2025 Reading Roundup
You know what it is
There was a lot of unfinished business and almost too many standouts this year, giving it a sheen of quality over quantity. I read more non-fiction than in the past several years combined because the good fiction I read was so satisfying that it was hard to move on from. I became addicted to historical romance novels (not counted below) on audiobook, set in old St. Giles, London.
Overall, I trended toward escapism and romanticism —doing what I accuse others of—trying to get back to a world long gone, when I should be running full speed because the old world is nipping at my heels. But I find myself better equipped to meet things as bad as they are, the more I carve out time for myself to step away and gain perspective. I always checked out the most boring books at the library as a kid about the countryside and the Middle Ages. My most base desire is to have no phone and to reread King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. That’s all to say, maybe I gave myself more latitude to step outside my “book project” of the last few years, reading and writing primarily about socialist fiction, and read some really boring or more arcane stuff I wouldn’t recommend to most people.
As for volume, I completed around 30 of the 50 or so books I picked up. I’m coming to accept that 25-35 is my average; I could set my watch to it. With 35-40 being an exceptionally dedicated 1 in 5 years. I see some concern trolling on my timeline about “over-consuming” books and literature, supposedly encouraged by apps like Goodreads, Letterboxd, or maybe even end-of-year lists like this one. That concern doesn’t carry much weight with me. If people can comfortably and excitedly read or watch that much, I say, eat your heart out.
My worst reading habit still stands where I only like to read midday, which is often eclipsed by my day job. At night, exhausted from that spiritually deleterious stuff, I will fall asleep just looking over at the book on my nightstand, passing out at the thought of opening a page. To avoid being a weekend warrior, I started setting a timer for 30 minutes M-F around quitting time before I slink off into other, less salubrious “decompression” activities, and that has helped. Halftime during a basketball game is also a great reading window. Things-cooking-in-the-oven is another secret window.
Other excuses for not reading:
Painting/sketching won almost every time against Reading/writing
I took on more editorial work and community care work this year than in the past year
I watched 60 episodes of The Practice instead (the ‘90s Boston Legal prequel about defense attorneys)
I’m watching every single regular-season Rockets basketball game
A lot of novels are bad
I do this other annoying thing that limits my variety or the introduction of new authors: if I like an author and want to read their body of work, I will read one a year. I don’t like to read all their books in a row, but it also ends up clogging up the pipes because of the cascade of familiar faces that pile up each following year. This occupies a lot of my TBR: I’ll read one Zola, one McKay, one Giono, one Bambara, etc., annually until I’m finished with their oeuvres. But new faces are constantly being added to the mix, making 10 out of 30 slots taken from the outset. Something for me to consider next year.
Tops
Song of the World - Jean Giono
Another perfect adventure in the French countryside from Giono. This was so magnificent, climbing up the river and then down the river for revenge and for love. Giono published this as a serial when he was disgusted with urban society, going against the fashion of the time to return to nature and to more classic heroism. Even if he was just RETVRN posting, it fed my soul. The back of the book features no blurbs, only a note from Giono himself ranting about how much he hates everyone and everything but nature and manly guys.
The Plains - Gerald Murnane
I hate overly formalist, experimental, and abstract stuff, and despite that, this was the best thing I read all year. It is so honest despite all it is “doing” (and it does it well). The best part for me is that the Plainsmen (of the titular Plains) are so erudite and cosmopolitan, even if only about their own corner of the world. Many writers approach the humble places they come from with a comedic treatment instead of veneration or honor, and seeing that tendency broken here was beautiful. I enjoyed it for the same reasons I enjoyed Song of the World—I’m aging and don’t care as much for parody or irony, I want something absolute and transcendental, pure from the source. Murnane worked hard here, but he wasn’t trying. I also found the romance buried in this to be thoroughly moving.
The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
Years ago, I knew a bookseller in Portland who was going through a terrible divorce after having a baby, he quit his job as a financial advisor, went into a deep depression, and said he really only liked reading Thomas Hardy. No baby or divorce for me, but I definitely hit a wall of some kind, so in Hardy I Trusted. There is a scene in this book where two characters play a game of dice in the woods that is more thrilling than any action movie of the last century. The world doesn’t know true drama, in the Greek sense, like this anymore. If you like the movie Closer (2004) this is the book for you.
The Girl - Meridel Le Sueur
A bleak heist novel that was blacklisted during the McCarthy era about a young woman working at a beer hall who falls in love with a patron and then helps him and his buddies rob a bank. The real story at the heart of this book, though, is about female friendship that endures after the money runs dry. Le Suerur is a U.S. proletariat literature movement staple. I started reading some of her other work, I Hear Men Talking and Other Stories after this, but DNFed for no reason I can recall.
