2025 - Year in Review, Books

Alli Grant Est. 27 minutes (5613 words)
year in review books 2025
My standard year in review for what books and book-like things I read! 2025 Edition. The one I've been dreading writing.

I hinted at this one, but for as much fun as I’ve had reading things this past year, the idea of writing about everything is… daunting, to say the least. It isn’t like I didn’t read a lot, once you factor in manga, in 2024. Like, I read the 107ish volumes of One Piece that were out at the time, I read all of Naruto, My Hero Academia, Frieren, The Case Study of Vanitas, and so on. On top of it, I got in the entire Imperial Radch main trilogy, The Locked Tomb series, started on The Expanse and Terra Ignota, and a few standalone novels. I mean, while the “list” only had 70 entries on it or so, those 70 entries represented like 200 books! I still wrote a lot about almost all of it, which was a great exercise in just parsing out my thoughts about all of those various books and making sure I still know how to retain anything, you know?

Then we come to 2025. I will not mince words. The list is not complete (I left off a few things that were either too short/informal or too terrible that I didn’t want to admit to reading them) but still has well over 400 entries on it. There are some rereads, and sometimes there are entries for just loose chapters of manga/comics, but in those cases it’s still generally grouped up enough to justify another line on the list. Alyson Greaves has an average chapter length that would justify each of her books getting a line per chapter in most cases! I am not going to end up writing enough about all of these to justify the absolute range of feelings that I got put through, and I might honestly end up going back and writing more individual book/series reviews about things on this list.

In no particular order (vaguely from skimming down the list), here are some thoughts:

Since one child got me into My Hero Academia last year, it only felt fair to give the other child’s literary fave a shot. The end result was that I went through the first series of The Warriors (Warrior Cats) back during softball season as a way to kill time between innings and at practices. I liked it! Once upon a time a partner tried to get me into them many years ago, and I have no idea why that didn’t work back then. I’m planning to read more of it, as well as her other obsession with Wings of Fire (which I didn’t list but did look into some…). I absolutely had enough fun reading it to justify continuing for my own sake. There were some absolutely brutal scenes, it made me think of how Animorphs didn’t shy away from violence when it needed.

The Apothecary Diaries light novels are great! As much as I enjoy the anime and manga, the light novels are really the way to go to enjoy the story. I caught up to the point that I ended up switching to reading unofficial translations of the web novels! I’m really looking forward to seeing more adapted, there are some delightful characters in the Ma clan that are just going to be a blast to see animated. I won’t say it’s completely without problems (the implications of this many eunuchs and Gender do get ran into headfirst), but I don’t remember anything that made me put it down in disgust.

Iron Window book two, Heavenly Tyrant? That sure was a turn. I want more. I should actually reread both of the books in the series, just to have more to say in a better review.

One Piece continues to be One Piece! Just like with the anime doing great things this year, the manga wasn’t slouching either. Elbaph, the island of Giants, has been a wild ride of flashbacks, reunions, and lore reveals. We’re finally out of a flashback that kept us away from the main crew for several months, and I’m really excited to see the upcoming punchbattling and its implications on where the series goes from here.

I Wanna Do Bad Things With You is this cute little straight romance featuring an absolute dork who has a crush on a sickly kid that stirs up trouble, hence the bad things. Just long enough to have fun character development, doesn’t overstay its welcome. I read a lot of romance-type things and it stood out above a few (not just by being the main straight one!) by the premise alone.

The Masquerade series was intense. The Traitor Baru Cormorant, The Monster Baru Cormorant, and The Tyrant Baru Cormorant have an instant place on my favorite series list. The basic background of the story is that there is a trade empire that has done a lot, lot of colonization via soft power – including our protagonist Baru’s home island. She gets identified as someone who could benefit the Empire, but at a young age sets her heart on revenge after one of her dads is disappeared and she has to be closeted as a lesbian. The thing about Baru as a protagonist is that she makes Harrow Lockedtomb look like someone who does not have the willpower to chase after her ideals. If you’re familiar with Harrow Lockedtomb, that sentence probably terrifies you. It should. She (being vague on purpose, they both are) is absolutely a monster and I love her. Seth Dickinson’s writing is top-notch, and each book has a quirk to its retelling in the same way each book of The Locked Tomb does. Don’t try to read too much into the comparison, though, they’re absolutely different styles. If you’re easily grossed out, you might want to skip it on account of some fairly graphic details.

