Here are all the books I read in 2025 – I think. I didn’t keep a list throughout the year, so there might be some I’ve forgotten. I’ve not included magazines, such as Gutter, which being on the editorial team I read as part of the production process, or Extra Teeth, which this year came back from a brief hiatus. Could I have read more? Yes. Should I have read more? Shut up.
But lads, it’s not been a good year for reading. That’s not 2025’s fault, but more a result of me forcing myself to get through my to-be-read pile, only realising a little late into the endeavour that it’s mostly books I don’t want to read.
The list is loosely ranked in descending appreciation. If you’re in the habit of only reading recommendations and positive reviews, I won’t hold it against you if you bail halfway. While I enjoy chewing on my dislikes as much as I enjoy analysing my likes, there’ll be a happy charity shop or two come January, I’ll tell you that much.
That said: the good shit does come first! In fact, the best book I read this year was published this year, which doesn’t often happen, as the old classics and award darlings from yesteryears often make for stiff competition. Yet, even Le Guin and Spark couldn’t nab the top spot!
So, with no further rambling, here’s seven books I loved, six I wasn’t too sure about, and six I did not care for at all.
Len Lukowski
Bodily Fluids
My book of the year! Poetry, which is surprising for me, but I gorged on this during an express train ride to Edinburgh, then returned to and digested it more fully on the dreaded long train back to Glasgow, and fell in love with it. Gutter asked the team to recommend their books of the year and, not realising they only wanted two or three lines, I wrote a full review, which I’ll copy/paste… now:
These starkly personal poems expose wounds not yet healed - soured relationships, unresolved trauma, suicidal thoughts - with barely a preamble. True to life, doom lifts and descends at a moment’s notice, jaded hurt twisting into cocky assurance, lust and friendship breaking through dissociation. Bodily Fluids is a game in which Lukowski tries to knock the reader off-balance with the softest of touches - and often succeeds.
Comedic flashes of nature - human or otherwise - are routinely shot through with desire, convenience, lowered expectations. In 'Pandas', the titular bears refuse to procreate until humanity gets its shit together, while 'Sea Turtles' provides an ambiguous source of hope, reptilian instinct pitted against man's selfishness. Across 16 short entries of things that aren't dogs but could be, one list poem ricochets between the park and the club, the soft comfort of plushies and the black leather of puppy play.
Everything feels of an even importance, so while at first glance Lukowski seems to imply it’s always worth trying to laugh (and fuck) the pain away, moments of quiet solitude make space for the pain all the same. In one particularly touching poem, returning to his Sixth Form common room, Lukowski is able to see through the haze of youthful nostalgia to the tacky plastic reality, closing on a confession all too familiar to many a queer reader: "I still fear the sound of laughter."
Yet, despite how shame looms over this collection, there's a strong sense of play, both for its own sake - such as in 'Blue Room with Dildo', a still life of self-pleasure - and as retaliation - such as in 'Ode to Vega', where Lukowski comes on strong to Street Fighter II's omnisexual assassin. Sex and sport make for occasional bedfellows - 'Fugue After the Gym' finds delight in reparative self-harm, while opener 'Olympian' weaves a fantastic orgy of memory, release and, yes, fucking, on a global stage.
With secret after secret given away like its nothing, Bodily Fluids elevates the overshare into a dance of permissions and confrontations, impossible to resist.
Ursula K Le Guin
The Word for World Is Forest
I knew going into TWFWIF, it received less-favourable reviews than most of Le Guin’s other work – I think it says so in the introduction to my copy, with a cover so hideously obvious (not the Masterworks pictured here, uncommonly pretty), you can see where the reviews might’ve been coming from. Compared to her masterpieces, they claim, it’s too on-the-nose, too polemic, too obviously about the thing it’s about; that thing being the Vietnam war.
In TWFWIF, humans have taken control of a planet with ample supplies of valuable wood, and a sentient alien race who are so unfamiliar with violence, they possessed no defences against Humanity’s colonial impulses. The evil characters are too evil, the good characters too good, or so says the criticism. But there’s not much wiggle-room, imo, in a story about colonialism introducing a pacifist community to incomprehensible violence and, in doing so, poisoning their society for the rest of time. In fact, I think there’s power in being able to easily declare that war is wrong, rape is wrong, slavery is wrong, colonialism is wrong, and if peaceful resistance is forbidden, forceful resistance will have to suffice – end of discussion.
