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First Top 10 Tuesday post of 2026! Happy New Year, everyone!!!
This week’s Top 10 Tuesday prompt has us look at our best books of 2025, and I am eager to see what everyone has to share!
My own favorites are listed below, and reviews shared earlier by me HERE. My reading list is still heavier on the historical fantasy fiction side, but I am glad I managed to pick up on non-fiction reads as well.
So, which were your best books of 2025? Do share in the comments!
I was ready to write bad angsty poetry on my never-ending reading / blogging slump in the first half of 2025. But luckily, the second half got me out of slump valley in record time. Here’s a quick record of everything I read and (mostly) liked in the past year.
This book reminded me a lot of Madeline Miller’s Circe, as if retelling a mix of Norse and Greek/ Roman mythologies. The lead character is Matilda, a messenger god who can travel across realms. She falls in love with a mortal, and that does not sit well with a trickster crafty god who hungers for more power and dominion. The story reads like a folktale about how a puny messenger god defeated the crafty god, won a mortal’s heart, saved several people, and learnt the surprising truth of her own heritage. The plot seems strangely familiar and also sometimes a little predictable. But I am a huge fan of the exquisite writing style, intriguing characterizations and the truly stellar world-building.
Name(s): Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy
Author: Ann Leckie
Publisher: Orbit Books
Cover Art: John Harris
Awards: Hugo, Nebula, British Science Fiction Association, Arthur C. Clarke, Locus etc. etc.
Audiobooks: Recorded Books (Book 1); Hachette Audio UK (Book 2)
Ancillary Justice had (IIRC) won almost every award the SFF genre had to offer, with good reason. It’s no easy feat, world-building on this level, with a character of this level of feel-good integrity and grit, and a thrilling, convoluted, galvanizing plotline to boot. Think Star Wars, combine it with Inception, Artificial Intelligence tropes and some comedic elements, and you will still fall short of Ancillary Justice. I can give the book(s) no higher praise. Till date, Ancillary Justice is definitely one of my favorite SciFi books.
The books are set in Imperial Radch, a highly advanced technology militaristic colonial empire which has conquered and rules most of interplanetary space. The first book, Ancillary Justice, tells us how Breq used to be a part of a sentient artificial intelligence/ ship (imagine a supercomputer hacked into pieces but still functioning, if you will) of the Radch empire, but has now been sundered and seeks revenge against the perpetrator.
I didn’t expect to enjoy The New Magdalen so much! Some minimal research pointed out that “Magdalenes” were rescue shelters for fallen women (~prostitutes/ unmarried pregnant women) back in 1800s.
The book is set in the background of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). A lady named Grace has sent out from Canada to England, to seek a home with one of her wealthier distant relatives as a paid lady’s companion after her father dies. She is also now engaged to be married to a family friend in England.
And yet within a few months of her arrival in England, another woman shows up (whom people have been mistaking as a fallen woman “Mercy” from one of the said Magdalenes) — and now she claims to be the real Grace!
So, who is the real impostor? How do we figure this out in the 1870s, with no DNA testing, photographs, photocopies, or international or electronic databases? Original handwritten letters from relatives and friends are really all you have, and if lost, you are done for.
This week’s Top 10 Tuesday prompt (ten books in special settings or time period) was so cool and could have gone a thousand different ways. Yet, what I ended up thinking of were books set in ominous places.
I was thinking of places that are remarkable and likely very dangerous, not somewhere you may want to venture — at least, not outside of a book.
1 / The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
Trapped in a castle with a wicked uncle and no way out? Crossed out.
2 / Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
Stuck at an afternoon picnic where reality and dreaming are blurred? Crossed out.
3 / The Tower at Stony Wood by Patricia McKillip
Desperate to enter a tower which won’t let you in? Crossed out.
4 / In the Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss
Lots of known fairy tale characters forgetting what’s important? Crossed out.
5 / Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Living in an amusement park in a swamp while wrestling alligators and fighting off rabid competitors? Crossed out.
6 / The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
Raised in a library that is not really a library? Crossed out.
7 / The City in the Lake by Rachel Neumeier
Trying to figure out a mirror city that is trying to become the real city? Crossed out.
8 / Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
Packed off to a remote and dreary island for reformation? Crossed out.
9 / The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino
Feasting with weird and melodramatic people straight out of tarot decks? (Hopefully) crossed out.
10 / The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Living in fear for your life in a house surrounded by a moat, when you know Sherlock Holmes will be too late to the rescue? Crossed out.
What about you? Which ominous fictional places have stood out in your recent bookish memory?
It’s time to list our top 10 reads of 2024 (and download massive TBR reclists, of course). Not much of reading this year, but I would not have missed this Top 10 Tuesday theme for the world!
I have not been a great fan or follower of the Grishaverse, so was hesitant in picking this up. But what a marvelous story this turned out to be. We peer into the ages of 16th century when anti-semitism was rife. Luzia is desperately trying to escape her confined pitiful life with her displays of magical craft… but soon ends up getting embroiled in a larger political net. Everything in this book was so impressive – the Spanish Golden Age/ Renaissance feel, the worldbuilding, the writing, the prose, the characterizations. Aaaaand, it is a standalone. If you’ve liked Mistress of the Art of Death, you’ll love this one too.
I count George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss as one of my all-time favorites, so I was eager to start Scenes of Clerical Life as my Spin #38 pick for Classics Club Challenge. I was also fortunate to find the Librivox Recording by Bruce Pirie (available in Podcast formats too) and it was so good — highly recommended!
Scenes of Clerical Life has 3 stories, each one progressively longer and more impactful.
This week’s Top 10 Tuesday is about listing books that you have picked up – or avoided – because of the hype around them. I fall in neither group — I’m a little wary of Hyped Books, so while I add them to my TBR, but save them for a later day. Instead, it’s the lesser known books which catch my eye… hoping to find some hidden gem perhaps?
So — here’s a list of some obscure books that I really think deserve a lot more love! Er, you may have seen these recommended around these parts before…
I am ready to write bad angsty poetry on my never-ending reading/ blogging slump! Still, somehow, pushing myself to do this mid-year 2024 blogpost on stuff I have liked till now.
Let’s all pledge to move out of Slump Valley! And just in case these recs reach you, hope you’ll like some of these.
I have not been a great fan or follower of the Grishaverse, so was hesitant in picking this up. But what a marvelous story this turned out to be. We peer into the ages of 16th century when anti-semitism was rife. Luzia is desperately trying to escape her confined pitiful life with her displays of magical craft… but soon ends up getting embroiled in a larger political net. Everything in this book was so impressive – the Spanish Golden Age/ Renaissance feel, the worldbuilding, the writing, the prose, the characterizations. Aaaaand, it is a standalone. If you’ve liked Mistress of the Art of Death, you’ll love this one too.
Happy New Year ’24, everyone! And at last, my favorite topic for the yearly wrap-up to Top 10 Tuesday: favorite books of 2023. We save the best for the end, and it is so much fun adding those best to Mount TBR. Here’s my list too.