This has been one of those years when the state of the world made me read twice as many books as usual, and a lot of that was re-reading my old favourites (nods to Sayers and Goddard and Pratchett). I also ploughed through Martha Wells' excellent Murderbot series, and Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief novels, which got me through the spring and fall, respectively. I can also heartily recommend Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan series, which was brought to my attention this year, and Ted Chiang's short-story collection Exhalation. And Helen DeWitt's short but glorious The English Understand Wool.

But!

Following my gripe over the NYT 100 "best" books I promised an account of Books in the Time of Chaos' Big Fat Anti-Oppression Reading Challenge. I learnt of it from my friend Roh, who has always been one of my sources of excellent books (and is one of the organisers). If anyone wants to join in on the 2025 challenge you can read about it here.

These are the books I read for the challenge:
For a book in your mother tongue I picked Sumaya Jirde Ali's Et liv i redningsvest, which I will admit I had been planning on reading anyway. It is excellent and viscerally horrifying in equal measure. The book chronicles growing up in Norway as a young woman of Somali descent, with descriptions of events, micro-aggressions and straight up aggressions, the reactions to them, and the contradictions and trauma responses over time, presented so effectively. The author is a poet, an it tells in the language, which is masterly. If you can read Norwegian, you should read it.

As my book with a neurodivergent protagonist I read Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts, which had been languishing on my bookshelf for some reason. The premise is excellent -- a generational ship in which the stratification of Earth society is reenacted and reinforced. As such a classic afrofuturist story, asking some very good questions about who gets to participate in this future lark, anyway.

Samuel Delany's Driftglass was my book which starts with the letter D. This had also been on my bookshelf for ever. Delany is one of my favourite writers, and I love his ability to sketch a world, characters and stakes so quickly. My favourite of the short stories in this collection was probably "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" (because I love a good heist, and the idea of Singers who are both semi-religious figures and key to the code of the underworld really appeals to me) and "Corona" (a very interesting early take on fandom).

As a book about revolutions/rebellions/uprisings I picked Joe Sacco's Palestine, for obvious reasons. I started it the day after the ICJ decided to move forward with the genocide case against Israel. It is not the only book on the subject I have read this year, but it was a good start -- not so much because the information was new (except some tidbits about Edward Saïd's childhood), but because there is something about this illustrative medium that ... clarifies, demonstrates. I found the forced honesty of it a bit jarring at times, but Sacco does a good job of showing how suffering in the aggregate ends up blunting the story, making it harder to care precisely when the caring (and acting) becomes all the more urgent. He also does a very good job demonstrating how hollow Israeli rhetoric had become, already at the time of the first intifada.

As the book that has a heavy police presence I did not listen to the angel telling me to pick a detective story, and instead read Rana Ayyub's Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover-Up. I have been interested in Modi's actions in Gujarat for a while, but still manage to know very little about the particulars. This book was, I think, written for someone more knowledgeable than me (someone, perhaps, who can read a bit of Hindi). I am a little confused by the project. It is a series of transcripts of sting operations, but without the videos as corroborations, only the author serves as the guarantor of their veracity. Though in the age of deep fakes and AI all around I suppose that is the new normal.

For my book on climate change/the environment I picked Pankaj Sekhsaria's Islands in Flux: The Andaman and Nicobar Story, expecting more anthropology and less genocide, though I should have known better. I knew the Andaman islands primarily from Andrew Lang's mild obsession with them, and The Sign of the Four, which is probably not unconnected. I know a lot more now, including that the megapode was not as I had thought invented by Pratchett. On a more serious note, this is a horrifying read in so many ways, not least in that it is so hard to imagine a happy ending. Attention, inattention, capitalism and colonialism in all the wrong ways (some of them, granted, do not really have a right way). A little repetitive at times, as it is a collection of essays on and letters on the topic, but I am very glad to have read it.

I read Jessikka Aro's Putin's Trolls as my replacement book with investigative journalism, having originally read She Said by Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey (one of them turned out to be TERF, which is not really in the spirit of anti-oppression). It gives an account of the result of Aro's investigations into the troll farms, and how they are used to punish critics and investigators. The information here is not altogether new to me, but I was not aware of Aro's own story. The pattern is familiar enough, unfortunately. There is a slight tendency here to make a hero of anyone attacked by the trolls, which is a little backwards, but otherwise this is a succinct and clear analysis of a part of Putin's propaganda networks.