Also, I think there is nuance here, if you’re willing to first and foremost empathise with the Athsheans rather than the Earthlings. The nuance is there in the delightful representations of Athshean culture, such as conflict resolution through singing or passive poses. The nuance is there in the idea of violence as a physical sickness, endlessly endurable as an action inflicted upon you, but once internalised, as an action you can personally commit, it interrupts a natural, even biological cycle necessary to a community’s holistic wellbeing.
That these nuances are by the book’s opening already all but erased, should, I feel, prompt a terrifying question - what nuances of our own culture have we lost, do we not realise we’ve lost, will we never reclaim again? Exactly how have we poisoned ourselves?
Muriel Spark
Not to Disturb
In a curious pattern of me enjoying literary legends’ flop eras, Wikipedia says this was also a mixed bag for Spark, reviews landing between annoyed and indifferent, but I loved it. A short nasty farce where the servants of a baron machinate in preparation for a triple homicide that has yet to occur inside a locked drawing room. Perhaps being largely unfamiliar with the genres it lampoons – manor murder mysteries, upstairs/downstairs melodramas – allowed Spark’s trademark restrained mysticism to shine. The servants share an uncanny precognitive hive-mind, or at the very least a spiritual link to their employers’ mortal predestination, obsessing over when ithe murder will happen, never once contemplating that it might not come to pass. Another of Spark’s favourite devices – repeated aphorisms – goes into overdrive, becoming more and more like a chant or spell, instructions delivered to the servants by a telephone that becomes increasingly demonic. There is, of course, also a madwoman in the attic, a pregnancy without an obvious father, an interruption by a trio of punks trying to shake down the baron for all he’s worth, a secret safe, an even more secret hiding space, and an affair that might be incestuous. Overstuffed? Yes! But all the better for it.
Jeremy P Bushnell
The Insides
In the words of Gordon Ramsay: Finally, some good fucking food!
Ollie Krueger’s an ex-magician, her past littered with mistakes, now earning an honest living prepping meat for a high-end New York restaurant. There, she encounters a knife that can cut reality, putting her on a collision course with a morally-agnostic psychic and a white-supremacist ex-marine who want to slice history into a more eugenicsy shape.
A freefall almost from the word go, the heroes possess a flailing kind of panache, the villains a rudderles cool, and it’s genuinely thrilling to watch both teams styling out the freefall, daring the other to hit the ground first. And yet, it sat on my to-be-read pile since 2016, its year of publication, because at the time I was on a sErIoUs LiTeRaTuRe kick, and worried it might be an already dated relic of le epic bacon era.
Don’t worry, I’ve since got over myself and also, it’s very much not that – there’s an art-punk sensibility, a commitment to joy as rebellion, and a genuine respect of sacrifice, which adds grit and heft to the madcap antics. And to be honest, I’m not certain I had the necessary nous to appreciate why this book is so fun, in 2016: even though it’s quite silly, it takes itself seriously. Behind the interdimensional slugs and the pig masks, the stakes are real: every minute of every day, authoritarian maniacs seek to convert our grief for a better world into crushing hopelessness, and you cannot let that happen. Only one course of action is ever given the time of day: you have to cut Nazi bullshit out of your life, before it cuts you and everyone you love out of existence.
Lena Valencia
Mystery Lights
I adored this collection – most of the stories dance around an emptiness where there should be meaning. This has earned it a low-ish three star rating on Goodreads, with most of its detractors wanting something more declarative. Unfairly, I think.
The first story plays this ambiguity well, a familiar tale with no twist at the end: a man in a pick-up truck saves a woman hiking in the desert from a pack of dogs – but is he as dangerous as the wild animals? Probably! Yet nothing comes of it. The man doesn’t give much reason for her to fear him, we know she’s right not to trust him, but validation of those fears never arrives: a feedback loop of threat, with no clear beginning or centre.
