2025 -

WHAT I READ IN 2025

My blog alleges I read 73 books this year, which seems surprising, because it felt like kind of a slow year reading-wise. Shout-outs have to go to the amazing HEART THE LOVER by Lily King, which I read in one short sleepless night; to I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN by Jacqueline Harpman, a post-apocalypse book that makes you wonder why we don’t wonder more at this pre-apocalypse world; and Gail Goodwin’s VIOLET CLAY, which most expertly and unpleasantly flashed me back to my twenties.

Potentially though even more shout-outs have to go to non-fiction this year. I don’t know what’s happening: I never used to read non-fiction, and now second year in a row it’s been killing me. NOBODY’S GIRL by Epstein survivor Virginia Roberts Giuffre, which makes you ashamed of every time you have called something ‘too hard,’ the anonymously written A WOMAN IN BERLIN, the real diaries of a woman who survived rounds of gang rape when that city fell in WWII, and found the dignity and even the comedy in it; and Erik Larson’s THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY, about the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893 (I can’t believe this was even interesting, but don’t even get me going on how the Ferris Wheel was invented because I am a FOUNT of information). Some books I can tell I liked because I am just dying to tell unwilling audiences all about them. Don’t mention Peru or Spain or colonialism near me unless you really do want to hear a summary of Kim McQuarrie’s THE LAST DAYS OF THE INCAS, and don’t mention the Nile or Victorians or the Kama Sutra unless you are ready for my enthusiasm for Candice Millard’s THE RIVER OF THE GODS.

I also re-read PERSUASION this year, but I do not intend to insult Austen by including it on some ‘best of the year ‘ list, when it needs to be on some as yet un-written lifetime list.

These books so shaped and coloured my experience of the year it makes me wonder what it is like to be someone who doesn’t read. Of course non-readers must have as full a life as readers, but I wonder what their lives are full of? Their own thoughts? I honestly can’t even imagine. Anyway here’s the list:

I DELIVER PARCELS IN BEIJING by Hu Anyan
THE EVENING OF THE HOLIDAY by Shirley Hazzard
THE LAST SAMURAI by Helen DeWitt
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN by Thomas Mann
A MOTHER’S RECKONING by Sue Klebold
PIRANESI by Susanna Clark
STOP TIME by Frank Conroy
TRAIN DREAMS by Denis Johnson
DADDY ISSUES by Kate Goldbeck
A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN by David Foster Wallace
THE REST OF OUR LIVES by Ben Markovitz
A WOMAN IN BERLIN by Anonymous
BUCKEYE by Patrick Ryan
NOBODY’S GIRL by Virginia Roberts Giuffre
HEART THE LOVER by Lily King
FAN SERVICE by Rosie Danan
WHAT WE CAN KNOW by Ian McEwan
BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott
JOURNEYS OF A GERMAN IN ENGLAND: A WALKING TOUR OF ENGLAND IN 1782 by Carl Philip Moritz
YOU, AGAIN by Kate Goldbeck
JOE CINQUE’S CONSOLATION by Helen Garner
GHOSTROOTS by Pemi Aguda
THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF by Helen Garner
DOOMSDAY BOOK by Connie Willis
ALL THE WORST HUMANS by Phil Elwood
STARTER FOR TEN by David Nicholls
THE FRIENDZONE by Abby Jimenez
LIFE’S TOO SHORT by Abby Jimenez
MARTIN DRESSLER by Steven Millhauser
FINGERSMITH by Sarah Waters
WORRY by Alexandra Tanner
THREE CAME HOME by Agnes Keith
AS I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING by Laurie Lee
YOU ARE HERE by David Nicholls
THE MISSIONARY’S WIFE by Tim Jeal
I HOPE THIS FINDS YOU WELL by Natalie Sue
I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN by Jacqueline Harpman
NAPLES ’44 by Norman Lewis
THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES by John Byrne
BORED GAY WEREWOLF by Tony Santorella
THE MOUNTAIN AND THE SEA by Ray Nayler
LOVE AND SUMMER by William Trevor
WE HEXED THE MOON by Mollyhall Seeley
THE POWER OF NOW by Eckhart Tolle
VIOLET CLAY by Gail Goodwin
THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA by Yukio Mishima
MONKEY GRIP by Helen Garner
GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL LIFE by Emily Henry
ADELAIDE by Genevieve Wheeler
THE PLACES IN BETWEEN by Rory Stewart
KINGFISHER by Rozie Kelly
OH THE GLORY OF IT ALL by Sean Wiley
PERSUASION by Jane Austen
FOURTH WING by Rebecca Yarros
DREAMSTATE by Eric Puchner
SAO BERNARDO by Graciliano Ramos
PLAYWORLD by Adam Ross
THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY by Erik Larson
A STOLEN LIFE by Jaycee Dugard
IN CHANCERY by John Galsworthy
YOU, AGAIN by Kate Goldbeck
HAPPY PLACE by Emily Henry
FUNNY STORY by Emily Henry
BOOK LOVERS by Emily Henry
BEACH READ by Emily Henry
ME AND YOU ON VACATION by Emily Henry
RIVER OF THE GODS by Candice Millard
YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES by Alvaro Enrigue
I’LL BE GONE IN THE DARK by Michelle McNamara
SUMMER OF BLOOD by Dan Jones
THE LAST DAYS OF THE INCAS by Kim McQuarrie
BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA by Dorothy Allison
FELICIA’S JOURNEY by William Trevor

