2025 on Goodreads
A rebrand, reading, and writing
First, at the beginning of 2025, my profile name was plain “L,” and this was my profile image
According to GR’s “My Year in Books,” I read 199 books and stories, 60,712 pages, in 2025. That’s off by a bit: it probably should be 200 (based on a comparison with my 2025 reading challenge list). Here are my numbers for the previous years:
2024: 245, 74,216 pages
2023: 231, 77,626 pages
2022: 237, 64,158 pages
So I definitely read less in 2025. Of course, it’s not a game, and there is no goal post. On the other hand, I am always aware that there are huge numbers of very good books I hope to read before I die. So less reading, of itself, is a not-good thing.
This year, however, I know why I read less. I started writing fiction myself. And it IS as good thing that I am doing that and enjoying it, and what’s more, that I am spending enough time on it that I have to do less of other things.
Good stuff I read in 2025
Series
This year my main audiobook listening was Terry Pratchett‘s Discworld series. I began the year with #12 Witches Abroad, and I am now listening to #34 Thud!. They are much more as a whole than the sum of their parts. Since there are only (only!) 41 full-length novels in the series, I will reach the end before much longer. Sadly, I understand from others that I can expect the books to reflect Pratchett‘s descent into dementia as I approach the end.
I like Urban Fantasy a lot, but I find I have exhausted the UF sources I really like, those being mostly Charles Stross, Patricia Briggs, Seanan McGuire, and Ben Aaronovitch. So I was pleased to discover Anne Bishop‘s The Others. These are fun for me because they are set in Upstate New York, where I mostly grew up, and where my family still lives. You wouldn’t necessarily know it, since everything is named differently in The Others, but if you’re from the area, you’ll recognize the locations. Bishop evokes the savagery of a Buffalo winter well.
Individual works
Ovid‘s Metamorphoses is of course a classic. Many of the Greek and Roman myths you know reached you through Ovid. What I had never appreciated before reading Stephanie McCarter‘s translation was the thread of defiance against the gods that runs through it. This was a real rebellion and dangerous, because Emperor Augustus had been proclaimed a god. When Ovid mocked the gods, he was mocking the political leadership of the Roman Empire, not a safe thing to do. In fact, he spent much of his life in exile.
Julia Ioffe‘s Motherland is a remarkable history of Russia from the beginning of the twentieth century through the present. It is largely told from the point of view of the Jewish women who were Ioffe‘s ancestors. It’s beautifully written, and as gripping as a novel, though much more bleak than most novels.
Finally, Tristan Needham‘s Visual Differential Geometry and Forms : A Mathematical Drama in Five Acts 2021, Paperback was truly a joy.
The rebrand
I wanted a new digital identification, to keep my fiction author ID separate from my real life. For years now I had a blog on Google’s blogger, broken-engines. blogspot.com. I found that the email brok3nengines@gmail.com was available.
So, I went with that. I switched my profile pic to a fractal image I had myself made in response to a homework question when I was an Applied Math grad student. I created a substack.
In principle one can charge readers for access to ones substack, but mine is free, and I have no plans to charge for access in the foreseeable future. If you follow the link you’ll see a page inviting you to subscribe. You don’t need to subscribe to read my stuff. (There’s an obscure link that reads “Continue w/o subscription” -- feel free to use it. Or feel free to subscribe! I always get a nice warm feeling when a new subscriber signs up :-). )
If you do subscribe, you will be notified whenever I post something new on substack. I have two substack channels. You can subscribe to one or both. (When you first subscribe, you’ll get an email that tells you how to manage your subscriptions.)
One of them, called Brok3n Engines Reviews, is for my reviews of books and occasionally movies or TV shows. This channel is pretty active: I post on it about five times a week. The book reviews on this channels are mostly just reposts of my Goodreads reviews. However, when I review something that Goodreads (i.e. Amazon) doesn’t classify as a book, that review will appear only on substack.
The other channel is Brok3n Engines Creations. It’s where I put my fiction. This channel gets two posts a month, usually on the first and sixteenth of the month.
What I have written and plan to write
If you follow the link to Brok3n Engines Creations you’ll find there everything I have published since 1-May-2025. There are two or three poems, but most of my output is short stories. (I am, I regret to say, a lousy poet, so the volume of poetry is low.) There are now eleven stories. Several more are already written and queued up for release up to 1-May-2026. Most of the stories are standalone, but four of them, Futures 1 - 4, are chapters of a novella, or perhaps a novelette. There will be nine chapters total. Only chapter 9, the epilog, remains to be written. I have just begun a new series, currently scheduled to begin 16-Feb-2026.
It is my intention, once a year has passed, to collect all the stories I have published on substack and publish them as a book on Amazon through Kindle Direct. This will not be free -- Amazon doesn’t allow that, of course. But it will be as close to free as I’m allowed to make it.