Babel, by RF Kuang, feels like someone deeply inspected my brain to come up with the series that would most grab my attention after that. An alternate history of the world where magic was found to exist in the missing context of translation between languages, but only for as long as you can maintain the foreign not becoming familiar – a real problem for Europe, leading to colonization having even more of an allure than it already did for them. Babel grapples with some of the same bits as Baru’s story: what it can mean to be a part of the empire that ruined your life, what that does to a person, and what do you do about it? I don’t think most people will find this to be an easy read, for one reason or another, but I also can’t think of many things that are more worth the challenge.

I liked the Hades Calculus, but the group that makes up Maria Ying as a pen name have some… quirks, let’s say. Greek retelling with giant mecha is a fun premise, the romance is nice and steamy, but the way the book approaches gender is just bizarre. There’s a style of writing “girl by default” that just doesn’t work for me here, since it’s trying to make it meaningful for characters to be trans without actually showing much in the way of gender alternatives existing anywhere.

So, I’ve known for a while that Chuck Tingle is actually a legitimate author outside of just the silliness of the tinglers. I have known this. But Camp Damascus was fantastic! It’s a bit too horror themed for me to recommend it as actively as I might otherwise, but “horror story set in conversion therapy camp” is a hell of a premise. That said, please be very careful about it thanks to that premise!

Pink Candy Kiss is a DELIGHT. Two women meet up by chance at work years and years after having crushes on each other in high school, and both think the other would’ve moved on. One of them’s married, even! They have not moved on. They have not even started to move on, neither one of them. The series is actually appropriate (at least as of volume 4) for teens and up, but does a great job delving into relationship drama from an adult perspective and regrets. I cannot wait for more of it, even if it isn’t the thing I’m the most feral about from this year.

I’ve already written about Akane-banashi, so I won’t bore anyone with more words on it, but I want to be very clear that it is the series that stuck with me the most of anything.

In terms of “stuff I went through as anime first,” we’ve got both Spy x Family and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. Spy x Family is a lot less goofy in the manga itself, and the pacing is much faster. I didn’t realize how much of the anime is filler? It’s fun filler, but at the same time it adds more relationship notes and Shenanigans that start to look a bit like plot holes if you just pick up the manga from where the anime left off. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime is incredibly power-scaling isekai trash, but I’m having fun with it. I’ve read a few more of the books this year already (well, two) and have a few more to go, and my verdict is that it’s incredibly okay. There’s some weird vibes sometimes, and I’m not sure how much of that is translation or what. The light novels have incredibly strange pacing, where sometimes you spend an entire book just waiting for an event that ends up resolving in a page and a half. Not the worst, not the best.

My Dress Up Darling ends really abruptly, which is a huge disappointment. I’m used to that being how it goes sometimes, and the series is incredible – the last arc especially – but it makes me wonder how adapting the rest is going to go. The last arc is just long enough that I’m not really sure you can justify a full 12 episode set off of it, but I’m not sure you could wrap it up with a movie either. It feels like an extra bummer that it almost looks like it got canceled for introducing another trans character, which I’m sure isn’t actually part of it, but oof.

Kaedegami and Otr of the Flame were both in the same boat–early cancellations meaning they got wrapped up at very accelerated paces. At least Kaedegami could be picked up again without having to undo an ending, since they only committed to a “and we’re going to keep adventuring!” style instead of speedrunning the plot. Otr technically ended last week (as of me writing this) but was clearly on its way out, and that’s a shame. Wild Strawberry I hesitate to call an early ending, but it was floundering and got rushed towards one as well, similar to Shojo Null last year. I think it was slightly better than that story, maybe not by enough to matter – it spent way too long building up before revealing what its power system looked like, and I think just ran out of setup time to make a positive impression.

For things that haven’t gotten cancelled (yet?), Ichi the Witch has grown on me a lot. It’s a bit more of a Hunter x Hunter thing than anything else, but considering the Eternal Hiatus status on Hunter x Hunter, well, that’s not the worst thing to have happen. HxH itself is wild, and there’s no way to go into that without incredible spoilers. It’s definitely got the same DNA as Dragon Ball and other Jump classics, real shame that health issues are keeping it from progressing. The Marshall King is… just bizarre. Similar to Otr, it’s a mangaka trying to take on another country’s mythology, but in this case the take is on The American Wild West, which is, uh, interesting.

