Category: Uncategorized

THE GOD OF THE WOODS by Liz Moore

My relentless hunt for something to read led me to the New York Times list of the best thrillers of this century. This was described as ‘literary’ which seemed a bit strong, though I don’t deny the artistry. It was tightly plotted and clever and the resolution was unexpected. But, if you’re going to read genre, I just don’t know why you would read thrillers. It’s such a sad world. I’d much prefer romance, where you know nothing is going to go really wrong and people will end up happier than they began. This one was particularly bleak, being about the death of a child. I don’t know why this would be relaxing? But many people find it so, so let me not judge.

HAPPENS EVERY DAY by Isabel Gillies

Here’s a memoir by some poor woman who moves to Ohio for her husband’s work and three months later gets dumped by him for a much younger colleague. It reminds me of the Belle Burden’s STRANGERS, another memoir about how very possible it is to know almost nothing about your own husband.

Most interesting thing about this book is how extraordinarily old fashioned the writer is. The divorce happens in 2005, but it reads like its 1955. It is just wild. Try this:

“Because I was on the cover of Seventeen magazine when I was fourteen and I am an actress, I depend on the fact that, objectively, I am good-looking. Tall, blond hair . . But I can tend to depend too much on the idea that I am pretty and sometimes, I don’t try very hard.”

She spends a really astonishing amount of time on home decor, and really cares a great deal about her husband’s height. And again:

“It seems clear to me now that although Josiah loved us and wanted dearly to have a ncie family, there was something in him that just did not want to let him do it.”

‘Nice family’?!? What is that?!? Who says that kind of thing?

I’ve got to report she also comes from money. She seems to think it is pretty normal that she spends her summers in Maine, with the ‘other women’ all of whom apparently don’t have jobs. She grew up in an apartment overlooking Central Park. She acts like moving to Ohio is an insane trek into the wilderness.

I don’t know why I sound like I’m slamming her so much. I enjoyed the honesty of this book. It was refreshing. And it was encouraging to see how she recovered. One wonders how she did not see the red flag that he left his first wife while she was pregnant. He left her with two toddlers; maybe with this third wife he’ll make it till the next kids are in elementary school.

BELOVED SON FELIX by Felix Platter (ed. Stephen Greenblatt)

Get ready for the real-life diaries of a teenage boy in the 16th century. It’s everything you can imagine, especially if what you imagine involves a lot of public torture. The diaries begin with his journeying to Montpellier to study. Coming into Nantua, they see bodies hanging from trees. “The night came upon us as we descended the mountain,” he writes, “and it became so dark that we only just missed bumping into a corpse that was hanging from a branch.” A few days later, coming into Lyon: “we saw several men hanging from gibbbets and others exposed on wheels.” And then at Nimes, they passed an execution ground. “Pieces of human flesh hung from the olive trees, and the sight gave me a curious sensation.”

It’s sometimes quite Adrian Mole, except if Adiran Mole dined with Nostradamus (which this guy did!). Lots of classic teenage stuff: they find “an infallible recipe for making the hair grow,” and smear it on their chins every day. They then razor their bare chins every day and astoundingly, this does not work. It’s also touchingly honest – about how frightened he is of the dark, about the pressure from his dad about his studies, even about his medical issues – e.g., 29 May 1553: “I purged myself with pilulas coccias, which sent me to stool sixteen times and left me very weak. My master was sent for and was very alarmed.”

I am also now annoyingly bursting with info about the 16th century, so I would avoid dinner parties with me for a while. That they had flocks of peacocks from the Indies, that they burnt huge bushels of rosemary to keep warm, that the apprentice program was basically a swap of sons between houses, and etc.

But mostly what I take from these diaries is the life of an ordinary sixteen year old boy. How unique and not unique everybody’s little experience is. It feels weird to think he’s dead, and has been for four hundred years.

EMMA by Jane Austen

I did this book for A-level, and so read it many times in adolesence. Perhaps as a result, I have not read it in about 30 years.  What I am struck by on this reading is how completely wrong Emma is on every level.  It is a much funnier novel than I recall, and much more damning of Emma.  It is not nearly so good as some of her others, but obviously still head and shoulders above 90% of all other books  GOD this lady was talented.

MARTYR by Kaveh Akbar

Reviewers loved this book, calling it a ‘dazzling debut.’  I call it annoying. I feel bad to say it, because it is so hard to get published, and I don’t doubt it has many merits, but it just wasn’t for me. I pushed on for about 200 pages but then I just had to bail. 

It’s about a man in Indiana who is loosely aspirational in academia but is not getting anywhere because he is drinking too much.  He is toying -i n an annoying, apathetic way – with writing a book on martyrdom, because he wants his eventual death to ‘mean something.’   Leaving aside this is a stupid goal right off the bat, it is all wrapped up with the fact that he was born in Iran.  He has never lived in Iran, mind you, but still much of the book is given over to his various thoughts about his ‘heritage,’ intercut with descriptions of the experience of his immediate family in Iran.   Usually if you read a book about a country by someone from that country, it increases your understanding of it; this was just the reverse. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book by someone ‘from’ a country that actually went ahead and exoticized that country.  Perhaps it’s because that ‘from,’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting.   Let me stop typing though, this post is already bad-tempered enough, which is probably not very fair. 

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:

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