Blog: Books What I Have Read

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Whenever I am a bit BORED and start with the DOOMSCROLLING I often stop and think "Hang on, is this really what I want to be doing with my precious time on planet Earth?" and the answer usually comes back as "No, obviously, you'd much rather be reading a BOOK". This is not always an option but when it IS I have been making a concerted effort over the past year to do THAT instead, which has been frankly DELIGHTFUL and resulted in my reading SIXTY SEVEN books in total.

I know this because I have also kept a RECORD of what books I have read, when I finished them (or in some cases GAVE UP because I am a grown-up and am allowed to do that now) and what I THORT. This was done for two reasons: firstly because I like having LISTS of things that I've done as it gives me a super-charged thrill of achievement, and secondly because I sometimes FORGET what I've read and end up reading it again.

Of the 67 books listed 32 were GRAPHIC NOVELS, a term I used ADVISEDLY to mean comics in BOOK form rather than actual comics which should always be called COMICS. Lots of these were re-reads, sometimes for FUN and sometimes for SERIOUS ACADEMIC REASONS, which meant I got to enjoy some of my FAVES like "All Star Superman" and the Alan Moore/Alan Davis "Captain Britain" all over again. Of the new (or at least new to ME) stuff that I read I think my favourites were "The Filth" (which I gave up on after two issues when it first came out but turns out to be BRILLO), Ryan North's "Star Trek Lower Decks" collections, "Badtime Bedtime Stories" by Leo Baxendale (which is AMAZING), "The Power Fantasy", "Asterix in Lusitania" and "Giant" by Mollie Ray which I bought while at The Lakes and is beautifully done and suddenly VERY MOVING.

Of the text-only books 15 were NON-FICTION and were mostly, though not entirely, to do with COMICS or THE BEATLES, of which probably "Cartoons and Comic Strips" by Terry Bave was my favourite, not because it's especially well-written or informative (it basically says he liked comics and he and his wife Shiela got their ideas from Seeing Kids Doing Things when they went for a walk) but because he came across as LOVELY. Terry and Shiela Bave crop up a LOT in the podcast and now whenever they do I feel a glow of AFFECTION towards them. Other than that my non-fiction FAVES were "The Ark Before Noah" by Irving Finkel (which was, to my surprise, VERY funny), a lovely memoir about a BADGER called "Brocky" by Sylvia Shepherd, and "How To Be In A Pop Group" by Alan Jenkins what I have spoke of before and still HIGHLY recommend.

That leaves 20 FICTION books, including the full Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist, which was HIGHLY enjoyable this year. Amazingly, one of the ones I liked the most actually WON this time too!

I also read TWO (2) SCIENCE FICTION TRILOGIES last year, which is not the sort of thing I would usually want to get involved with. The longest running, for me, was the SPACE trilogy by CS Lewis, which I read over the course of nine months with GAPS in between to recover. This starts off FAIRLY normal in the first book, where it's a bit like HG Wells or something and then gets progressively more DERANGED as ACTUAL SPACE ANGELS turn up and then MERLIN. It's all quite good fun - especially the end of the first book where the hero basically goes "PUB!" - but A Bit Much and VERY LONG. The other trilogy was "Shards of Earth" by Adrian Tchaikovsky whose books I like a LOT. This wasn't QUITE as much fun as the standalone books or the ones with SPIDERS and OCTOPUSES in them, but I read them all one after the other in the space of a couple of months so they must have been pretty good!

That leaves nine other books, my favourites of which were probably "My Cousin Rachel" by Daphne Du Maurier (EXCITING!), "Mill On The Floss" by George Eliot (a bit long but also DEAD GOOD), the first two "Fermi's Progress" books by Chris Farnell (dead good, dead FUNNY) and "The Bullet That Missed" by Richard Osman, which I read entirely out of order but which I also read in about two days as it was V FUNNY.

There were a few books along the way that I didn't finish, and quite a few that I wanted to finish a lot sooner than I did (AUTHORS! Write shorter books please!), but for the most part it was a GRATE year of READING which was a whole lot more enjoyable than spending the equivalent time looking at rubbish stuff on my phone and thinking "Is that real or AI?" BOOKS! They are ACE!

posted 8/1/2026 by MJ Hibbett

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