Wyrm Lore

Mae's Top Reads of 2025!

I wanted to put together a little highlight reel of the year's reads, so here it is!

The Masquerade series by Seth Dickinson: This series is is all fantasy politics. There's no magic or fairies or prophecies, just Seth Dickinson's invented world and the titanic machinations of Empire. And it is electric...Baru herself is the epitome of ruthlessness. Her goals are noble—her desire to free her home, to end the tyranny of the Masquerade—but she will do anything to achieve those goals. She is a truly fascinating character, calculating, controlled, brilliant—and constantly tormented by the need to weigh her choices and the potential futures ahead.

The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin: Le Guin captures truly great sci-fi because this work is so imbued with curiosity. Le Guin is asking questions at the heart of any great sci-fi work: What defines humanity? What can we achieve, and how is it done, and what does that mean for society? What is society? What does it mean to be alone? What does it mean to be part of a whole? To me, sci-fi can't be truly sci-fi without a measure of philosophy, and The Dispossessed has this in droves.

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield: Armfield's writing beautifully illustrates this journey, and she does a particularly good job of doling out information a little at a time, so that the reader often share's in Miri's confusion and muddled state of mind.

The Originalism Trap by Madiba K. Dennie: Dennie does a great job making this book accessible to everyone...She doesn't stop at "here's what's wrong" either--she has proposal and suggestions for how to counter the outsized influence of this once-disfavored theory and what we as citizens can do to push back against it.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter: The book is obviously well-researched, and Hofstadter does a thorough job of documenting his sources and influences, as well as recommending additional reading on a broad range of topics touched on in his own book. So much of what he establishes here makes perfect sense when looking at modern American society. He so neatly threads the needle between where we started and where we are now that at some moments, it felt like the fog was lifting on something I should have seen ages ago.

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez: Jimenez's writing is beautiful and vivid—for good or for ill, as there are some gruesome events that take place—and really sweeps you up in the events of the story. He also does a wonderful job capturing the emotional mindsets of the characters. In particular, I thought the way he handled the relationship of the two main protagonists, Jun and Keema, was very realistic given who they are, and the emotional payoff of his taking the time to work through that was so worth it.
And for the haters among us, below the cut are my most disappointing reads of 2025.
( Booooo )

Title: Empty Wardrobes
Author: Maria Judite de Carvalho
Translator: Margaret Jull Costa
Genre: Fiction, literary

I collect false treasures in empty wardrobes.

This quote by Paul Eluard opens book #14 from the "Women in Translation" rec list, which continues to fatten up my TBR list. This is Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. This novella, originally published in the 1960s, is about the ways in which women are subsumed by the men in their lives, or otherwise are buffeted about with less control over their lives than they ought to have.

The forward by Kate Zambreno is a wonderfully complementary piece. She talks about the anger she feels going to a woman's funeral and hearing the dead woman sanctified by men in her life who did nothing but take from her, who can speak of her only to praise what she did for others, and can say nothing about what the woman herself was. 

Sometimes you can read a book and just know the author was angry when she wrote it. This is one of those. The book uses the phrase "discreet rage" about one of its characters, and I think that sentiment succinctly describes the whole book. The protagonist, Dora Rosario, is ten years into widowhood, and she has devoted her entire life to mourning her unremarkable husband as much as she had previous devoted her life to supporting his every opinion regardless of whether or not she agreed with it. Now, a decade on, her mother-in-law reveals something about Dora's late husband that changes her entire perspective.

I would like to believe we are moving away from the world portrayed in Empty Wardrobes (though not with as much success as I'd like), but this is a stark reminder of how even a few generations ago, in the Sixties, a woman's identity was so controlled by her husband's. There are only two men in this book--Duarte, Dora's dead husband, and Ernesto, the longtime partner of a side character--and they both, through social structures, exercise incredible control over the lives of the women around them without any respect or even knowledge of their impact.

The three main women in this book--Dora, her daughter Lisa, and the narrator--each take a different approach to the male romantic partners in their lives, and none of them comes out the better for it (well, perhaps for Lisa, but I personally doubt it will last), because the ultimate problem is societal attitudes about the way men and women are meant to relate to each other. 

It's not a long book, and I can't say much more without spoiling things, but I also think it does some fabulous things with its narration and perspective, and the way it doles out information. Really an excellent framing that allows for a lot of fluidity and filling in gaps with your own visions while remaining clear in the nature of the story it's telling. 

This book was only translated into English in 2021, which is a shame, because I think it would have struck a nerve much earlier, but we have it now! Costa does an excellent job with the work too; the writing is full of punchy phrases like the above, and she captures some realistic dialogue--characters repeating themselves, responding in ways that don't quite match up with what was asked, etc.--while keeping it natural-sounding.