I DELIVER PARCELS IN BEIJING by Hu Anyan

I am always surprised there a so few books about working life, given that by some measures it is the majority of many peoples’ lives. But here is one. And work is definitely the majority of this guy’s life. It’s a memoir of him trying to find a way to make a living at the bottom end of the economy in China. He has done many roles: not just parcels, but nightshift in a sort center, selling bubble tea and bikes, etc.

He doesn’t complain, but he does drop some horrifying facts, in an almost off-hand way. E.g.: he has to deliver a parcel every 4 minutes to cover his expenses; he only gets the Spring Festival off (I don’t know what the Spring Festival is, but it doesn’t sound long); and in one mall job he had for two years he only saw daylight for 15 mins a day.

It’s unclear to me if he actually thinks this is bad, or if he just thinks it is what it is. Maybe both. One thing I found interesting, and I remember from when I was a new immigrant, is how he knows the price of everything, and feels telling you about it is important information. In this day of nepo-babies, it’s incredibly refreshing to read a book where you are never unaware of what his rent is at any time. And I get it: I guess I’ve never thought about it before, but the amount of the rent is probably the single most defining piece of information about what your life will be like. In his case, it means he has to work his ass off.

I loved this little part:

“I would while away the remaining hours at the Jingtong Roosevelt Plaza, to take advantage of the air conditioning. I liked to sit in the employee dining area, behind the Acasia Food Court on the basement floor, where delivery drivers waited to pick up order and take breaks. The mall stacked spare tables and chairs there, as it was a dead end only dimly lit with what little daylight filtered in through the south-facing wall. After being under the glaring lights of the shopping area, entering that space was like stepping backstage, with the curtains drawn. The time I spent back there was very meaningful to me. I will always remember it and how I felt then.”

His parents can’t help him financially, but more than that they also can’t help him with advice. He tells us they have spent all their lives in the managed economy, so how he should survive ‘capitalism’ is something they can’t help him with. He does not (of course) make any commentary on what life was like under communism but still there are some interesting pieces. Let’s end with this part, where we can ponder our own ‘freedom’:

“Consumerism is the new ideology, a different kind of lifelong imprisonment, which only gives the appearance of freedom. Compared with restricting you from doing everything you want, it is certainly the more stable and lasting way to maintain social order – instilling in you a sense of what you need and providing the means to achieve it. But this is still a form of enslavement, one in which the individual’s main route to self-realization remains through work. ”

THE EVENING OF THE HOLIDAY by Shirley Hazzard

I really hated this book. Why did I finish it? I guess it was only 149pages. And I have been feeling guilty about how many books I have given up on this year. But god I should have given up on this one. It was some kind of love story where a married (but separated) Italian man has an affair with an English woman on holiday. They part because they cannot face the difficulties of his not being able to divorce. I mean I guess that’s why they part? I don’t know, because most of the novel was descriptions. Descriptions of landscape (bad) but also descriptions of unimportant moments (e.g., woman gets briefly lost in church). I fear this was supposed to be poetic but I just found it DUMB.

THE LAST SAMURAI by Helen DeWitt

This is a famous book I had never heard of. First off, this is not the (I have never seen it, but probably) problematic film with Tom Cruise. It is about as far from Hollywood as you can get. The author is a total rebuke to all of us weak people, having half-written an astonishing ~50 other novels before finally completing this one. During that time she worked as doughnut salesperson, dictionary text tagger, copytaker, fundraiser, night secretary etc.

The book was a huge hit, being a crazy, baggy, comic story about a single mother with high ideals. She got pregnant on a one night stand, and refuses to tell the father because she does not admire his writing. She manages the heating bills by spending their days riding the Circle line.

I found it funny and clever, but I gave up about 300 pages in. We got to a part where the child was trying to find his father and it became kind of like a series of short stories about the various potential fathers, and it just felt like it wasn’t going anywhere. I felt bad, because I just love this author’s guts. She went on to write other strange books, and struggle to find a publisher, eventually only publishing one twenty years later. What a life!

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN by Thomas Mann

I thought I would give myself the challenge of this 700pg nineteenth century novel. Well, challenge failed. I got about 250pgs in before I decided to bail. There was just way too much undirected babbling about some seriously bullsh*t theories and I just couldn’t handle it. This sort of thing is fun at a party when you are drunk and you are doing the babbling but listening to someone else: no thank you.

I’m disappointed, because I enjoyed his other book, BUDDENBROOKS. It was his first, and seethes with the kind of rage at the bourgeois you only have when you are extremely bourgeois. I read it by the pool in Jordan, and maybe that was what I needed for this book too – long uninterrupted stretches of time where I could get into whatever nonsense everyone wants to talk about ‘art’ or whatever. But I didn’t have that kind of time.

