The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025
by Cheryl Morgan
The trouble with running a publishing company is that you end up reading lots of books that you can’t review. Not to mention a whole bunch of books that may never get published. This has been cutting down the amount of reading for review that I can do a lot.
Having said that, I’d like to start this year by heaping praise on something we did publish. I am truly honored to have Chaz Brenchley’s Of the Emperor’s Kindness in our catalogue. It is an amazing piece of work.
Chaz, of course, has been around a long time. One of the dreams for a small press is to discover someone brilliant at the start of their career. My friend, Francesca Barbini, who runs Luna Press Publishing, did that with Lorraine Wilson. Raine, as she prefers to be called, has now made the step up to working with Solaris, and she has produced two fabulous novels for them. We Are All Ghosts in the Forest and The Salt Road are set in a post-collapse world which is haunted by the ghosts of things on the internet. Quite how that can be is never explained, but I think that just adds to the atmosphere.
This has been a year in which there is a new novel by Guy Gavriel Kay. That’s always a cause for celebration. Written on the Dark lives up to the very high standards that Kay sets for himself. Novels by Nalo Hopkinson are rather less frequent, but Blackheart Man has finally seen print and is well worth the many years I have been waiting for it.
I am trying to read more books by trans people because I worry that, in the current political environment, they will be finding it very difficult to sell new work. Charlie Jane Anders is perhaps the highest profile trans writer these days, and I think that Lessons in Magic & Disaster is the best thing she has done. M M Olivas is at the start of her career, but Sundown in San Ojuela is a very promising piece of horror that I think should appeal to fans of Liz Hand.
Other novels that have stood out for me over the past year are The Tapestry of Time by Kate Heartfield, Alien Clay by the amazingly prolific Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear, and Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison.
I have been reading a lot of novellas because they are short and that enables me to up my review count. I had to do some catch up for award season, and very much enjoyed The Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P. Djèlí Clark. However, it is my personal opinion that The Practice, The Horizon and the Chain by Sophia Samatar should have won all the awards.
For this year I am continuing to enjoy various ongoing novella series including The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older, The Gnomes of Lychford by Paul Cornell, What Stalks the Deep by T Kingfisher and A Mouthful of Dust by Nghi Vo.
I have been reading a lot of Welsh folklore of late, primarily because of an anthology we will be publishing next year. Most of these tales are at best short story length, and often mere vignettes, but there is plenty of potential in them. To experience the true weirdness (and queerness) of Welsh myth, however, you need to read The Mabinogion. It is seriously strange and has some amazing gender explorations.
Most of my non-fiction reading has been about the ancient world, and feminist. Immaculate Forms by Helen King is a history of medical views of women’s bodies from Classical Greece forward. Honestly, men, what were you thinking? Mythica, by Emily Hauser, is a wonderful history of Bronze Age Europe told through the lens of the women of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. And Carthage by Eve MacDonald asks what we can know about this famous ancient civilisation (founded by a woman) given that the Romans utterly destroyed its written culture.
More generally I enjoyed Queer as Folklore by my friend and sometime colleague, Sacha Coward, which won the non-fiction prize in this year’s British Fantasy Awards. I also liked Patriarchy Inc. by Cordelia Fine, despite the unfortunate fact that a book that points out the shortcomings of DEI initiatives is now rather redundant.
The standout TV series of the year was Kaos. All of my Classicist friends absolutely loved it, and I can see why. I am distraught that it got cancelled because it robbed us of a resolution of the storylines. Ari & Dion 4 Ever!
The TV version of Murderbot seemed to work well, though I will always prefer the books. Somewhat to my surprise, the TV version of Foundation (to which I am late, and of which I have only seen season 1 so far) is not a hot mess, and is much better than the books.
There have been various Marvel TV shows and movies released this year, but the only one I would recommend is Thunderbolts. Here’s hoping that, after all the build-up, the new Avengers films work well. Personally I am looking forward to Young Avengers. We have seen a lot of the cast now, and anything with Kamala Khan in it is going to be good.
Viewing also includes museum exhibitions. This year the British Library put on Mediaeval Women. There was an amazing collection of original documents on show, including those pertaining to the 14th Century English trans woman, Eleanor Rykener. Much of the exhibition did take a rather stereotypical view of what a woman is, and what her role in society should be, but the stand-out exhibit for me was the letter signed by Joan of Arc herself.
I also got to visit Copenhagen. The Danish National Museum is worth a look just for the Gundestrup Cauldron. It is an astonishing piece of metalwork.
The highlight of my music year has been Solas, a new double album from our local heroes here in Carmarthenshire. Adwaith is a female rock trio who have built up a stellar reputation in Wales. Their lyrics are all in Welsh, but the music can be enjoyed by anyone who loves a good guitar and drum band.
If you must have lyrics in English, you will be pleased that the new album from Gwenno has a lot of that – a marked departure from her previous song writing in Welsh and Cornish. Utopia is her poppiest album yet. Here’s hoping that it wins her some fans outside of the Celtic countries.
Cheryl Morgan blogs, reviews and podcasts regularly at Cheryl’s Mewsings and Salon Futura. She is the owner of Wizard’s Tower Press. She also lectures regularly on topics of SF&F literature, and on queer history.
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