Though some stories move to university campuses or city offices, this haunting void of consequence works best in the desert setting, which makes frequent appearances. My favourite in the collection concerns a mean-spirited painter and her lover’s lonely daughter, each unbeknownst to the other communing with the same glowing orb in the wilderness. It’s never made clear what they gain from this entity, only that they’re not getting it from each other, and maybe they shouldn’t want it from each other, and anyway, they wouldn’t be able to give it.
Sometimes, these stories say, emptiness can be substance – and filling the emptiness with answers would miss the point entirely.
Malcolm Devlin
Engines Beneath Us
A murky horror novella that doesn’t give much away, as all the best murky horror novellas don’t. Devlin transplants British folk horror from the countryside to the schemes, and in stripping the breezy Tory-coded rural aesthetic from the genre, choosing instead a dark reflection of a New Labour-esque housing project, the atmosphere becomes punishingly bleak.
The Crescent is a strip of company accommodation for employees of The Works, a mysterious but essential service to the city. They’re taken care of, thanks to the healing powers of a secretion dredged up from their basements – but only for as long as they agree to never leave, and trade their labour as payment for their health, and subject themselves to a panopticon of curtain twitching. When an outsider arrives, everything taken for granted comes into question.
The Crescent works like a cult, but it’s not a cult – it’s a heightened representation of a working class experience in an industrial satellite town, dedicated to maintaining a lopsided pact nobody can remember making. The horror doesn’t come from finding out the dark truth of what makes The Works work, but rather that the truth doesn’t matter. All that’s left is a grim acceptance of living to work and working to live; stepping outside of that pact will cost you everything.
A short dirty sharp book, like broken glass stirred into a muddy garden.
Martha Swales
Give It a Grow
Speaking of gardens! An extremely chill primer on gardening. Swales essentially says: if you’re a beginner, the variables of biology are far beyond what any one book can cover, some things you plant will die, don’t sweat it, have a fuckabout. Which is liberating, for sure.
A majority of the planting advice concerns growing fruit and vegetables on the scale of an allotment in a rural-ish English back yard. Which makes most of it irrelevant to our sliver of Ibrox tenement scrub which is less likely to come under siege from hedgehogs and slugs, and more likely to be drowned by footie hooligans wanting somewhere to piss out nine pints of Tennants. I’d love to attempt her mini-pond project – her viral tadpole video being what inspired my partner to buy this for me – but I fear our upstairs neighbour’s window-cleaner would come a cropper if we dug a moat where he lodges his ladder.
Similarly, all the emotional benefits covered in the book involve being out in your garden, enjoying it up close, but I would look an absolute lunatic lounging in a deck chair among my (as yet, unblooming) wildflower meadow, in full view of one of Glasgow’s busiest streets, not to mention dozens of curtain-twitching neighbours. So: an aspirational read, rather than instructional.
Joseph Hansen
The Little Dog Laughed
If you’ve spoken to me about crime fiction any time in the last ten years, I’ve probably sung the praises of Hansen’s Brandstetter Mysteries. I found an incomplete early-2000s No Exit Press collection in a book fair. The most current covers either feature a Scandi-noir minimalism applied to sun-blasted LA that entirely sidesteps the books’ queerness (pictured above), or bright retro vector art that does put queerness on the page but, considering the 70s-90s period which the series covers, to my eye ends up looking a bit too 60s Hitchcockian. Perhaps I’m biased, but I think No Exit Press nailed it with their high contrast, blown-out photos of hard but impeccably-groomed men smoking, drinking, and pointing guns at people. Sadly, no good photos of these exist online.
Design opinions aside - Dave Brandstetter is a brilliant character, especially for the time of original publication, but also just generally in how he flips the usual genre conventions. He begins as an investigator for his father’s insurance company, with a specialism in death insurance claims. Rather than investigating a crime scene with the authority of a police chief or detective, he’s merely there to verify cause of death is accurate so that his father’s company don’t pay out in the event of natural causes or suicide. He’s not upholding justice, he’s enforcing capital. The moral distance this affords him, as he closes in on an inevitable crime, shapes these stories in ways that feel fresh to the genre even 50 years on.
