Top 3 SFF books read in 2025 > Likes and Comments

This year I found that the books that impressed me where ones that did something different with a well worn sub-genre.

* Raising Stony Mayhall

* The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

* The Ragpicker

My top three new books/first reads are probably:

Tolkien - The Silmarillion
E J Swift - When There Are Wolves Again
Adrian Tchaikovsky - City of Last Chances + House of Open Wounds

However, I spent a lot of 2025 re-reading books to see how they stack up on the SFBRP Must-Read list, so my favourite re-reads were:

David Zindell - Neverness
Iain M Banks - Inversions
Derek Künsken - The Quantum Magician

My top three new reads this year were:

Once Was Willem by M.R. Carey - A group of horrific monsters, including the titular Willem, rise up to defeat a wizard in medieval England.

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid - This is a romance novel set in the late 70s and early 80s during the early days of the space shuttle program. It's science fiction in that it's alternate history; there are no other fantastical elements. It's superb. Not as much space stuff as I would like, but the framing mechanism is clever. It will make a great movie.

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie - Fantasy version of Europe with a lot of things turned on their head (Carthage as a source of civilization rather than Rome for instance). Follows what's essentially a suicide squad in service of the catholic church made up of a vampire, a werewolf and a bunch of others.

I'll do an honorable mention rather than a best of rereads:

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove - It's set on a spaceship, and two of the main characters are AIs, but it plays with classic horror literature (Dracula, werewolves, the Shadow over Innsmouth etc) and has a lot of fun with it. The first part is split into several separate stories, partly because the narrator AI keeps getting reset to factory defaults, but it comes together wonderfully towards the end.

Luke wrote: "My top three new books/first reads are probably:

E J Swift - When There Are Wolves Again"

Good to hear. I have that sitting on the nightside table, ready to go. Just the description sounded so interesting

When There Are Wolves Again