Category: Uncategorized

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

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.