My book told from multiple POVs was N. K. Jemisin's The World We Make, the second half of her New York duology. In her preface Jemisin says that her plan was to write a slightly different trilogy, and I feel like I can sometimes see the echoes of that, but even that works well with the questions of stability or lack thereof in this text. Urban fantasy is not altogether my beat, but I absolutely adore these cities and boroughs. If anything can make me visit the US again, this would be it.

As my communist's memoir I finally (FINALLY) picked up Angela Davis' Autobiography, which I really should have read by now. I had expected it to be a much tougher read, for some reason. It is not exactly "light", considering the central period around which she structures her autobiography is her period on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list and her trial for murder, but it helps to know it will all turn out well in the end. For Angela Davis, at any rate. It was interesting to read such a clear political analysis of each event, with such emphasis on solidarity throughout. The idea of 1968 I grew up with was deeply sanitised, and while I know that, it is still very enlightening to read her account of it. Am I a little envious of her stumbling across Marcuse and getting a Frankfurt school education? Yes. Meanwhile, the idea of being on trial for your life with a possible outcome being the gas chamber makes it hard to breathe.

I read Adania Shibli's A Minor Detail first, and only then realised I could pick it as my book about colonialism in the 21st Century. I picked it up because a friend recommended it and because the Frankfurt Book Fair had cancelled the award they had planned to give Shibli. It was not an easy book to read. Especially the first part, with its nightmarish feverishness (though the allegory is clear). The core of the text, the erasure of the palestinian story, both in terms of actual erasure of sites, but also the systemic impediments to research (from lack of travel permits and Israeli-only road, to death). It is a good book; I will not read it again.

I struggled a bit to find a book featuring an animal as one of the main protagonists, but then remembered we bought Sun-Mi Hwang's The Dog Who Dared to Dream years ago. It was a quick, though not precisely easy read. The perspective of the dog is very strong, which blurs the line between animal and human. The theme of complicity in own exploitation is interesting, but it was not my favourite book of the year.

My book about an escape was Esi Edugyan's Washington Black, which was not what I expected. When I first bought it I had shelved it as fantasy (that had to do with the cover art), and a large part of me expected the story to take a turn and for there to be weird and wonderful adventures in an aerostat. But the book remains faithful to its realism, and the horror and challenges of slavery and life after slavery -- the brital horror of discrimination, the lack of a foothold in the world, a name and standing. I like how it developed. There is something about the excited 18th-century scientific quest for knowledge which has always appealed to me, but this book lays out the erased background to what is generally presented as so pure and innocent.

As my book of South Asian speculative fiction I picked Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. It could have been my book about military law, as it is set in Sri Lanka just after the civil war, in a kind of in-between of life and death. I really, really liked this book. It is part satire, part detective story (as he tries to solve his own murder in the time allotted), part exploration of myths of the afterlife, ghosts and demons galore. All set in a complicated political setting which requires the setting out of acronyms for the many groups involved. You should read this.

I finally landed on Prayaag Akbar's Leila as my book that inspired a TV show, though I have not heard of the TV show. The blurb described it as a kind of Handmaid's Tale of Indian nationalism, and I can definitely see that. As a conceit -- the logical progression to wholly separate lives -- it works, but I am not sure I am convinced by the follow-through. It may be that I am missing something. The most interesting part was the transition period where everything falls -- or is forced -- apart.

I read Vauhini Vara's The Immortal King Rao as my book with a Dalit protagonist. It presents an unconventional dystopia in development, if not in effect, and lives in my brain as "what if Steve Jobs was Dalit". The book continues past our period to consequences for the next generation of our current trajectory. Apart from the back story, the most interesting part of the book is the dilemma of whether to withdraw or undermine, and how purity is disconnected from effect. Reading the description of the Shareholder government in the lead-up to an election in which Elon Musk paved the way for Donald Trump is ... disquieting.

As my book speaking about AFSPA or other military laws I chose Parismita Singh's Peace Has Come. I really liked this collection of short stories. They have a flow to them which gives you time to get invested in the stories and characters. I find I do not know enough about the conflict this all centres on, though I know more now than when I started it. The confusion and tragedy of civil war comes through, though -- and the lingering trauma of it. But I really like how it is not all there is. We have the news for that. The smaller stories that are not all tragic or dramatic have as much impact because they humanise the people caught in the middle of it all.

