I’m a sucker for a good dinosaur book, as 2025’s list will show. Ultimately, what stuck with me since January is how well this book does time travel and government influence on it. If you’ve seen Tenet, you’ll know. Where one story starts, another ends (and vice-versa). Don’t look at it as a reskinned Jurassic Park, because it isn’t. I promise.
These books are fantastic. Full stop. I transposed the visuals of the movie characters over those in the books. Ian Malcolm will always be a sexy Jeff Goldblum and not a pudgy, balding, nasally man to me. The carnotaur light switch scene is my favorite and shows the ingenuity of the returning crew. This is my guilty treat series to return to when I need comfort.
The Count of Monte Cristo was my last book of 2025, and what a heavy one to read in December. It probably took me a full month (or maybe more) to digest this beast of a narrative and sit with the characters. As a person from my life said to me as I was reading it, it is the “perfect revenge story”, or depending who you ask its “a book about a sandwich”. The only way to know for sure is to read it. I go back to Dumas’ description of Danglars frequently – (Chapter 9 right at the end)
Danglars was alone, but neither troubled nor disturbed. Danglars was even happy, because he had taken revenge on an enemy and ensured himself the place on the Pharaon that he had feared he might lose. Danglars was one of those calculating men who are born with a pen behind their ear and an inkwell instead of a heart. To him everything in the world was subtraction or multiplication, and a numeral was much dearer than a man, when it was a numeral that would increase the total (while a man might reduce it)
What Dumas has essentially said is that Danglars is a robot, or a computer, instead of a Man. But this was before computers even existed, yet with his choice of words, we can know what he was saying even back then. 200 years, and yet things remain the same. Incredible
That is all for my favorite books of 2025. I could include books I didn’t like, but I don’t want to bring that kind of negativity to the table.
BrandonKeck.NET 