Transit - Anna Seghers
A book where all anyone does is drink wine, eat pizza, be cold, and go to the visa office in Marseilles. I really hate reading World War II lit, I’m sick of it from the NYRB boom, but this was so well worth it from Comrade Seghers. I’m lukewarm on the Petzold adaptation.
To the Wedding - John Berger
Oh, to be a better novelist than you are a critic when you are mostly known as an all-time critic. If you want a really sad Euro Trip read, look no further.
Balzac - Stefan Zweig
A biography about the time when Balzac’s mommy issues were so bad he slept with his mom’s elderly neighbor for like a decade, and then traveled to Sardinia to try and buy a silver mine so his Russian long-distance girlfriend would leave her husband, and then he was down so bad he started a pineapple farm to impress said girlfriend, oh and then he drank so much coffee trying to write books to be able to afford all his unavailable old gals he died.
Balzac, I wish you lived long enough to have an American Express card, Vyvanse Rx, and file Chapter 7 bankruptcy. We need to hide this book from the Safdie brothers.
Last Days - Brian Evenson
A gory thriller better than any Stephen King I ever picked up about an amputation cult, one man is dead set on escaping and dismantling … one limb of his own at a time.
Ice - Anna Kavan
Do I hate that underneath all the best-in-class writing this is some cheeky anti-authoritarianism allegory? Yeah. Was this the only book I read whose writing was on par with Murnane? Also yes. Once again, formalism and abstract stuff that didn’t bother me one bit. Devoured this in two sittings on a 20-degree day, the premier winter read.
Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata
What a lonely little winter novella. Take it on any weekend trip from now until March and enjoy a really gut-wrenching situationship between a geisha and her client in a remote hot spring town.
A Long Way from Home - Claude McKay
McKay continues to fascinate me as a partisan of the Bolshevik Revolution who neither embraced Stalin nor Trotsky fully and grew disillusioned with organized communism, particularly due to the party's racism. He remained a leftist but a very critical one, and more and more of these figures stack up on the fringes of our current U.S. leftist organizations as these formations continue to fail and fail again along these same lines.
This collection of essays names names as we see McKay recount nights spent with Charlie Chaplin and his racist dinner date, yet there is also something keeping the reader at arm’s length. My guess is it was written at the urging of a publisher. It is still well worth reading for the stories of McKay hiding incriminating papers in his shoe while narrowly escaping a raid at Sylvia Pankhurst’s HQ in London, or Martin Anderson Nexø waving to him longingly at a big party convening in the USSR, or his total reluctance to ever go to that clout-chasing fraud Gertrude Stein’s house in Paris.
Substitute Wife for a Prizefighter - Alice Coldbreath
I added historical romance genre audiobooks into the fold late in the year because I was tired of reading all the literary discourse about how upsetting and anti-intellectual it is that women are consuming copious amounts of written smut. I enjoy it in the same way I want to watch a sitcom sometimes, or the way Hulu’s Normal People is just soft-core porn; it all has its place in the zeitgeist. This is entertainment, maybe more than art. Still, there is an art to producing strong entertainment in this category, which I’ve been particularly interested in from my experience as a former ghostwriter in the erotic genre.
This book is part of a series where all the main male characters are prizefighters in the Victorian Era. In this particular one, there is a marriage of convenience between a fallen woman pushed into garment work and an over-the-hill prizefighter that blossoms into a love match. Together, along with his dysfunctional family, they tour county fairs and live out of a wagon. He is possessive and adoring, and she is practical and naive. And yes, every nipple is referred to as a rosebud, and every clit is a pearl.
Coldbreath is known for her lengthy or frequent depictions of the mundanity of domestic life, and some find all the spilled ink over the preparation of a cup of tea tedious; others find them comforting or cozy, or even political in the weight she gives to domestic labor in her stories.
Unfinished
These were some of my favorite books of the year, so I’m putting them next to the Tops. If they are so great, why have I not finished them? Most of these are tomes, or I have copies that are cumbersome to carry around or throw in a purse. Or they have really tiny print, or I felt it wasn’t “the right season” to finish. But I highly recommend all of them. They are knocking my socks off.
In the Castle of My Skin - George Lamming
Anti-imperialist, autobiographical novel I came to by way of the introduction to Hills of Hebron by Sylvia Wynter. A Barbadian coming-of-age story that looks at British rule in a small town. This is a book for summer so I will finish it in June.