I have been meaning to read Condé for a while, and so I picked her I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem as my book about witches. It imagines the story of the one black (or possibly indigenous -- the historical record is lacking) woman in the Salem processes. I'll freely admit that while I caught and enjoyed the postmodernism of the book, I did not see the mock-heroic parodic aspect until ti was pointed out to me in the afterword. It is easy to fall into the heroic reading mode. The more I think about this book, the better I like it. The description of the witch hysteria, its grounding in children, and the experience of being caught up in it as powerless and Other was very powerful. There i no place of power and safety there, despite the real powers of Tituba.

My banned book was Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and if I had thought about it this is exactly what I would have expected the most banned book in the US to be like: brilliantly written, by a Black woman, with sex as a pretext, and an incisive portrayal of race and class and gender. I had put it off forever because no one wants to read about the rape of a child, but outwith that part (which is brief and well handled) it was a lovely read, and I will be looking up the later volumes of this autobiography.

George Takei's autobiographical They Called Us Enemy was my non-fiction graphic novel. I like Takei (how can one not), and while I am aware of the Japanese internment in the US during the Second World War, I do not feel I have been inundated with information about it. It is interesting to see it through the eyes of a child, yet at the same time with the layering effect of hindsight. I love that his mother brought her sewing machine. The parents' choice to go quietly to the camps is chilling in light of what was happening at the same time on the other side of the Atlantic: when complying and giving up your power, you do not know how that will develop. Then again, what choice do you have in the face of the promise that if you just behave like a model prisoner everything MIGHT be all right?

My book by a Maori author was Keri Hulme's The Bone People, and I am really not sure how I feel about it. It is beautifully written, but in the way of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, where the horror is equal, or more, than the beauty. And while the book is very convincing on the possibility of love and abuse coexisting, the child's right to decide, and the overbearing nature of the conventional system that thinks it knows best, I find it sticks in my throat. There is a magical, fantasy element to it, I think, which jars with the realism of the abuse. The forgiveness and love feels more like an absolution than it should. Reading it around my niblings made me deeply nauseous. It is an unsettling book, to say the least.

I picked up Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber as my Afrofuturist/Africanfuturist book because while I had read Delany's Nova it felt a little like cheating to read two books by the same author, and Hopkinson is one of the grandes of afrofuturism, too. And like so many excellent books, it had been on my shelf for a while. Once I got into the patois, it flowed very easily, though after a summer of The Bone People and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I was very much not ready for another book featuring child abuse. I loved the development of the world, though, and the promise that a balanced society can develop as an alternative to draconian laws or might as right.

My book about the migrant experience was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, another book that had been on my shelf too long for words. I really liked her Biafra book and a short story collection I had read, but there was something about the summary of this book that made me need a reason to pick it up. I really quite liked it, though. I have noted before how easily Adichie's writing flows, even when she is writing about difficult things. The levels to the exploration of the construction of race seemed very good to me, even as I understand there are things I am not properly understanding. It is not my favourite of her books, but it fit the challenge very well: it is a story of migration -- im and em, both. And not just for the individual, but as a social phenomenon with a history that still influences the present and its lives.

As my queer epistolary book I chose Alice Walker's The Color Purple, which is another one I should have read so many years ago but never got round to. Part of the reason is that I did not expect to enjoy it. After my summer reads, another book opening with a child expecting after being raped by the man she calls her father was really not something I was looking forward to. But this book is joyous. I love the variety of human experience explored in it -- and the variety of expression. The epistolary form can be tricky, but here it is well integrated.

Finally, my book about a natural disaster was The Man with the Compound Eyes -- Wu Ming-Yi. As with so many of these books, I had this recommended to me years and years ago, but while I bought it I somehow never started it. Dust jacket summaries have a lot to answer for. Once I did, I really enjoyed it. It is elegiac, almost lyrical in tone, and a little hard to describe. If I say it is about a trash vortex hittting Taiwan, or a tunnel, or the loss of a child, or the arrival of a child and a cat, you will get the wrong idea. Eco-consciousness, grief, imagination as a productive force, climate change, and (somehow) Scandinavia feature heavily. And yet, it is a very enjoyable read.

