The Big Reading List

I primarily use The Storygraph for tracking my reads, but I'll post them here too. The list is categorized from most recent to oldest and by year when possible. For links, I default to author website, publisher website, and/or independent booksellers - whichever comes up first in a search. Editions may not necessarily match. I don't include my DNF ("Did Not Finish") books, which would probably increase the list length by 20-30%.

Current

Stone Sword Table, Various

2026

• Jonny Appleseed Joshua Whitehead

• The Mercy of Gods, James S. A. Corey

• The Foucault Reader, Michel Foucault

  • Foucault (along with Fanon) seems to be a major influence on many of my favourite socio-political authors. His thoughts around biopower and panopticism are very important for analyzing the contemporary world through a critical lens.

• Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Michel Foucault

• Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), Dean Spade

• Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, Nick Turse

• Embers: One Ojibway's Meditations, Richard Wagamese

• Dark Matter, Michelle Paver

• Horrorstör, Grady Hendrix

  • This book was a very underwhelming start to the year. I should've seen the gimmick-y read coming.

2025

• The Stone Sky, N. K. Jemisin

  • This entire trilogy was great. Jemisin is a new favourite author of mine.

• The Obelisk Gate, N. K. Jemisin

• Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, Shawn Wilson

  • Ontology, Epistemology, Methodology, Axiology. Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Circular time. Relationships and accountability applied to a respectful research paradigm.

• Orientalism, Edward Said

• Mapping the Interior, Stephen Graham Jones

• The Fifth Season, N. K. Jemisin

• Taaqtumi, Various

• Bad Indians Book Club, Patty Krawec

  • Very cool follow-up to Becoming Kin, focused on writing from marginalization. Particularly interesting look at the Indigenous perspective on the apocalyptic and horror genres.

• The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber, David Wengrow

  • Second time reading. This was an eye-opener for me the first time I read it. I think I may actually like Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years better.

• The Kaiju Film, Jason Barr

• Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham

• The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

• Pollution is Colonialism, Max Liboiron

  • Lots of insights about ideas of waste, historical views on the "safe" amount of pollution which an environment can handle, and so on. Seems important for those taking a serious look at changing ecological systems and human relationships with them.

• The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller

• The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli

• Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

  • What a monster of a book.

• Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials, Marion Gibson

• Land Justice: Re-imagining Land, Food, and the Commons, Various

• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara W. Tuchman

• How to Change Everything, Naomi Klein

  • I read this one to see if it might be a suitable recommendation for younger folks. Seems that way. Someone who has spent any significant amount of time reading about climate and geopolitics may not find anything new here, though.

• An African History of Africa, Zeinab Badawi

  • A very useful book for those (i.e. most) of us who've learned very little about Africa other than something focused on ancient Egyptian civilizations as part of high school history classes.

• Zegaajimo, Various

  • Another good collection of Indigenous horror stories. Surprisingly, I found the story from Waubgeshig Rice (whose Moon of the Crusted Snow and Moon of the Turning Leaves I loved) underwhelming.

• After the People Lights Have Gone Off, Stephen Graham Jones

• One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad

  • A very timely, practical example of necropolitics at work.

• Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures, Various

• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones

  • One of my favourite fiction reads of the year.

• Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe

  • Second time reading. Seems like it'll become a yearly look.

• If I Must Die, Refaat Alareer

• Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici

• At the Trough: The Rise and Rise of Canada's Corporate Welfare Bums, Laurent Carbonneau

• Tiger Lung, Simon Roy, Jason Wordie

  • A collection of prehistory fantasy comics. Cool concepts, but a little disjointed.

• Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction, Damien Keown

• Confucianism: A Very Short Introduction, Daniel K. Gardner

• The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien

  • Tolkien's works have shaped my reading and media interest for a very long time, so I decided to finally give this a go. While it's nice to have some idea of the broader mythology he had in mind, this was a brutal and boring slog of a read. I can't say I'll ever do so again.

• The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon

  • I'm surprised I hadn't read this one earlier. Challenging, but it really is an important book.

• The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World, David Graeber

  • Posthumous release of essays and speeches by Graber. If anyone wants to get a feel for his thinking, this seems like a good place to start. For certain topics (i.e. "bullshit jobs", which is also a book), I think the essay is actually sufficient.

• Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, Various

  • This was amazing. Give it a read.

• Black Sun, Rebecca Roanhorse

• Hinduism: A Very Short Introduction, Kim Knott

• Between Doorways: Explorations Into Liminal Space, Various

  • Another short story collection, this time about "neverwheres" and in-between places. There are some really creepy ones in here.

• Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future, Patty Krawec

  • One of my favourites.

• Chaos: Making a New Science, James Gleick

  • This book blew my mind when I first read it in ~2009, and it helped inspire me to pursue a degree in physics. However, I didn't find any of that magic while re-reading it, and I don't think I'll read it again. Funny how that works.