Oh, and he’s also gay. Obviously this was a big deal in the 70s, and I suppose still is now, but it’s fascinating watching how this plays out in retrospect. Hansen instils Brandstetter with a hefty dose of internalised homophobia – he’s extremely masc for masc, and passes in the more macho circles of law and order. But he also possesses a strong sense of aesthetic consideration and a begrudging amount of community spirit. Every mystery he investigates hinges on some aspect of queer culture which other, more heteronormative characters overlook. It’s a very specific, and generous, point of view that I find much more rewarding than the default suspicion of more traditional crime protagonists.
All of which to say, The Little Dog Laughed is the first in the series where I think Hansen drops the ball. It starts out well enough, with the scale of the mystery small and human – an investigative reporter found dead in his condo, apparently having turned to suicide after a career-ending misfire. The stakes are personal, if not to Brandstetter then to the reporter’s blind daughter and her besotted boyfriend. But, after a first half of LA-based intrigue, it spirals into a conspiracy of South American military coups, and a finale more suited to James Bond than an insurance claims investigator.
This is the last in my incomplete collection, but the series continues for another five titles. Knowing the series moves alongside history, and that the catastrophe of AIDS was probably emerging alongside The Little Dog Laughed’s publication, I’ll be keeping my eye out for the rest of the No Exit Press run, and hoping for a return to form, as the series moves from an era of queer liberation, into queer disaster
Thomas Page McBee
Amateur: a True Story about What Makes A Man
In wanting to research and write about the so-called crisis of masculinity, Thomas Page McBee takes up boxing, and trains for a fight in Madison Square Garden, becoming the first (that we know of) trans man to do so. A great hook, a… so-so book.
McBee covers a lot of ground, though not necessarily in much depth. How the more you use your body, the more you become aware of its connection to core facets of your personhood. How everyone is expected to pass as an easily parsed gender – whether trans or cis, but especially in the world of boxing, specifically men – and failing at doing so invites violence. How the permissions granted if you succeed at passing come paired with prohibitions, blind spots, behaviours that might not align with who you want to be. How queer people, shaped by a life of self-defence, are often unaware of how they turn that internalised reactionary streak on themselves. For many readers, a lot of this is Gender Stuff 101, but for others, I suspect it might be quite eye-opening; I wonder how much really crunchy queer shit McBee held back, in order to speak to the latter audience.
And yet, for a book about the defensiveness and conflict inherent to heteronormative masculinity, there’s… very little conflict. Everyone’s nice. The lads McBee trains with are overall pretty decent, and none seem too afflicted with the misogynistic shit that comes with having rolled high on privilege. Although this perhaps isn’t explored, because we rarely see them (or McBee himself) interact with anyone who isn’t also a man. McBee finds much-needed community in boxing, but does very little to critique its highly-policed edges. Once he steps into the ring, the Brotherhood of Man accepts him, even when he doesn’t accept himself. Which is heart-warming, but not exactly the thesis which opens the book.
Ultimately, the “true story” of it all becomes limiting. The day of the big match arrives, and McBee does not miraculously win the fight after receiving nearly no training – in fact, sitting with his failure to be a Socially Acceptable Man is the entire point. But multiple emotional subplots don’t resolve satisfactorily, due to shame, embarrassment and general ambivalence on the parts of the men involved. Which is how real people behave, and McBee can’t spin their behaviour differently for the sake of a neat bookend or a great revelation.
An awkward epilogue, in which McBee reveals his transness to his trainer, plucks out the one interesting thorn: the question of disclosure. He doesn’t, until after the match, want to broach this subject at all, fearing it’ll skew the story he’s trying to write, and how other men relate to him. Which, well, probably! But there was something uneasy in that lack of disclosure that held the book together – nobody queer owes cis-heteronormativity full access to their identity, especially not when putting themselves at physical risk. I got the feeling the epilogue was likely requested by an editor to address the book’s overall lack of resolution.
As a result, the most memorable lessons actually come from McBee’s sister, and a woman he spars with, but they’re given significantly less space on the page than the men achieving selfhood through violence with other men. You can draw your own conclusions on what that says of men.
Jonas Eika
After the Sun
I adore the cover of my edition. That fading heat map swirl is confident and enigmatic and otherworldly but also strikingly soulless – which happens to be how I’d describe this collection. And oh, how much I wanted to love it. Alas, not so.
General consensus seems to be that the highlight is ‘Bad Mexican Dog’, a hallucinatory blend of sun, sea, sex, blackmail and magical pool boys reanimating colleagues with parasols and piss, but under the shock value, I couldn’t discern much of a story. The same, I suppose, could be said of my personal favourite, ‘Rachel, Nevada’, in which a man takes the opportunity of his wife attending a psychic life coaching seminar, to merge with an alien artefact in the desert, demonstrating some of the most viscerally repulsive self-harm I’ve read in a long, long time.
And yet. Hmm. Every story sat right on the cusp of pulling me in with heartless concepts and impossible body horror, abstracted critiques of late-capitalism, prose poised between academic rigour and freewheeling surreal nonsense. But the collection’s veneer of alienation never cracks to expose the inner lives of its characters to any palpable degree, nor the reasons for the stories.
Yes, I know this is similar to the emptiness I loved in Mystery Lights, but the difference between these two books is similar to the difference between one-way glass and a mirror. Both invite self-reflection, but only with the former can you convince yourself you’re not alone. It’s the veneer itself Eika wants to examine, not what’s behind, and there’s only so long I can stare at the surface level before I feel pushed away.
Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle
Jesus, but this was a downer, and I say that as someone with a high tolerance for Vonnegut’s cynicism.
What begins as the narrator’s research into important persons’ activites during Hiroshima briefly becomes a madcap investigation into Ice-9, a compound that could instantaneously freeze all water in the known universe, and ends up dabbling in a parody of the Cuban Missile Crisis, before the inevitable occurs.
What usually offsets Vonnegut’s doomer impulse is his inclusion of surreal, spiritual, ironic perspectives that exist outside of humanity’s tendency towards self-destruction. Which here is Bokononism, a cultish nihilism riddled with meaningless coincidences and daft terminologies. But, its presence is too slight and, frankly, too annoying to alleviate the actual crisis of the story. Cat’s Cradle says, you have to laugh or you’ll cry, then doesn’t give you anything worth laughing about.
China Mieville
The City and the City
I was 23 when this was first published, which is wild – it’s such a heavyweight in speculative fiction, I thought it must’ve been published long before I started taking an interest in the genre. So it’s possible I came to this with expectations set a little too high, but I found it overburdened by its concept. For those who aren’t familiar: a murder takes place in two cities that exist superimposed over each other, and one detective’s attempts to figure out the means, method and execution requires breaking arcane laws which prohibit the residents of one city observing the residents of the other.
This symbolism is true of some cities close to my own heart. As a teen, a journalist allowed me to ride along with him as work experience, while he gave diplomats from London a tour of Belfast. After half an hour, the diplomats asked if we’d been driving in circles, when we hadn’t. They were gobsmacked at how patchwork the different districts were, how invisible the boundaries. I think they’d conceived of Belfast more like the opening of the 90s X-Men cartoon, Protestants on one side, Catholics on the other, charging headlong to fight centre-screen where “normal” people scrambled out of the way. Now I’m older, I see this better not as naivety but wilful ignorance. These people didn’t know about the complexities of Belfast, and truly didn’t want to know.
Spinning that impulse into speculative worldbuilding is, let’s not muck about, a great concept. Unfortunately, it wore thin quickly. Mieville is constantly at pains to ensure you understand the idea at its most basic level, even three quarters in, when the plot necessitates you throw that understanding out the window. Also, the act of “unseeing” the other city is clever, as a device to communicate how we pretend parts of our world don’t concern us, but at times you get the feeling Mieville’s actively unseeing the story he’s telling. A good mystery freely gives its readers well-camouflaged clues which they might assemble into truth, allowing the finale to be a short sharp burst of consequence. The City and The City does not do this. It withholds clues and deeper analysis, filling the space with thematic noodling, then surprises you with a villain whose motives remain concealed while the detective monologues how he figured everything out, with details the reader doesn’t even know he’d encountered.