And the three bonus assignments:

For my Middle Eastern fantasy I picked Deena Mohamed's graphic fantasy novel Shubeik Lubeik. It draws on the history of colonialism to present a world where the exploitation centred on the extraction of wishes from the natural homelands of the djinn. It is beautifully presented in stark black and white, telling the stories of three people whose first-class wishes present political commentary, ethical conundrums, and logical puzzles (through the rules set out for wishing). I am surprised no one had told me to read this before, but if no one has told you to, this is your signal.

My A BIPOC adoptee story was Sarah Myer's graphic autobiography, Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story, which is beautiful in so many ways. I loved the style of it, and the story it tells about being a weird kid trying to bond through set topics and fan identities, and about being caught in patterns of gender and race while transcending them in one way or another. I am also (again) reminded that I need to look up Sailor Moon.

Finally, my book with a trans protagonist was Ryka Aoki's Light from Uncommon Stars, which contains deals with the devil, intergalactic conflict, violin competitions, and trans life. It is interesting how much of the book deals with spearating the art from the identity, while it acknowledges the importance of voice and lived bodily experience. It is a difficult balance to strike. I really enjoyed this book and its characters. I had some doubts along the way, but really liked how the plot came together, and now crave doughnuts and Bela Bartok.

Here endeth the challenge, but the struggle continues. The election on the horizon has shaped a lot of my reading this year. Some of the books bear mentioning.

With Gaza in mind, I started the year with Judith Butler's Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable (at the time there were 22 000 dead in Gaza, but the media was still full of the 240 hostages and 1200 dead on the 7th of October, and the old adage of individuals vs statistics was ringing in my ears). The book is written in the context of Abu Ghraib, but also to some extent earlier punishment of Gaza. I need someone to articulate an ethics which recognises victimisation but not the victim-playing of the wholly empowered, but that is beyond the scope of this book. As ever when reading Butler, I find I need to read more Butler.

Strengt fortrolig: Norges hemmelige forsøk på å stanse krigen i Libya by Henrik Thune was a much quicker read, and deals with the diplomatic back channels to try to stop the war in Libya. It was interesting, though I read it with some caution -- the why and wherefore of the book raises some questions (Norwegian diplomats and the current PM come out of this looking very good). I knew about Sarkozy as a driver of the war, but this account of how it thwarted peace negotiations is difficult to read. What it really send up, however, is the total lack of coordination between Norwegian diplomatic and military action.

Serhii Plokhy's The Russo-Ukrainian War picks up some of the threads from his Gates of Europe (which I also recommend), but focuses more on the lines that have fed directly into the current conflict. Plokhy has a talent for snide commentary through judicious use of historical detail, which I greatly admire. The book shows how Russia and Ukraine reacted differently to the fall of the Soviet Union, with the former going in a more autocratic direction while attempts to follow that playbook was stopped at crucial moments in Ukraine. It can usefully be read in conjunction with Simon Shuster's The Showman, which traces the development of Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a politician. It follows him from before the war and one year in, and takes some pains to avoid a hagiography without falling into criticism for the sake of it.

If you can read Norwegian I also recommend Tusen dager med Taliban by Ayesha Wolasmal, as a way of keeping tabs on another area that keeps sliding out of the news. Wolasmal was in Afghanistan during the Taliban take-over and made it out on one of the last planes, but chose to return to work for women's health in Afghanistan. It is interesting both as a series of stories that are rarely told, but also in the questions of the ethical tension between refusing to legitimise a horrifying regime and the pragmatism of helping where possible.

Russia has loomed large in my reading this year, in part becuase I have been working a little on propaganda. I can recommend both Jade McGlynn's Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia and Sergei Guriev & Daniel Treisman's Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century as useful analyses of the propaganda techniques on offer.

The book I would really recommend, though, is Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. It is not a difficult read, and it traces how the Russian pattern is repeating throughout the West. The book was written in 2018, but it seems fairly uncontroversial to note that the 2024 US election went a long way to confirming it. Seen in conjunction with Guriev and Treisman, the pattern he traces goes beyond the US and Europe, however. In On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century Snyder gives a much shorter and simplified account of the lessons that can be drawn from recent history on how to resist authoritarianism. If you still need convincing that resistance is necessary, there is always Umberto Eco's even shorter How to Spot a Fascist. It fits neatly into almost any pocket and can be carried around.

