I didn’t set a reading goal last year. I’m studying part-time and working full-time and, while I wanted to read more, a goal seemed like far too much pressure. Also, I find having goals sucks the fun out of things. Since I read Is it Really Green? I’ve been tracking what books I read so I make sure I read more than 25 books on my Kindle, which meant I had a tally at the end of the year. I read 33 ebooks, and 32 print books making a grand total of 65. Which is pretty good going under the circumstances.

Obviously, I’ve only blogged about one of those books, the excellent Infomocracy, so I thought I’d do a round up and pull out some highlights. I read the second and third books of that trilogy, Null States and State Tectonics, which were both just as good. Highly recommend.

Right at the beginning of the year I finally read Dreamsongs by G.R.R. Martin. It’s been on my TBR shelf for years: as it’s in hardback, I’ve quite possibly had it since not long after it was published in 2006. It is a retrospective of his life’s work with short stories from all phases of his writing life. There are a handful of really good stories including ‘The Second Kind of Loneliness’, ‘Sandkings’ and ‘Portraits of his Children’. It is interesting to see how his style and career progressed. I’m very glad I read it, and pleased to move it from the TBR shelf to the GRRM shelf (yes, he has his own shelf). It’s definitely one for the fans though.

The most fun books I read were The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. I read the first two books in the series in 2023 and the remaining five last year. It is the story of a cyborg that has slipped the mental leash its owners had on it and gone rogue. Murderbot is trying to come to terms with the things it did in the past and to learn how to live as a free being, with the help of soap operas, a few progressive humans, and a similarly free AI transport ship pilot bot, Asshole Research Transport. It is very funny. Murderbot and ART are hilarious. It’s set in a dystopian future of corporate control of humanity and deals with some dark themes in a clever and entertaining way. Highly recommend.

In non-fiction, I read these excellent books, all recommended:

• Masters of the Lost Land: Murder and Corruption in the Amazon rainforest, by Heriberto Araujo.
• Show me the Bodies: How we let Grenfell happen, by Peter Apps.
• Pompeii, Mary Beard.
• Children of Ash and Elm, by Neil Price.

It was also a year of great exhibitions at the British Museum and the equally great exhibition catalogues, which offer far more than a paragraph on each object featured:

• Legion, by Richard Addy. Exhibition.
• China’s Hidden Century 1796-1912, edited by Jessica Harrison-Hall and Julia Lovell. Exhibition.
• Hew Locke: What Have we Here? by Hew Locke, Isabel Seligman and Indra Khannal. Exhibition.
• Silk Roads, by Sue Brunning, Luk Yu-Ping, Elisabeth R. O’Connell and Tim Williams. Exhibition.

There are two more from 2024 still on the TBR shelf. I was also inspired to pick up the exhibition books from a couple of past exhibitions I’d enjoyed before I got into the habit of always buying the book and I read:

• Shunga: sex and pleasure in Japanese art, edited by Timothy Clark, C. Andrew Gerstle, Aki Ishigami and Akiko Yano. This one was back in 2013 apparently, so there’s no link to the exhibition.
• Peru, A Journey in Time, edited by Cecilia Pardo and Jago Cooper. Exhibition.

I’m not setting a goal for 2025 – still studying, starting a new job in March, lots going on – but I’m interested to see if I can read even more this year. As I’m having a phase of ‘trashy’ novels, (i.e. easy, fun reads whether thrillers, spy stories, fantasy romance, or sci-fi, some of which will be good and some not-so-much), I think I might just do it.