Post #11: 2025 reading tier list

I was going to wait a little longer for this, but I don't think I'll be finishing the book I'm currently reading before the new year (Backbone of the nation: mining communities and the great strike of 1984-85 by Robert Gildea - which I'm enjoying!) so here we are:

Literally changed me as a person:

• The Black Insider, Dambudzo Marechera

• Burnout, Hannah Proctor

• The Book of Records, Madeleine Thien

• Dogs at the Perimeter, Madeleine Thien

• Mirror Nation, Don Mee Choi

• Hardly War, Don Mee Choi

• DMZ Colony, Don Mee Choi

• The Dispossessed, Ursula K LeGuin

Re-read <3:

• Dogs at the Perimeter, Madeleine Thien. After I finished this, I immediately had to turn back to page 1 and start again so I could absorb it properly.

• Poétique de l'emploi, Noémi Lefebvre

• Do not say we have nothing, Madeleine Thien

Could not get better than this:

• Living things, Munir Hachemi, tr. Julia Sanches

• Pig Earth, John Berger

• A Theory of Birds, Zaina Alsous

• Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte... unfortunately

• Rich and Poor, Jacob Wren

• When we sold god's eye, Alex Cuadros

• Polyamorous love song, Jacob Wren

• The Aesthetics of resistance, vol III, Peter Weiss, tr. Joel Scott

• Against the loveless world, Susan Abulhawa

• Blood on the forge, William Attaway

• Tip of the spear, Orisanmi Burton

• The Waiter, Kwan Ann Tan (!!!! <333)

• Toddler-Hunting and other stories, Taeko Kono, tr. Lucy North

• The god of small things, Arundhati Roy

Incredible

• Crook Manifesto, Colson Whitehead

• Everything for everyone: an oral history of the New York Commune 2052-72 by M E O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi

• Un captif amoureux, Jean Genet

• Mammoth, Eva Baltasar, tr. Julia Sanches

• Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq, tr. Deepa Bhasthi

• Savage Coast, Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

• From A to X, John Berger

• Ban en banlieue, Bhanu Kapil

• My lesbian novel, Renee Gladman

• A flat place, Noreen Masud

• Memory Piece, Lisa Ko

• Cry, Mother Spain, Lydie Salvayre, tr. Ben Faccini

• Landbridge, Y-Dang Troeung

Great!!!

• The essential Dykes to watch out for, Alison Bechdel

• Siblings, Jay Bernard, Mary Jean Chan, Will Harris, Nisha Ramayya

• It lasts forever and then it's over, Anne de Marcken

• The first jasmines, Saima Begum

• Dawn, Octavia E Butler - read with Lis

• Good Girl, Aria Aber

• The Hajar Book of Rage, ed. Farhaana Arefin

• The Common Wind, Julius Scott

• Portrait of an island on fire, Ariel Saramandi

• Coop, Nida Sajid

Nice, good

• Guerrilla USA: The George Jackson Brigade and the Anticapitalist Underground of the 1970s, Daniel Burton-Rose

• How beautiful we were, Imbolo Mbue

• A blind salmon, Julia Wong Kcomt tr. Jennifer Shyue

• There there, Tommy Orange

• America is not the heart, Elaine Castillo

• Fundamentally, Nussaibah Younis

• Participation, Anna Moschovakis

• A rage in Harlem: June Jordan and architecture, Nikil Saval

• Musical elaborations, Edward Said

• Wildcat dome, Yuko Tsushima, tr. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

• POLICES !, Sonia Chambretto

• God-disease, An Chang Joon

• Determination, Tawseef Khan

• Capitalists must starve, Park Seolyeon, tr. Anton Hur

I read it.

• The hive and the honey, Paul Yoon

• Tokyo Express, Seichô Matsumoto

• The case of the socialist witchdoctor and other stories, Hama Tuma

• Nothing special, Nicole Flattery - I might have put this higher except that sadly I had literally completely forgotten that I'd even read this until I saw it on my Goodreads. Just utterly wiped from my mind in every way.

• The free people's village, Sim Kern

• The racial imaginary, ed. Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, Cap Max King

• On the calculation of volume I, Solveig Balle, tr. Barbara Haveland

• Black sunlight, Dambudzo Marechera

• Milk, Joanna Wolfarth

• The hypocrite, Jo Hamya

• Your driver is waiting, Priya Guns

Nobody should read this

• Kent State, Derf Backderf. I very rarely will put in a year-end tier list that I hated something (I'd rather just put it in 'I read it' and leave it at that), but this was actively bad and I don't think anyone would get anything out of it apart from being misled and condescended to. Perhaps worth studying as a cautionary tale of what can go terribly wrong when storytelling around solidarity movements end up focusing entirely on Western protesters, their repression, and their suffering, so that the cause they were originally trying to highlight and the imperialist violence they were originally trying to disrupt become the merest of backdrops, revealing that people like Backderf never considered Vietnamese and Cambodian people to be truly human at all.

Another note is I'm still in the middle of reading Wild Thorns by Sahar Khalifeh, tr. Trevor LeGassick and Elizabeth Ferneo with Melissa. It is entirely my fault that we have not been able schedule read-together sessions in the later half of this year and I promise to do better in 2026.

I've been getting more into non-fiction books, particularly history, which is new to me and something I want to keep maintaining as long as I'm not forcing anything on myself. Unfortunately, my local library's history selection is not very good. There is more stuff on specifically Britain's role in WWII than all of Africa, Latin America, and Asia put together, I'm certain. I'd welcome any recommendations of history books along the lines of what I have on this list as well as Floating coast by Bathsheba Demuth, which I read last year.

And in terms of short-form writing, I don't keep a good list of articles, essays etc I've read that have really blown me away (I probably should), so instead here are a couple tabs I currently have open on my browser* that are really worth reading:

• Death and resistance: a dispatch from HMP Low Newton by Madeleine Norman

• Winning the battle of empty stomachs: hunger striker Bilal Diab interviewed by Linah Alsaafin

• ‘People Struggle Where They Are’: Joshua Clover on Riots, Strikes and Communes That Are Already Here by Ronja Mälström

*Another achievement is that this year I attempted twice to quit Google Chrome and I think this time it's stuck.

Today, three prisoners in the UK continue to be on full hunger strike: Heba Muraisi (day 57), T Hoxha (day 51), and Kamran Ahmed (day 50); Lewie Chiaramello is also on day 39 of fasting every other day. I hope that in the new year everyone will continue to put effort into foregrounding abolitionist principle and practice, which, for me at least, keeps me somewhat grounded. Venceremos.