Finally Cleared a To-Be-Read Pile
Just managed to clear a to-be-read (TBR) pile, right on New Yearʼs Eve, 2025.
- The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin
- The Carpet People, Terry Pratchett
- October the First is Too Late, Fred Hoyle
- Stardust, Neil Gaiman
- The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut
- Inside Wakefield Prison (non-fiction), Jonathan Levi, Emma French
- The Massacre of Mankind, Stephen Baxter
- Let the Spacemen Beware, Poul Anderson
- Methuselaʼs Children, Robert Heinlein
- Fifth Planet, Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle
- Mindstar Rising, Peter F Hamilton
- Pyramids, Terry Pratchett
- The Bain of the Black Sword, Michael Moorcock
- Silas Morlock, Mark Cantrell
- The Black Cloud, Fred Hoyle
- The Cyberiad, Stanislaw Lem
Any TBR piles I have previously owned seldom amounted to more than one book, on rare occasions stretching to two. But here were Sixteen books, read in fifteen months. Probably the most intense and most stressful period, being an obsessive completist, of reading in my life; when I read books, I read every word carefully, cover to cover. The pile was 10 books in October 2024, following two surprise trove finds in a charity warehouse and a couple of unwanted ‘gifts’, shrank to 6 by February 2025, then grew to 11 after an irresistible birthday visit to At the Sign of the Dragon in Wigtown, Scotland. I bought the Cantrell work around September 2025 after reading an especially clever and enticing advertorial discussion piece the author wrote about the environs in which his work revolves, which I discovered while doom-scrolling social media.
The reading started with my first unexpected disappointment: The Left Hand of Darkness, written by one Iʼd heard so much of as a great social commentator, supposedly one of her better works, and with an enticing title. I found the book flat and ultimately pointless; a member of royalty flailing randomly between an extravagant regal life and the prospect of lifelong solitary confinement, ending up making an arduous voyage to get back where they started. Iʼll admit at this point that I was probably not in the right frame of mind to read this book, and that if it had been the last of the TBR pile instead of the first my attitude might have been inverted.
The other mild disappointments were Mindstar Rising which I actually enjoyed very much as a mindless romp, though it was not the cosmos-spanning epic I was expecting and surprisingly domestic, and The Bain of the Black Sword which was utter rubbish.
On the other hand, the unexpected surprises were the ultra-realistic works of Fred Hoyle, the unjustified extraordinary science fiction of Stanislaw Lem and Micheal Moorcock, and the almost ubiquitous two-part structure of many of the older works.
I discovered Hoyleʼs books in the charity warehouse, all three of them together, donated through the clearance of a readerʼs house. I found all of the books amazing. Hoyle clearly regarded writing as secondary to his career, but undertook it with some diligence and only when he knew he had a properly new idea to write about.
Having never read any Hoyle before, I have now read all three of his fictional works, happy happenstance leaving the best one until last, and am left wishing there was more to read. While October the First and Fifth Planet are extremely, and very cleverly, speculative, all three of the works portray the actions of people from the viewpoint of an extremely experienced astronomer who knows how government and academia interact to deal with such situations. But The Black Cloud, while also being unassailably fictitious, really comes close to how things might pan out, so that it serves as much as a historical note about the machinations of British and Western government than simply as a piece of science fiction. This is by far the best book I read in this period.
By far my happiest discovery, however, was The Cyberiad. Iʼve never read anything (Black Sword aside) which made no attempt to justify the science fiction. With Lem, this goes almost beyond believable human imagination and culminates, over and over again, with incredibly ingenious resolutions to far-out problems. While the work does become tedious in its relentless intensity (à la Terry Pratchett), it is the book which brought me the most entertainment.
The fact that Black Sword doesnʼt justify itself is due to the extremely poor quality of the presentation. It is clearly written to entice young boys into reading, but the stuff is just awful, with gaps, zero development of concepts or background, and weak direction.
The books The Sirens of Titan, Methuselaʼs Children and Fifth Planet all showed the two-part trait: start in a relatively normal environment, introduce some clever futurist deviances from normal life; explore and develop this world calmly in the first half of the book, and then in the second half blow the thing apart by going to town with the imagination. I think the main reason was the cinematic drive at the time to keep fantastical things off the screen for as long as possible, keeping the audience hanging on for the action which is always going to be ultimately disappointing due to the limitations of the special effects which were available in those days. By contrast, modern cinema likes to hit the audience with the special effects from the start, and so produces a more consistent, as well as more bombastic, story line, though one which tends to be heavily scene-by-scene. This shows up in the one modern book I read: Silas Morlock, which clearly takes its cues, characters, and structure from modern—post Star Wars—cinematic events; that was a competent work but slightly silly in its premises and felt more like a screenplay than a novel.
The Sirens of Titan turned out pretty much as I expected, though I was surprised to find Vonnegut to be very loose on the science side. I can tolerate this in the name of variety, but donʼt think Iʼll be looking for any more.
The Massacre of Mankind is an incredibly well written monument to science fiction (it is an imagined follow-up to War of the Worlds), a real indulgence and proper piece of escapism from the England I live in. It is almost overbearingly long and niggling in its detail, but at least is consistent with it through to the end.
The rest of the books I can look over and say that I have thoroughly enjoyed the journey within and through them all. I learnt more about variety in this period of my life (even though I do often make effort to stray to other genres, including romantic classics, occasional horror, and some number of murder/mystery/detective novels). I have also learned that, of all microspecies of work, the ones I historically harboured are actually the ones I really rather prefer to read: solid science fiction, properly described and justified within the context of the speculative innovation, with English prose serving to add extra depth to dryness where possible. At this point I hold up Frankenstein, Neuromancer and now The Black Cloud as my favourite novels.
While The Left Hand of Darkness disappointed me and Mindstar Rising was not the work I was expecting, I will definitely pick either of these authors up again if I come across them, as I am left with the feeling that more data are needed to do their appraisal justice.
At the end of it all, I learnt that reading is more rewarding when it is relaxed, not forced, and I have found my stress levels receding linearly with the falling level of the TBR pile. And now it is done I am returning to mathematical textbooks for a while to turn me away from the forced consumption of fiction, which really has been a large stress on my life these past 15 months, and vow to not get myself into that position again. From now on Iʼll only buy a book if I have no other reading going on at the time.
I am feeling exhausted, and ever so slightly elated.