It turns the book into a parade of locks with no keys – very frustrating, and not the totemic genre staple I’d been expecting.
Ann Leckie
The Imperial Radch Trilogy
We all know the horse drawing meme, right? Where the arse of the horse is impeccably drawn, the middle a bit shonky, the head at the other end derpy as hell? Well, I’m annoyed it took me until halfway through the third book of the Imperial Radch Trilogy before I realised this horse wasn’t gonna get un-derped.
Ancillary Justice is great. Protagonist Breq exists somewhere between an android and a corpse, the last remaining fragment of an AI that used to be a galactic warship staffed with reanimated bodies of conquered populations. She’s hell-bent on revenge against the multi-cloned hivemind godlike emperor, whose betrayal many centuries beforehand not only destroyed her life, but destabilised the Radch Empire. Told in alternating chronologies – the betrayal and the revenge – you get a sense of this empire as vast, the emperor as terrifyingly multitudinous, the femme-genderless Radch empire nuanced and blunt in all the ways empires have to be if they want to remain empires
Ancilliary Sword chucks all of that, to zoom in on one planet and orbiting space station as a microcosm of this empire. The plot is vaguely interesting – tea trade, indentured labour, classist prejudices, a historical conspiracy - but suffers from losing sight of the murderous motivations that fuelled Justice’s expansive worldbuilding. Breq, now hooked up once again to a warship, loses a large degree of her charm as a warship learning to be human; now capable of reading her staff’s emotions and minds by spying on their vital signs, the narration becomes an exercise in head-hopping. There’s a reason much writing advice warns not to do this – characters become parodies of themselves, locked into stagnant personalities, for fear you might not recognise them next time Breq invades their privacy. A curious moral quandary, you might think, worth examining in the next book.
Nope! Look. I know wrapping up a trilogy must be difficult, especially if the readership most likely to buy the third book responds positively to aspects of the second that, for want of a better word, read as cosy. But this trilogy did not start out cosy. In fact, the cosy aspects of the Radch empire – elaborate tea rituals, progressive gender politics, slapstick alien representatives, an ability to be known entirely by another entity – all explicitly stem from the injustices it inflicts on the societies it ruins. That was the good shit! After condensing the story to a microcosm where the upper classes dominate the narrative, I was looking forward to a return to all that raggedy discomfort we left behind in Justice. But closer Mercy takes everything that doesn’t work with Sword, and does it more, and makes it cosier.
There are probably more charitable readings of how the series ends, but to me, it betrays its own radical anti-colonialist origins, arriving at a damp squib of a finale that excuses, if not empire, then the individualism at the core of empire. A derpy horse, indeed.
Thomas Pynchon
Gravity’s Rainbow
I told myself I would read a normal-length book’s amount of Gravity’s Rainbow, and if it hadn’t grabbed me by then, I wouldn’t bother with the rest of it. I loved The Crying of Lot 49, and hoped that same superstitious mania and doomy paranoia could be sustained across something massive, but I’m not sure it can? I think I managed two normal-length books’ worth before giving up.
I also think, like many war books, it assumes a certain level of familiarity with the ins and outs of military service, as many more people used to gain first-hand experience of that life than they do now. Without that familiarity, a lot of the organisational logic of this book went right over my head. Let it be known: I lacked the stamina and the curiosity needed for Gravity’s Rainbow. Frankly, I blame social media.
Richard Brautigan
Sombrero Fallout
Never say I do not have an open mind – after my disappointment with Hawkline Monster (more on that in a moment), I gave Brautigan a second chance at prose. Shouldn’t have bothered.
An ice cold sombrero falls out of the sky and, when the residents of the town in which it lands lose their minds over who should be allowed to wear it, the violence escalates into world-ending farce. Meanwhile, in alternating chapters, the fictional author of the book, who is definitely not Brautigan, trauma-dumps on the reader, so depressed his blatantly fetishised Japanese girlfriend has broken up with him, he might just kill himself.