Those Bones Are Not My Child - Toni Cade Bambara
What a fascinating project from Bambara that fictionalizes the Atlanta Child Murders, focusing on a single family of one of the victims in their search for justice in 688 pages. Whether it is through short stories (Gorilla, My Love), experimental novels (The Salt Eaters), or this tome, she squeezes every last drop out of the selected form to deliver the same theme—community—to a whole other dimension.
A Distant Mirror - Barbara W. Tuchman
This has been my nightstand book for the last 6 months. It is a Pulitzer Prize-winning history book from the 70s about the crisis of the late Middle Ages in the 14th century, as told through the eyes of a single knight. Papal schism, little ice age, black death — it is all here. It is helping to make me feel small, remember how bad it has always been to be a human, how much has changed, and how much it really hasn’t. We are all still peasants. I’m staring right into that distant mirror, Barbara.
Dream of the Red Chamber
18th-century Chinese novel that Mao is said to have read several times and cites as one of his favorite books. One of The Four Great Novels in Chinese literature, scholars can spend their whole lives studying the textual history and versions of this book. 40 new chapters were added after the author’s death, and that new 120 chapter version is the most widely published and circulated. It isn’t the easiest read, but it is really entertaining once you get situated. I’m scared I’m going to fall down a rabbit hole, and start going version and translation hunting, before I continue on with the random copy I picked up off a used book cart.
Mids
The Pine Barrens - John McPhee
The platonic ideal of an off-the-beaten-path single-topic non-fiction book. Can be read in a day. Focused more on some parts of the history I didn’t care about and seemed to gloss over the things I found most interesting in a way that was personally frustrating to me. Brought out my Jersey Pride.
A Judgement in Stone - Ruth Rendell
Just watch the Chabrol adaptation with Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire.
Koula - Menis Koumadareas
I wanted to read some contemporary Greek literature, and this was an erotic little novel from Dalkey about a middle-aged woman’s affair with a young student whom she rendezvous with on the metro. I found it a bit repetitive and short on ideas, relying solely on the age gap concept to draw me in, and it did for a time.
The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M Cain
Hilariously hateful towards Greek people (me). I wanted to like this more than I did, but they really lost me with all that talk of insurance fraud.
Lenin - Nina Gourfinkel
The perfect pocketbook look into Lenin’s life that is politically sympathetic in a way that may surprise the author at times. A lot of talk about his ugly wife and the hot actress they were both friends with, which leaves us with one question — Lenin polycule?
Diogenes The Rebellious Life and Revolutionary Philosophy of the Original Cynic - Inger N.I. Kuin
Sometimes, everyone seems so fickle and compromised, you have to turn to Diogenes “I’m looking for one honest man” of Sinope. I’m not so sure about all the conclusions the author draws here about what we can say Diogenes did or didn’t say or what did or didn’t happen, and I don’t care because I find the myth or the man equally interesting. If he was real, I love that he peed on all his friends when they teased him about being like a dog at parties. I’m not someone who relishes reading philosophical proofs or studying rhetoric outside of group settings, so I always prefer intellectual histories or biographies that give me the core ideas plus context.
I also listened to CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties and Fort Bragg Cartel on audiobook while I ran errands and wandered around drinking iced decaf all summer, and both delivered exactly what everyone says they do. I look back on that time fondly.
Flops
Harrow - Joy Williams
As a Joy Williams stan, this was a tough rating to give. Such a compelling dystopian table was set, her same endearing lead character—the slightly dull, wise but not smart, playful wallflower, I buckled in, ready for a Joy ride. All I got was this overworked MFA project from someone who, in my mind, has nothing left to prove to put out something this sophomoric. The ecological themes in here are excellent, though. Held my nose for the second act, only to get to an even worse third act, to slog through, really killed the vibe on my trip to the Jersey Shore this summer.
Good Morning, Midnight - Jean Rhys
I would’ve loved this when I was an alcoholic and still can respect it as “revolutionary” for the time for the topics it covers with regards to motherhood and the permission it could lend to women to be as desperate, depressed, suicidal, and drunk. Still, wow, I couldn’t have been less interested while reading it. I kept thinking, “Someone get me some Anna Kavan to wash this taste out of my mouth! Stat!” Kavan works sort of the same beat around the same time, but is actually interesting. It is funny because I would say Rhys exhibits more of late modernism than Kavan (despite being slightly older), not to pit two queens against each other.