One thing I did enjoy was being reminded of the horrors of TB. It takes place in a TB sanitorium, when they had no treatment other than ‘better air’. I just want to say how EXTREMELY PRO-VAX I am.

A MOTHER’S RECKONING by Sue Klebold

Not sure how I got into this, but here is a memoir by the mother of one of the shooters at Columbine High School, Dylan Klebold. First thing to note, which really astonished me, was that school shootings were extremely uncommon at the time of Columbine. Imagine how bad it would be to find out that your son is a school shooter, without even having a model of what a ‘school shooter’ is.

This woman’s experience is truly jaw-dropping. Dylan, far from the bullied outcast I always thought he was (trenchcoat mafia etc), had in fact a bunch of friends and had been to the prom a few days before. He was also a perfectionist who was the child they ‘never had to worry about’. I guess I should not be surprised: teenagers lie to their parents. It is just astonishing how people do not know each other, even if they see each other every day.

What struck me particularly was that Dylan was not just a murderer, but also a suicide. When they eventually found his journals and went through them, it turns out he had been thinking of ending his life for at least two years. Even the week before the shooting he had been debating with his father on what dorm room to choose. Apparently this kind of apparent ‘planning’ is common in suicides – something for us to bear in mind when deciding how worried to be about someone. Her main takeaway after a decade of agonising is the simple one, that she wished she had listened more and talked less. Poor lady.

I cannot imagine how she survived this level of shock and bereavement. It puts one’s own problems very much into perspective i.e., they are minor.

PIRANESI by Susanna Clark

This is a strange book and FYI this post will be chock-full of SPOILERS. It opens with a man living in a mysterious flooded mansion that is full of statues. It is so large that he has never found the end. There is only one other person who he sometime sees there, who he calls ‘the Other,’ and who sometimes brings him modern items (e.g., sneakers) but everything else he must forage for himself out of the tides that crash into the halls. There are also thirteen skeletons, in different parts of the House, and he has developed a strange religion involving caring for the skeletons and worshipping the statues. It sounds sad but actually he is rather happy, and has a full life engaging with the beauties of the House.

Eventually he is rescued by a police officer, and we find out that he is a journalist, who (in a past he has now forgotten) was trapped by the Other, an occultist, in this parallel universe. He goes back to the ‘real world,’ and – this is right at the end of the book – this is where I found it really rather lovely. You’d think he would be happy to be back in ‘reality,’ but he misses the beauties of the House, and he brings to our reality this same kind of simple delight in the beauty of what he sees. I think this book, while full of plot, is really a triumph of narrative voice, offering us a different, and frankly better, way of living in the world. A way of loving the streets and trash cans and commuters like they were marble statues.

STOP TIME by Frank Conroy

Do I really need another coming of age story from an American man? Apparently so. I’ve enjoyed this one. Mostly, it reminded me of how boring childhood used to be. I know people talk about it a lot, but this memoir really brought back to me what it was like before phones and television. God, we were bored. And I had my cousins and a library card, so I was not even as bored as this guy, who had neglectful parents and a shack in Florida.

I am always awed/frightened by the idea of memoir. Imagine sitting down and actually trying to recall your childhood? It feels frighteningly impossible and also frighteningly possible. This deep in some Pandora box territory. I also really don’t like the idea of fixing the past into my specific narrative about it. I think the past does best when it is constantly changing, just like the future. That said, please enjoy this baller analysis of his step dad:

“Because for all his knocking around his view of the world was incredibly naïve. He believed important jobs were handed out in nightclubs by impulsive millionaires and that he was the sort of man they might be given to. Spoiled all his life . . . he deeply believed that the good things in life were given to one. Food, clothing, and the bare necessities had to be earned, but after that it was a question of being in the right place at the right time, or knowing the right people or simply being lucky. It never occurred to Jean to work hard anything except menial labour. He was always above his work, the secret possessor of an inner wealth untouched by the world – his image of himself.”

I came to this book from seeing that David Foster Wallace said it was the book that made him want to be a writer. I just love author’s recommendations of other authors. It’s sad this was only available in second-hand.

TRAIN DREAMS by Denis Johnson

Well this is an almost depressingly fantastic novella. It’s an eerie and beautiful story about a railway worker in Idaho in the early twentieth century.

It’s kind of frustrating for anyone to be this amazing as a writer. I looked him up and I see that he was widely acknowledged as the ‘big talent’ of his generation of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. I note I must be a bad person because I was almost relieved (!?!) to see he became a drug addict. He still went on to write more though, and apparently this is not even his best book! That is apparently something called JESUS SON. I haven’t ordered it yet because I almost dread finding out how good it is.

DADDY ISSUES by Kate Goldbeck

I really liked this author’s previous book, YOU, AGAIN, which managed the difficult task of novel-as-romcom. This one I didn’t like nearly as much. It’s just wild, and shows you how much of a mystery writing is. Even if you can do it once, it doesn’t mean you can do it again. Or at least not for this particular reader.