There were a few short story collections, and they were all more or less fine. Farewell to my Alter opened with its strongest story, Ninetails wove one of its better ones throughout the rest of the book. I don’t think a single story in Whenever Our Eyes Meet is still in my brain, which is a disappointment.

I know there was some translation controversy over I Think I Turned My Childhood Friend Into a Girl, but from what I can tell the story went back to what it got in trouble over in the first place naturally? It takes way too long to try and say anything about gender and what it means, considering the title and main sources of drama. I have no idea how to classify the main pairing’s relationship, which is cute. It’s fun! I don’t hate it! But it’s not the best gender stuff I’ve read this year, either.

That would go to Alyson Greaves.

Look, I mentioned her earlier. I’ve mentioned her a few times, I’ve recommended her countless times to folks over the last year, but her writing is the elephant in the room of 2025 for me. I think her best known work is The Sisters of Dorley Hall series – set starting around 2019, a secret force-femme rehabilitation program is run out of a dorm at a college in the UK, which takes bad men and forces them to be pretty decent women-or-women-adjacent folks. The publishing status of it has been in limbo, so hard to get physical copies of anything past the first book, but (like her other works) it is available on a combination of Patreon and Archive of Our Own. Please don’t take this negatively, but a lot of self-published works struggle to meet a certain quality bar, and while Alyson herself is pretty harsh as a critic of her own work, I don’t think that is warranted in the case of her larger series. The thing about Dorley, though, is that it has a lot of shock value mixed in with its realism. Folks have said that you can’t read Dorley without coming out as trans on the other side of the experience, and as cute of a statement as that is, I don’t think it’s true. Most of the horror vibes in Dorley come from just making someone sit with the reality of your body changing without you having much say in it, but it lets you take some distance from that if you aren’t intimately familiar with it. It’s good, and most of what goes on in Dorley feels incredibly plausible, but it isn’t the thing that utterly wrecked me.

That honor goes to her When You Fell From Heaven series, a trans cheerleading drama set in 2003. Max Giordano was a gymnast, who got bullied so badly his family had to move across the country to escape from it. Max’s neighbor and captain of the local cheerleader squad, Taylor Scott, sees him practicing in the yard and decides she wants to be friends with this kid… and maybe convince him to join the squad, since they might have a real shot at competition with someone that talented! But Taylor has a shitty boyfriend who freaks out at the idea that she had another guy in her room, leading her to come up with the quick excuse that “Max” is just short for “Maxine” and he has nothing to worry about. Until they have to then present Maxine to him, to get him to stop being so suspicious–which, oops, now what? Max’s family can’t afford to move again to dodge the bullying that this could result in, so now Max is going to be going to school as Maxine instead. This story is incredibly grounded in what it felt like to be trans prior to, well, 2016, and it’s incredibly relatable as someone who came out around the time the story is set. Max’s forced circumstances lead to some introspection, which leads to a lot of spoilers that I don’t want to discourage people from reading. It is a rough read, though – assault, bad reactions to coming out, family problems, talk of disasters – so consider yourself content warned.

I read some of her smaller stuff, too, like Kimmy and Show Girl. Kimmy is body and psychological horror more than anything else, and while I enjoyed it, I’m hesitant to recommend it because of a hell of a list of content warnings. Show Girl is an earlier work, just some cute forced-transition fluff about a guy in marketing who ends up having to take over for a booth babe for a convention. It’s straight romance, which I don’t mind, but it does end up feeling a bit more like wish-fulfillment than it might otherwise thanks to that. You can’t really go too wrong reading her works, just be careful.

I’m going to end this with an honorable mention, though, which is Beth and Talia’s Ranked Competitive Breast Growth. It started as a satire shitpost, a no-girls-allowed competition for taking estrogen to grow the largest boobs in order to win prize money. If you’re suspected of being a trans woman, you’re out, but if you’re in, you get free hormones and medical treatment. So naturally, a bunch of trans women who are Olympian levels at mental repression gymnastics decide to join the contest and are some of the most dysfunctional but delightful misfits. There’s a real plot! There’s a character who goes by Boymoder Sephiroth, and she’s not even the worst one! There’s real drama! There’s tons of character growth, even from the people you hate! The serialization is getting reworked into a proper book one, but the series is still going on alongside that. Recommend is such a strong word for how I feel about RCBG, but I’m reading every chapter the moment it comes out and love/hate-ing every minute of it.

the books

january:

february:

march:

april:

may:

june:

july:

august:

september:

october:

november:

december: