Some books I read in 2025
2025 wasn't my most enthusiastic year of reading but I finished 83 books, and a lot of them were pretty good!
Highlights:
- Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha, a poet's novel (complimentary) that tells a whole complicated life in under 200 pages.
- Finally managed to read the whole of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the first Earthsea trilogy, too. Turns out there's a bunch of stuff at the end of LOTR - "The Scouring of the Shire" - that I never knew about. War-hardened hobbits cleaning house, shit yeah.
- Two continuations of classic dystopias: Margaret Atwood's The Testaments was enjoyable but inessential. More vital was Sandra Newman's Julia, a telling of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four from the perspective of Winston Smith's lover and co-conspirator. It's a bold and subversive book, one that I'm still thinking about six months later. (No spoilers, but I cackled with delight at the audacious closing paragraph.)
- Speaking of Orwell, I loved Dorian Lynskey's The Ministry of Truth, which examines Orwell's life and writing through the lens of his most famous work. The same author's Everything Must Go, a cultural history of humanity's preoccupation with the end of the world, was another standout.
- Two short, enigmatic books: White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings by Iain Sinclair and Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Please don't ask me to explain what happens in them.
- Two very good and very different satires on race and racism, both from the US: Percival Everett's savage The Trees and William Melvin Kelley's wry, pointed 1962 novel A Different Drummer.
- Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger, which takes as its foundation the country house ghost story and builds an intimate epic that is insightful, especially on class and gender, and compulsively readable. The ghost stuff is pretty scary, too.
- Ben Macintyre's books about WW2 and Cold War espionage, beautifully written (and beautifully read by the author on audiobook) yarns that "read like thrillers", as the cliche has it, but in this case it's true. Three recommendations: The Spy and the Traitor, about Soviet double agent Oleg Gordievsky; Agent Zigzag, about professional reprobate and British agent Eddie Chapman; and The Siege, a slight change of pace, about the 1980 hostage crisis at the Iranian embassy in London.
- Dana Stevens's excellent, expansive look at Buster Keaton's life and times, Camera Man.
- A couple of big books about WAR, namely Antony Beevor's Stalingrad and Downfall: Berlin 1945. On a cultural tip, but still WAR-related, I enjoyed Philipp Blom's The Vertigo Years, which examines the ways in which the times were a-changin' in Europe in the immediate pre-WW1 period. Didn't really tell me anything new, but it's an enjoyable synthesis.
- A couple of books about how fucked everything is - or is it?? (Yes.) Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, which everyone and their dog has probably already told you to read; and Wild Faith by Tal Lavin, an informed, witty and impassioned look at the rise and political consolidation of Christian Nationalism in the US, and indeed elsewhere.
- Favourite rereads: Wolf Hall (Mantel); Doctor Faustus (Mann); Operation Shylock (Roth); The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood); Northanger Abbey (Austen); various Chekhov stories.
Of course it's not all sunshine and lollipops.
- The worst book I finished out of devotion to its author was Angela Carter's debut novel, Shadow Dance. A terrible chore.
- The worst book I couldn't finish despite my devotion to its author was Vladimir Nabokov's Ada or Ardor. I don't even know if it's a bad book, but I've been trying to read it for twenty years and I'm not sure I'll ever crack it. It's charmless and off-putting and long.
- From the "Why don't I like this? Seems like something I should like!" Department, I'm afraid the appeal of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin books continues to elude me. I don't dislike them, but I'm not captivated. In theory they ought to be my ideal sort of comfort read, but in practice I can't get on board. (Seafaring joke there folks.) Perhaps I'm simply not middle-aged enough yet.
- Most disappointing old book was Ghost Story by Peter Straub which I've been planning to read for thirty years. I hated it. Drab and derivative. For the record, I read 187 of its 522 pages.
- Most disappointing new book was Shadow Ticket, the unexpected ninth novel from Thomas Pynchon. I'm happy for those who enjoyed it - which is a lot of people, going by my Bluesky feed - but I thought it was dreadful. Again, I read 117 of its 192 pages and it really didn't seem like it was going to improve.
2026 resolutions? Much the same as always: Read more! Read better! Maybe even do some posting on here. Who knows.