Sunday, 3 November 2024

2025 Anyone? Part Deux

I've previously looked at a potential 2025 Reading challenge, a 12 + 4 challenge to read the 16 books I've had the longest on my Goodreads page. If you haven't seen it already, you can go to the link by clicking on 12 + 4 above. The other 12 + 4 challenge I plan to have is to finish 16 series in 2025. (this is a specific challenge. It's possible I might finish more.) The series will follow below.

2025 12 + 4 Reading Challenge - Finish a Series or Two or 16

1. Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale) - The Testaments.

"When the van door slammed on Offred's future at the end of The Handmaid's Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead for her--freedom, prison or death.

With The Testaments, the wait is over.

Margaret Atwood's sequel picks up the story more than fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.

In this brilliant sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, acclaimed author Margaret Atwood answers the questions that have tantalized readers for decades."

2. Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows) - The Crooked Kingdom. As I understand it, this finished the Six of Crows but not the whole Grishaverse universe series.

"When you can’t beat the odds, change the game.

Kaz Brekker and his crew have just pulled off a heist so daring even they didn't think they'd survive. But instead of divvying up a fat reward, they're right back to fighting for their lives. Double-crossed and badly weakened, the crew is low on resources, allies, and hope. As powerful forces from around the world descend on Ketterdam to root out the secrets of the dangerous drug known as jurda parem, old rivals and new enemies emerge to challenge Kaz's cunning and test the team's fragile loyalties. A war will be waged on the city's dark and twisting streets—a battle for revenge and redemption that will decide the fate of the Grisha world."

3. Jayne Barnard (Maddie Hatter) - Maddie Hatter and the Timely Taffeta.

"Maddie Hatter’s third Adventure finds her in Venice on an all-expenses-paid assignment: report on the season’s most extravagant Carnevale costumes. Determined to land an inside scoop, she enlists the help of her half-Venetian friend, Lady Serephene, to penetrate Madame Frangetti’s Costume Atelier in disguise.

Serephene is pursuing plots of her own: training in secret for a career that’s forbidden by her family, and flirting madly with a low-born Scottish inventor in his airship laboratory. When the inventor’s fabulous new fabric is targeted by industrial spies, Serephene risks not only her family’s displeasure but her own safety to protect him and his work.

Pursued through the floating city’s legendary canals and squares, Maddie must draw on all her hard-won survival skills to keep herself and Serephene out of the spies’ clutches. With the help of unexpected allies among Venice’s underdogs, the daring young ladies just might reach Carnevale’s grand finale alive."

4. Giles Blunt (John Cardinal) - Crime Machine.

"A year after the death of his beloved and troubled wife, Catherine, John Cardinal has moved into a new, but very humid, condo. He has fallen into an easy routine of work on cold case files and platonic movie nights with friend and colleague Lise Delorme. The quiet of a snow-covered Algonquin Bay is shattered when the decapitated bodies of two people are found in a summer home on Trout Lake. The victims, visitors from Russia, are in Algonquin Bay attending the annual fur auction. This is by no means a routine murder investigation as Cardinal soon discovers, but a horrific piece of a very twisted puzzle. Blunt has, once again, given us a page-turning plot, a remarkable cast of characters and the comfort of John Cardinal at the helm."

5. Edgar Rice Burroughs (Land that Time Forgot) - Out of Time's Abyss.

"This is the tale of Bradley after he left Fort Dinosaur upon the west coast of the great lake that is in the center of the island. About them upon the ground, among the trees and in the air over them moved and swung and soared the countless forms of Caspak's teeming life. Always were they menaced by some frightful thing and seldom were their rifles cool, yet even in the brief time they had dwelt upon Caprona they had become callous to danger, so that they swung along laughing and chatting like soldiers on a summer hike."

6. Olivia E. Butler (Exogenesis) - Imago.

"From the award-winning author of Parable of the Sower : After the near-extinction of humanity, a new kind of alien-human hybrid must come to terms with their identity -- before their powers destroy what is left of humankind.

Since a nuclear war decimated the human population, the remaining humans began to rebuild their future by interbreeding with an alien race -- the Oankali -- who saved them from near-certain extinction. The Oankalis' greatest skill lies in the species' ability to constantly adapt and evolve, a process that is guided by their third sex, the ooloi , who are able to read and mutate genetic code.

Now, for the first time in the humans' relationship with the Oankali, a human mother has given birth to an ooloi Jodahs. Throughout his childhood, Jodahs seemed to be a male human-alien hybrid. But when he reaches adolescence, Jodahs develops the ooloi abilities to shapeshift, manipulate DNA, cure and create disease, and more. Frightened and isolated, Jodahs must either come to terms with this new identity, learn to control new powers, and unite what's left of humankind -- or become the biggest threat to their survival."

7. Agatha Christie (Tommy & Tuppence) - Postern of Fate.

"Tommy and Tuppence Beresford have just become the proud owners of an old house in an English village. Along with the property, they have inherited some worthless bric-a-brac, including a collection of antique books. While rustling through a copy of The Black Arrow, Tuppence comes upon a series of apparently random underlinings.

