PotsandPlots

There’s a whole new year of books ahead of us, but here’s what caught my eye in the last month of 2025.

On Bluesky, prolific book tempter Womble, asks on Sundays what books people are reading. Somebody mentioned Pagans by James Alistair Henry.

“21st Century London. The Norman Conquest never happened.”

Count me in!

A murder investigation, with island unification on the cards and all the tensions that brings with it. This book sounds right up my street.

I’ve been meaning to listen to Adrian Tchaikovsky and Emma Newman’s podcast since I first heard about it back in April/May. Starship Alexandria discusses a great SFF book each month. At first, I thought I’d try to read the books before listening, but that has properly gone south, so perhaps I just need to listen. ( I did listen to their TV show advent calendar short reviews, and you should definitely check those out!)

In any event, the October broadcast is about Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future. I haven’t read a KSR book for ages, and I’d forgotten about this one. Perhaps it’s time to jump back in.

Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison appeared in one of my reads last month, This is How You Lose The Time War, which immediately qualifies it as worthy of further investigation. A new edition of Travel Light is on the way in 2026, with a pull quote from Ursula Le Guin (“Read it Now”) and a foreword by Samantha Shannon – Surely a book to pick up?

Apparently, it “Weav[es] folklore, fairy tale and Norse myth into a shimmering, witty and slyly subversive tapestry,” which sounds pretty good to me!

The Big Issue festive edition had a “books of the year” round-up with quite a few that caught my eye.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico was picked by two separate contributors. This is a quiet polemic about the problems of leading a life for your social media feed rather than yourself. The book is very short, so I will be suggesting it as an easy book club pick to kick off 2026.

The Colony by Annika Norlin looks similar. Set in a Swedish commune, it again provides a social commentary on modern life and “becomes a small-scale reflection of our political age.”

Fair Play by Louise Hegarty promises to be an interesting spin on the murder mystery, with a split narrative. I’ll probably try this out on Mrs PotsandPlots before reading it myself.

I’ve seen good things about On the Calculation of Volume just about everywhere I’ve looked. Which, to be reductive, looks to be a hifalutin Groundhog Day. Tara is approaching her 365th 18th of November. The 19th never arrives, and nobody believes her when she tries to tell them her predicament. Whether she becomes proficient at ice sculpture is not clear.

It’s a seven-volume story (the first 3 of which are out so far) that charts the course of Tara’s repeated days. I’m sort of intrigued and sort of worried I’ll find it too much like literary navel-gazing.

Danial Kehlman’s The Director. Kehlman has written several epically good novels, most notably Measuring the World. Where Measuring the World was a fictional account of Gauss and Humboldt, and rooted in science and exploration, The Director follows a film director G.W. Pabst, who found himself trapped in Nazi annexed Austria, with Goebbels pressuring him to make propaganda films.

Christmas was a time for thinking about books, and where I want to go with this blog. I guess I’ll post more about that as time goes on, but a few more books that caught my eye were:

We Live Here Now by C.D. Rose. This was mentioned by my fellow GeekDad, Jonathan Liu, in one of his regular “Stack Overflow” columns, a font of excellent book recommendations. The premise of visitors to an artist’s installations going missing is an intriguing hook, as is the suggestion that this is part of a reality-altering experience that will lead to a “final apocalyptic bacchanal.”

Japanese fiction is quite in vogue at the moment, and over the festive season, I was reminded of The Man Who Died Seven Times by Yasuhiko Nishizawa. It’s branded as a “Time-Loop Mystery,” which, frankly, is all I need to know.

The excellent Nerds of a Feather blog recommended a novella by K.J. Parker, Making History, that sent me down a Parker/Tom Holt rabbit hole, where I found about a million books I’d be interested in reading. So many books with intriguing premises to choose from!

One final late entry to the list from New Year’s Eve, when a friend recommended a book, The Raven Scholar, which I then found about 3 hours later on a “books of 2025” list on Bluesky. I then found it mentioned again on Fantasy Hive, too. There are some crazy good looking books on this list, too, so do check it out. https://fantasy-hive.co.uk/2025/12/nils-top-reads-of-2025/

A nice collection for my virtual to-be-read pile (now at over 100 books). I’m sure it won’t be long before some of them start physically arriving in the Book Garden.