• Howls From the Dark Ages, Various

  • The first of many forays into short story collections of the year.

• The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott

  • Interesting overview, and it meshes well with writing from Graeber/Wengrow and others. I found it to be a little repetitive, though - while I understand this isn't my area of expertise and a lot of details given might be useful to similar researchers, I felt that it could've been half as long.

• The Abrahamic Religions: A Very Short Introduction, Charles L. Cohen

• The Blacktongue Thief, Christopher Buehlman

  • A good example of very concise worldbuilding, combined with some novel takes on common fantasy tropes. I hear the audiobook is also good.

• The North-West is Our Mother, Jean Teillet

• The Lost World, Michael Crichton

  • The movie Jurassic Park is possibly my all-time favourite, and I love both books. Reading this again recently reminded me of how much more entertaining the second book is than the corresponding movie.

• African Religions: A Very Short Introduction, Jacob K. Olupona

  • One of several religion-oriented AVSI books I had planned to read in 2025.

2024

• Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, Various

• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

• The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer

  • This felt like a very compact and actionable version of her previous book, Braiding Sweetgrass. I recommend it.

• Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

• The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord

• An African American and Latinx History of the United States, Paul Ortiz

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The IDW Collection Volume 1, Kevin Eastman, Tom Waltz, Erik Burnham

• Astonishing X-Men, Volume 1: Gifted, Joss Whedon

• Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton

• The Invention of Prehistory, Stefanos Geroulanos

• Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, Kohei Saito

• The Solutions Are Already Here: Strategies of Ecological Revolution From Below, Peter Gelderloos

• Anarchism and Other Essays, Emma Goldman

• Moon of the Turning Leaves, Waubgeshig Rice

  • An incredible follow-up to Moon of the Crusted Snow.

• Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe

  • Short but very insightful and hopeful (despite the title). Draws on Foucault and Fanon to describe the concept of necropolitics, ideas of the Other, applications of bio-power, and borderization. There's also some stuff in there about artificial intelligence-type developments. Apparently based on an earlier essay.

• Hyperobjects, Timothy Morton

  • The idea of a hyperobject (i.e. an object or concept distributed through both time and space, which has nonlinear, aperiodic influence on other objects; climate change is the primary example) seems useful, but I agree with many other reviews which suggest the book is too vague and the existing definition too broad.

• Elephants on the Edge, G.A. Bradshaw

• The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

• Hood Feminism, Mikki Kendall

• Moon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice

  • This was a very vivid and intense read, experiencing how a community struggles to get by in the wake of civilizational collapse.

• Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

  • Booktok recommendation. Stopped going on Booktok after.

• Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber

• The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones

• Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber

• The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, Rashid Khalidi

• The Causal Angel, Hannu Rajaniemi

• Between Two Fires, Christopher Buehlman

• The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins

• A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy, and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

• The Fractal Prince, Hannu Rajaniemi

2023

• Freedom is a Constant Struggle, Angela Y. Davis

• The Last Ronin, Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird, Tom Waltz

• Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire

• The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, Steve Brusatte

  • Lots of very interesting post-dinosaur evolutionary and ecological developments leading up to the current area that don't get enough attention.

• Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning From Indigenous Practices for Environmental Stability, Various

• The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi

• Canadian Labour in Crisis: Reinventing the Workers' Movement, David Camfield

• Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, Various

• X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, Chris Claremont

• Plastic Matter, Heather Davis

  • Plastic as a material reflection of societies' expectations about the world, its long-term consequences as part of our identity, and a form of kin for the future.

• Batman: Hush, Jeph Loeb, Jim Lee, Scott Williams

• Radicalized, Cory Doctorow

• Stonehenge, Bernard Cornwell

• The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada, Various

• Transgender History: A Resource for Today's Struggle - and Tomorrow's, Susan Stryker

• The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien

• The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien

• Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art, Rebecca Wragg Sykes

• The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien

• The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

• Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon

• The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan

2022

• Archaeology of the Night, Various
• The Will to Change, bell hooks
• The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
• Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon

Older

Non-exhaustive:

• The Expanse Series from James S.A. Corey
• Mort, Reaper Man, Soul Music, Hogfather, and Thief of Time, Terry Pratchett
• The Dark Elf Trilogy, R.A. Salvatore, along with some other random installments in the series
• The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, Paulette F.C. Steeves
• A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Great Silence, Milan M. Ćirković
• The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, Steve Brusatte
• Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family, Cynthia J. Moss
• Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of the World's Most Mysterious Continent, Gabrielle Walker
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles C. Mann
• How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney
• 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act, Bob Joseph
• Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Warfare in Neolithic Europe: An Archaeological and Anthropological Analysis, Julian Maxwell
• Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America, Paul S. Martin
• Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, Various
• Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano
• Cosmos, Carl Sagan