Is the sombrero story funny? In the same way your narcissistic mate down the pub might stretch out a mildly humorous anecdote, so the spotlight of attention rests on him a little longer. But in Sombrero Fallout, the only person Brautigan shares that spotlight with is a fictionalised version of himself, and that guy’s such a pathetic sad-sack, with a tendency to self-deprecate into a pit of misery. I started skipping his chapters, keen to return to the sombrero. When the violence finally erupts, there’s a good few pages where all his pent-up dissatisfaction finds release in some entertaining slapstick that, if it weren’t so indiscriminate in its targets, could read as gratuitous. I dunno, maybe it is gratuitous. But it’s a glimmer of comedy and action in a book which otherwise staunchly resists any kind of pleasure or movement.
A disturbing wrinkle: Brautigan married his second wife, Akiko Yoshimura, the same year Sombrero Fallout published; she divorced him four years later, and four years after that, he killed himself. He obviously needed more support than he received, but his prediction of his own life gives this book a marginal redeeming macabre aspect of curiosity. I would love to know what Yoshimura thought of it.
Kingsley Amis
Complete Stories
Not knowing much about Kingsley Amis, I picked this up from an academic pal getting rid of books before they moved house, drawn in by a blurb that foregrounded some of the more speculative works that I assume occur towards the latter half of his career. Reading chronologically, I tired quickly.
I knew something wasn’t clicking with me from the outset. The opening stories (presumably his first published) circle around social mores in military service, petty little tales about soldiers pulling strings to make sure some old boy doesn’t get a promotion he doesn’t deserve on account of being a rotter, or majors and generals convincing themselves they’re not bigots, because it suits their career goals to allow people of colour to serve. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a moral purist, but the lesson these stories arrive at isn’t so much, “war requires you to compromise your values”, but “what’s the fucking point of bothering to be good?” These were followed by a damningly long story about ministers backsniping each other in parliament, where Amis seemed to be poking fun at their detachment from general society, but couldn’t quite hide how enamoured he was with their status.
And then, the one that put me right off the collection: a story about an upper-middle class office worker who disagrees with his wife’s choice of cleaning lady on vibes alone. He’s quickly proven to be a good judge of character as, enabled by her overbearing and farcically socialist support worker, the cleaning lady turns to a much more profitable (if obviously morally depraved) line of sex work and, in doing so, secures a soft foreign husband, who the protagonist pities for not being able to resist the woman’s feminine wiles, as he did a few pages prior due to his obvious moral superiority
Only then did I look Amis up, and discover his history as an ex-communist turned right-wing thinkpiecer with a reputation as a misogynist with xenophobic, antisemetic leanings. I’ll admit I’m curious to see how this mixes with the sci-fi flavour of his later work – it’s not a genre I personally associate with narrow-mindedness – but I don’t know if I can stomach giving more time to him, when there’s so more enjoyable, optimistic, idealistic and challenging work out there.
Richard Brautigan
The Hawkline Monster
Didn’t like, didn’t finish, didn’t even get close to a semblance of a story, which I had to look up on Wikipedia: Two Wild West assassins are tasked with killing a monster under a science lab in a gothic mansion surrounded by an oasis of ice in the desert, but it turns out there is no monster nor any caverns under the mansion, only the strange reality-warping effects of the chemicals in the lab, nullified by pouring whiskey into a beaker, at which point the missing scientist turns back from an umbrella stand into a human being. Obviously.
I like Brautigan’s poetry. The surreal and often meaningless imagery works in tiny doses, like Rene Magritte paintings. One framed painting of a floating apple is art; cover the walls with dozens of posters of floating fruit, and you suddenly find yourself in the dorm room of the most irritating person you knew at uni. Especially when half the posters aren’t of floating fruit, but of 40 year old assassins fucking children.
Yeah, so, turns out I have an Instant Dislike button, and it’s Born Sexy Lolita Twin Sisters, never definitively given ages, but only ever depicted as extremely sexually active and alluring children under the influence of magical chemicals. Maybe it was easier to publish psychedelic paedophilia in 1974, but it’s certainly not an easy read in 2025.
