Before I get to the title of this post, I guess I should make a quick introduction and tell you my plans.
I used to blog all the time. From my early twenties until my early thirties, it was a big part of how I expressed myself. This web address used to be filled with tons of posts that I either lost or deleted. There was another URL before that. There was a Brewers blog that saw some success, and people still mention it to me from time to time. There was a wrestling blog that I’d like to forget happened. The point is, I used to do it a lot, and then I just stopped. Call it life, blame it on work, whatever. It doesn’t really matter. I just stopped. I’ve wanted to get back into it for a couple of years, but blogging as a medium isn’t really a thing anymore, is it?
For a while, I thought I would start a YouTube channel. Just write the blogs and then record a video. Maybe it could be my lottery ticket to escape the day-to-day! I have a few done and ready to record, but the whole editing thing takes up so much of my life that I’m not sure if I’ll ever follow through on it. I won’t put out something that I don’t think is good, and making something good takes time. Plus, YouTube seems to be leaning towards hour-long videos, and I really don’t have the time for that.
So, let’s blog, baby. Not that good blogs don’t take time (this one, for example, took forever), but they take time in a manageable way, and I was good at them once. Maybe I can be again. I’ve also been writing a novel for what seems like forever, and I think I’ll be done this year. Selfishly, I thought that maybe if I could write a blog that some people read, those same people might like to read a book I write.
That is still down the road, though. For now, I’m going to commit to blogging at least once per week. I’m doing it here, not on a platform like Substack, for all the usual reasons. (Capitalism.) If you like what you see, you can check back here each week, or enter your e-mail below and I’ll send you one message per week with the latest post(s).
One last thing, this blog won’t always be about books. It will be whatever I want to write about. Mostly books, movies, and TV, but also life, the universe, everything. It should be fun, and I’ll try to keep the Seattle sports talk to a minimum.
Okay, let’s get to the books. Thanks to BookNotification.com, where I logged all of these books. I also work there.
All the books I read in 2025, sorted by date read
A quick note about ratings: BN doesn’t do half stars; they do out of ten. I know a lot of people prefer a five-star rating system, and if you are one of those people, you are going to have to do some math. A 7/10 would be a 3.5/5. I hope this helps.
Razorblade Tears (2021) by S.A. Cosby 7/10
Two dads, one white and one black, get revenge on the guys who killed their gay sons. The dads were not accepting of their lifestyle in life, but found it in their death.
This book is a lot like a lot of books that come out these days, where you can almost see the writer willing the book into a movie. I think I might like the movie better when it comes out, but we’ll have to see. At times, the dads come off less as unaccepting of their children than willfully stupid. You mean dem boys was kissing each other on they private parts!? That don’t sound like no sex I ever heard of!
There is good stuff in here. The violence is extreme, but that’s what you’re signing up for. In the end, it’s like Cosby was writing this book for his two main characters with his over-explanation of quote-unquote woke stuff. Hate to break it to you, but those dudes can’t read.
Slayers & Vampires (2017) by Edward Gross & Mark A. Altman 6/10
An oral history of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel with extra Joss Whedon glazing.
I mentioned in the opening that I was thinking about making some YouTube videos, and Buffy would be my launch topic. I’ve seen that show more than any other in history, and I definitely have some opinions, but there is also just a ton of misinformation out there about it, and I feel an urge to get the truth out. Is Joss Whedon a monster? For sure, but he *was* also a great writer who is responsible for most of your favorite parts of the show. There can be nuance there.
Which is the funny thing about this book, because there is no nuance. In this book, Joss Whedon is God. Most of the people interviewed agree with this sentiment, and the editors seem to push it. There are a handful of Joss quotes spread throughout, but you find out at the end of the book that they were all pulled from much older interviews.
There were a few new things gleaned from this, but it was mostly a waste for a person who had hyperfixated on this topic for much of their life.
Whalefall (2023) by Daniel Kraus 7/10
A young man gets swallowed by a whale while searching for his dead father. Thankfully, his dead father wasn’t actually mean; he was teaching him all the things he needed to escape being eaten by a whale.
This book was exactly as overwrought as that preview makes it sound, but it still has a ton of heart.
There are things to learn here about scuba diving, whales, and the sea, and I found them interesting. The main character isn’t exactly likable, nor is his dad, but the life-and-death stakes and sense of urgency make it enjoyable.
Sunrise on the Reaping (2025) by Suzanne Collins 7/10
Remember that drunk mentor guy from the original Hunger Games? Well, he’s actually the original Katniss, and they did the most fucked up stuff to him.
I don’t remember why, but for some reason I decided that The Hunger Games was super cool and based in 2024. I think it was something where I got a brief window of people who are SUPER INTO IT on TikTok, and they made some good points. I convinced Sam to read the series this year, and we watched the original trilogy.
This was a fun, if quite brutal, read. It does this one thing that the prequel Star Wars movies did: there is suddenly this technology that didn’t exist in the original future but somehow does in the past. It might just be misremembering, but there was a lot more fake news video editing than I remember being possible in the days of Katniss.
Dungeon Crawler Carl (2020) by Matt Dinniman 6/10
The world ends and puts this guy in a frickin’ video game. His cat is there and he’s not even wearing pants lol.
People are crazy about this book series. I saw multiple people online just glazing it, saying how amazing it is, and decided to try it out. It’s fun in a “What if Ready Player One was good?” kind of way, but it’s also too cute by half at times. The goblins are on meth! The cat is a frickin’ princess! I think I would’ve liked it more at a different part of my life, but I didn’t hate it.
