look, as well).
June: Moon Songs by Carol Emshwiller (ed. Matthew Cheney) is an invaluable, perfectly curated selection of her best and most representative stories.
July: When There Are Wolves Again by EJ Swift is a remarkable story of near-future Britain, hopeful but never pollyannaish, depicting the slow grinding of systemic change and ecological restoration as experienced by two women, an activist and a documentary film-maker, over the course of their lives.
August: Sea Now by Eva Meijer (trans. Anne Thompson Melo) is a fantastical disaster novel in which the Netherlands is flooded, filled with wit and piercing observations, at times Calvino-esque.
September: The Incandescent by Emily Tesh takes a great and simple conceit – a magic school as experienced by a teacher – and executes it with a perfect balance of humor and steel.
October: Ice by Jacek Dukaj (trans. Ursula Phillips) is an expansive (1200-page) attempt to extrapolate not just alternate early twentieth-century social history but alternate intellectual history, and inevitably comes up short in some areas (it has too little to say about gender), but is overall worth the haul.
November: Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan (trans. Jesse Kirkwood) is a compact novel, possibly a novella, about language and architecture and justice and about how what you build shapes what is possible next.
And December: I have caught up with Paul McAuley's compelling 2017 novel Austral, about a genetically engineered woman trekking across a vividly transformed Antarctic landscape, in preparation for his new one next year.
And speaking of landscapes: the second angle is books speaking to and of places, which would include places like Nina Allan's Aberdeen and EJ Swift's Somerset, but also others. When I traveled to Beijing, I read Jonathan Chatwin's fascinating Long Peace Street (2019), recounting the history of the city as seen on a walk from one side of it to the other, rather like peeling back the rings of a tree; in Amsterdam I read Geert Mak's enriching 1994 history of the city (and later wished I had had Sea Now with me). Tom Cox's Everything Will Swallow You, a bittersweet tale about a man and his strange dog-like companion, is set primarily on the South Coast of Britain, not too far from my parents' house, and brought every hill and river alive; Jacob Kerr's hallucinatory horror novel The Wolf of Whindale is set in an alternate version of the North East of England, where I live, and it was fun to see the transfiguration of familiar places and historical figures. Mai Ishizawa's The Place of Shells (trans. Polly Barton) is set in a precisely rendered version of Göttingen, Germany, not long after COVID lock-down, where the narrator is visited by the ghost of someone who died in an accident years earlier; I have never been, and Ishizawa's novel both made me want to, and reminded me what a privilege travel can be.
And then speaking of travel: the third angle is linked to movement, albeit on a more local scale. Ben Ratcliff's Run the Song is a book I have slowly worked my way through over the course of the year. It is comprised of brief essays exploring the music that Ratcliff listens to on his daily runs, and how the music and the running inform one another. My musical taste is much narrower and more conventional than his, but since taking up running a couple of years ago, I too have found a great deal of pleasure in the combination, whether that is trying out a newly-released album on a Friday morning, or composing a thematically and geographically-appropriate playlist when I visit a new Parkrun.
Top listens this year: Low Island's most recent synth-pop album, bird; Public Service Broadcasting's 2023 tribute to, well, public service broadcasting and the BBC, This New Noise; North East folk-rock act Hector Gannet's 2020 album Big Harcar, and especially its epic concluding track, "The Haven of St Aidan's"; shoegazey-electronic band crushed's debut album, no scope; and Blondshell's 90s-style-alt-rock album If You Asked For A Picture.
Niall Harrison reviews regularly for Locus, and occasionally for other places. He runs the small press Briardene Books (https://briardenebooks.uk/), which focuses on collections of non-fiction about SF and fantasy. He lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
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