However, when she writes down the letters, they spell out a very disturbing message: "Mary Jordan did not die naturally." And sixty years after their first murder, Mary Jordan's enemies are still ready to kill. . . ."

8. John Christopher (The Tripods) - When the Tripods Came.

"When it comes to alien invasions, bad things come in threes. Three landings. One in England, one in Russia, and one in the United States. Three long legs, crushing everything in their paths, with three metallic arms, snaking out to embrace -- and then discard -- their helpless victims. Three evil beings, called Tripods, which will change life on this planet forever."




9. Justin Cronin (The Passage) - The City of Mirrors.

"The world we knew is gone. What world will rise in its place?

The Twelve have been destroyed and the terrifying hundred-year reign of darkness that descended upon the world has ended. The survivors are stepping outside their walls, determined to build society anew—and daring to dream of a hopeful future.

But far from them, in a dead metropolis, he waits: Zero. The First. Father of the Twelve. The anguish that shattered his human life haunts him, and the hatred spawned by his transformation burns bright. His fury will be quenched only when he destroys Amy—humanity’s only hope, the Girl from Nowhere who grew up to rise against him.

One last time light and dark will clash, and at last Amy and her friends will know their fate."

10. William Gibson (Sprawl) - Mona Lisa Overdrive.

"Mona is a young girl with a murky past and an uncertain future whose life is turned upside down when her pimp sells her to a plastic surgeon in New York and overnight she’s turned into someone else.

Angie Mitchell is a famous Hollywood Sense/Net star with a special talent. And despite the efforts of studio bosses to keep her in ignorance, Angie’s started remembering things. Soon she’ll discover who she really is . . . and why she doesn’t need a deck in order to enter cyberspace.

From inside the matrix, plots are set in motion and human beings are being played like pieces on a board. And behind the intrigue lurks the shadowy Yakuza, the powerful Japanese underworld, whose leaders ruthlessly manipulate people and events to suit their own purposes.

Or so they think . . ."

11. James Herbert (Rats) - Domain.

"The long-dreaded nuclear conflict. The city torn apart, shattered, its people destroyed or mutilated beyond hope. For just a few, survival is possible only beneath the wrecked streets - if there is time to avoid the slow-descending poisonous ashes. But below, the rats are waiting."






12. P.D. James (Cordelia Gray) - The Skull Beneath the Skin.

"Private detective Cordelia Gray is invited to the sunlit island of Courcy to protect the vainly beautiful actress Clarissa Lisle from veiled threats on her life. Within the rose red walls of a fairy-tale castle, she finds the stage is set for death."






Alt. 1. China Mieville (New Crobuzon) - Iron Council

"Following Perdido Street Station and The Scar , acclaimed author China MiĆ©ville returns with his hugely anticipated Del Rey hardcover debut. With a fresh and fantastical band of characters, he carries us back to the decadent squalor of New Crobuzon—this time, decades later.

It is a time of wars and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming city to the brink. A mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places.

In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope.

In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon’s most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the iron council. . . ."


Alt. 2. Leo Rosten (Hyman Kaplan) - The Education of Hyman Kaplan.

"The humorous adventures of Hyman Kaplan, the irrepressible student at the American Night Preparatory School for Adults, and his personal war with the English language. A classic work of American humor."







Alt. 3. Philipp Schott (Dr. Bannerman) - Eleven Huskies (It's possible that there may be more books in this series, but as of now, this is the last.)

"Peter Bannerman, veterinarian and amateur detective, deserves a summer vacation. Peter and his family head to a remote fishing lodge in northern Manitoba for a canoeing trip with his champion sniffer dog, Pippin. But a series of incidents color their plans. The lodge’s sled team of huskies has been poisoned and, at the same time, a floatplane crashes into the lake, killing the pilot and both passengers. While Peter works to save the huskies, it is discovered that the plane crash wasn’t an accident. It was murder. It’s been a hot and dry summer, and one morning the Bannerman family wakes up to find a forest fire spreading quickly. They manage to dodge the conflagration, making it back to the lodge before it becomes cut off from the outside world. Peter soon figures out that the murderer, who probably also poisoned the huskies, must be among the other guests or staff trapped with them at the lodge. The power fails. The now-enormous fire draws nearer. Can Peter discover the culprit in time?"

Alt. 4. Bart Somers (Commander Craig) - Abandon Galaxy!

"Commander Craig Battles for Survival on the Planet Thand.

If Craig makes one false move in this grotesque tournament of cunning and savage skill, he sacrifices his life and the lives of everyone in the galaxy.

If he wins, the deadly League of Outer Space Thieves will be prevented from blowing up the universe. As part of his reward, Craig will receive the exciting beauty Mylitta.

John Craig races against time as he struggles to save the world in the most dangerous adventure of his incredible career."

It's not set in stone yet, but this is one of my 2025 plans. Books may be adjusted. See any that interest you? 

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