What I did hate was the length. Not of this book in particular, but that feeling when I was like 80% into this one and realized that the story is in no way close to wrapping up. I honestly didn’t even think about it being an ongoing series when I was reading, but then you get that far in and realize they are only on Level 1 of a dungeon with something like 20 Levels. Once I finished and realized that there are seven more books, each longer than the last, and that the story still isn’t done, I tapped out.
I liked it well enough, but not enough to make reading these books my job. Maybe I’ll check out the next one this year, as I have heard they get better.
The Last Manager (2025) by John W. Miller 7/10
The life story of the GOAT baseball manager. He drank a lot, and maybe that wasn’t cool, but he sure was one hell of a manager.
Earl Weaver rocks. The best baseball manager ever, and if I could force Dan Wilson to read Weaver on Strategy like the kid in A Clockwork Orange, I’d have done it already. One thing that I’ve never really liked is how Earl’s portrayal in the media is often boiled down to “he got thrown out of games a lot” when he was obviously much more than that, and that getting thrown out was itself just another level of strategy.
This book does a good job of that, but trades it for parts about how he’s a drunk and a bad dad/husband. (It was the seventies, you couldn’t do both!) There is some interesting stuff about him having an uncle who was a bookie, which shaped his early understanding of strategy.
Weaver was an excellent manager, and the way he adapted as the game changed around him is the best part of this. A very good baseball book.
The Dog Stars (2012) by Peter Heller 6/10
In a post-apocalyptic, pandemic-ravaged world, one man will risk it all to find a girlfriend.
This was a weird one: I listened to half of it like two years ago, didn’t finish, then went back and finished the rest this year. I wasn’t missing much by waiting.
The post-apocalyptic world was just kind of nasty to me. The main character and his partner (John Milius) kill so many people. There is a lot of evil done for survival that just comes off like evil for evil’s sake.
Not Mad Max enough, but no Station Eleven either. It was fine.
What We Reckon (2017) by Eryk Pruitt 8/10
Two grifters who love and hate each other can’t do anything right and fuck up everyone’s lives.
The first book I really loved reading this year. A low stakes Natural Born Killers about shady drug dealers who can’t even do that right. Both characters want desperately to get away from each other, but there is no one else who could ever accept them.
I’ll admit here that I typically like character growth, resolution, and something close to a happy ending. Afterall, why should my escapism make me feel worse? That is not even close to what’s going on here, and I still loved it. This is watching two cars driving full speed directly at each other, hoping one will swerve, and then watching the cars explode.
Hashtag (2015) by Eryk Pruitt 6/10
Three dummies do some dumb stuff in three interconnected stories about crime.
I liked the last Pruitt novel so much that I went back for more here. This one didn’t work as well for me.
There’s a new criminal who is really into getting credit for his crimes, a cop doing cover-ups, and a woman on the run from her boyfriend who ends up famous. There is a thread of early Twitter here, the obsessiveness of getting a trending hashtag (#STICKYBANDIT), that feels so quaint and dated. The Teen Mom 2 of southern noir.
Blacktop Wasteland (2020) by S.A. Cosby 6/10
The best wheelman who ever drove a car is pulled back in for one last job, but wouldn’t you know it, the guys he’s working with are untrustworthy. Unbelievable.
After finishing that, I figured it was also time to revisit S.A. Cosby. This guy is constantly referred to as the King of Southern Noir, a genre that I am ostensibly writing my novel in, so I figured I’d better give him another shot. I didn’t want to read the one with a cop protagonist (gross), so I went with this one.
The writing killed this one for me, specifically the references. This post is long enough, but I just have to share this one that made me audibly WTF.
“Well, I wish I had something, but things have really dried up these last few years. The Italians got pushed out by the Russians, and the Russians only using their own crews. Shit, Bug, it’s been real quiet. Them Russians coming through sounding like Ivan Koloff trying to be all scary and shit,” Boonie said. He made a face like he had bitten into a rotten apple.
I am a person who has watched way too much professional wrestling in my life, but that reference is way too try-hard and niche. (Nikita Koloff, maybe.) The character who says this is an older black man who owns a chop shop, and I struggle to see him watching enough 80s Jim Crockett to make the reference. I definitely don’t see the main character catching the reference.
When These Mountains Burn (2020) by David Joy 6/10
A tough old man, an addict, and the DEA walk into the Appalachia…
Honestly, this rating might be too high. This one was kind of boring, the cops were good guys(?), and it was bleak in a way I don’t want from this genre. Yeah, these people have no future, but you don’t have to rub my face in it.
Writing this genre isn’t easy, but this felt like it hit all the tropes without much subversion. Honestly, it would’ve been better if it were just the tough old man getting revenge for his addict son.
The Traitor Baru Cormorant (2015) by Seth Dickinson 5/10
An accountant does accounting things explained in great detail to start a war.
I made a huge mistake with this one, where I recommended it to a friend before it was finished. Pretty much from that moment of the book to the end, I liked it less and less. So boring. Some good stuff that excited me, but the execution was off, and by the end, I never wanted to return to the world. There are two sequels I won’t be reading. I can’t even be bothered to have them spoiled for me.
Honestly, that was maybe my biggest reading lesson from 2025: just because there is another book in a series doesn’t mean you have to read it. It’s fine.
Cottonmouths (2017) by Kelly J. Ford 8/10
A woman with no hope goes to live with her former best friend, whom she’s always been in love with. They are cooking meth at her house.
I’m glad I went back to the southern noir genre for this one because it absolutely rocked. Bleak in all the right ways. This was part of my study of the genre for the book I’m working on, and this one hit closest to home. I hope what I eventually publish will be half as good.
Cottonmouths is about longing. About wanting something for so long that you ignore every red flag you see in order to have it. The result of doing that can only be bad for everyone involved, but you have to do it anyway. You don’t have a choice.
Ford nails that feeling so well, and I really need to read more from them.