Another book from the previous round of Trump that I finally got round to finishing was Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) by Rebecca Solnit. Perhaps especially the final essay, on the hope in unintended consequences, was a text I needed to read in the lead-up to the US elections. Perhaps that is the key to stop worrying and learning to live in apocalyptic times: all the strategising in the world may have no effect, but you can still do what you know to be right; you can organise; you can TRY, and even if you fail, your failure may be material for a new effort later. If there is a later, of course. I always hesitate between narratives, but this one brought some solace. The trouble is all the real people who suffer when we get it wrong.

Unsurprisingly, Gaza has dominated a lot of my thinking this year, however. I picked up Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance well into the decimation of Gaza, and reached the chapter on the war in Lebanon as Israel bombed and invaded Lebanon yet again. The final chapters, on the result of the Trump policy putting Palestinians "on notice that the prospect of an independent future in their homeland was cut off and that the Israeli colonial endeavour had a free hand to shape Palestine as it wished" (250) is both an eerie precursor to the October 7 attacks and all the more horrifying as we are nearing a second Trump term. This book takes a stand, but that does not make it any less clear-eyed. I really liked it.

Isabella Hammad's Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative is a pamphlet-style printing of her Edward W. Said lecture, delivered at Columbia a week before October 7th, and it is so spot on it is painful. The question of how to avoid the stark opposition of us and them, and at the same time, or through that, find the ability to stand up to injustice that face some grounds more than others is beautifully developed.

Angela Y. Davis' Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement is perhaps not the best collection of her work, but it does a good job of highlighting precisely the interconnectedness, the international and intersectional nature of all struggle for freedom. Reading Davis is a little like washing your brain, not in the brainwashing sense but more of a soothing and cleansing rinsing out of dross.

I picked up Debating Genocide by Lisa Pine because one of my former university professors mentioned it on Mastodon, and we were in the middle of the Great Debates on whether Gaza counts as genocide or not. The book does not offer a very deep dive, but it patterns were more than horrifying enough. The echoes of Gaza were hard to escape in reading the accounts. Not least in people waiting for the word to indisputably apply before action can be taken. The same structures brewing across the pond makes me wonder about the questions of the non-cultural/ethnic other, specifically LGBT+ people have been targeted for mass killings again and again and that is not considered genocide because they are ... a mode, not a genre? We are going to need a word for that, since words are apparently needed for action.

Not all my non-fiction reading dealt with the present political dumpster fire, thankfully. While this post is already much too long, I would like to mention these four books, as a palate cleanser:

Reading The Queen's Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr Dee by Benjamin Woolley was glorious, in part because it allowed me to forget about the world for a bit. I remember seeing an exhibition of Dee's books in London a few years ago, and as a figure he has always fascinated me, not least through my reading of Frances Yates. I find myself wondering how much of his code work primed Dee to find patterns and messages in gibberish, and how much was conscious deception by his medium. I suspect a combination of the two, as Kelley is firmly placed in my scoundrel column.

I bought Eric H. Cline's 1177 B. C. The Year Civilization Collapsed on one of the last stops of our interrail journey this summer, and read it almost immediately. I had heard of the Sea Peoples and their mysterious origins, and am obviously interested in the Bronze Age Mediterranean. Again, a book that allows me to tie together what I know about different cultures in the area. I was delighted with this book. It is interesting on the Hyksos, the historical basis of the Trojan War(s) and the Hittite connection, which I know all too little about. The central thesis as a de-vilification of the Sea Peoples/Philistines and the impact of climate change on a complex civilisational system works very well. I recommend it!

Jack Weatherford's The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire is another one of those books I bought for its amazing title and the promise inherent in the story, but never got around to reading. Having finally picked it up I really enjoyed it. The Mongols are one of those parts of history where I hold several fragments and cannot always see how they fit together. The book helped e connect the Mongols in Russia, Ghengis Jhan and Kubilai Khan, and cleared up some parts of Chinese history along the way. And of course, it introduced me to these women more or less swallowed whole by history.

I love and adore Emma Southon's voice, and her A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women is a light yet erudite overview that resists the pull of traditional Roman history-telling in a way that to me is deeply impressive. I am not generally a fan of "X things to take you through Y", but I like the idea of a collective biography in this case, in part because so little is known about each, and because it allows her to showcase commonalities, patterns, and departures. The way she shows the rhyming or allusional quality of either history or historiographers works very well. Zenobia and Clodia are probably my favourites out of the 21.

And with that, onwards to a new year. May there be books and time in which to read them.