A Tardy 2025 List
A different list about the best READS of the year ...
I was nagged throughout the holidays by a voice reminding me that I should write a “Best Books of 2025” list. Isn’t this what any self-respecting critic does? I certainly perused with genuine interest the lists from my favorite critical sources. Looking at the lists, I should have been alarmed at not only the usual number of books I have not read or looked closely at but, more importantly, the number I had so little interest in pursuing. I tried. I took a stab at the shortlists of both the Booker and the National Book Award. I read works from the writers who spoke at the Sun Valley Writer’s Conference. Many were good, but only a few interested me enough to build a newsletter around. I may be getting too old to “keep up” with current fiction. I know that a typically huge biography feels like a literal mortality drain while my original love, history, is still alive and well, its shape and focus has moved increasingly away from my “sphere of interest”. All this is my way of saying that I do not have a Top Ten List or any orderly treatment of books published in 2025. Instead, I have the Best READS of 2025 identified in several different ways.
Biggest Surprise of 2025: Rabih Almeddine … winner of the National Book Award for The True, True Story of Raja the Gullible. When dipping into the Book Award shortlist, I was least familiar with the writer who won it … and won it with a title as difficult to remember as his name. I read the first few pages and was hooked. I liked it so much that I checked out one of his earlier critically acclaimed books, An Unnecessary Woman. Both books take place in war torn Beirut. They are odd, deeply human, humorous books. The stories unroll like Super 8 film with the sepia of a tragic Beirut and the intimacy of a home movie.
The Great Overlooked Writer: Rumer Godden … I wrote a long piece about The House of Brede – her masterpiece. Those who have read it are in complete agreement about its merits. Another of her books, The Battle of Villa Fiorita, recently popped into our life and affirmed her place, in my mind, as a great overlooked writer. A very different, less ambitious book, The Battle of Villa Fiorita shares with The House of Brede (in a much more modest context) her clear eyed study of character illuminated by prose as clean as it is penetrating.
The Best History Book of 2025: The Fate of the Day … Rick Atkinson’s book is history at its finest. It is the second installment in his long-anticipated trilogy on the American Revolution. The first, The British Are Coming, is every bit as engaging. In both, I felt like an enthusiastic student in awe of the material and suffused with the enthusiasm unique to a genuine learning experience. There is no doubt that Ken Burns’ recent documentary on the Revolution is beautiful and moving; however, there is simply no way he can match in his medium what Atkinson achieves in these long but utterly readable books. My book of the year …
My Favorite “Reading” Experience: 4321 … this huge brass ring of a novel was also my favorite audiobook of the year. I listened to the author, Paul Auster, narrate it after reading the first couple hundred pages. I returned to the print at the end and was stunned and bereft. It, and Auster’s extraordinary voice, had been a constant companion. It is a story of being a young man unlike anything I have read. I wrote about it several months ago and I have nothing to add. Written in 2017, set mostly in the Sixties, its themes are timeless treatments staged in a world familiar to anyone my age … a world that was becoming unhinged both within and without.
My New Favorite Irish Writer: Donal Ryan … Irish literature is shining brighter than ever – thank God. I mentioned Ryan in my earlier piece on the Irish shoring up the high standards of serious literature. He will shock you in the best of ways. This is not the misty, romantic Ireland of popular imagination. It is dark, hilarious stuff with characters you can HEAR. The books are short and pungent. Start with The Queen of Dirt Island …
Sun Valley Writer’s Conference Award Winner: An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s … This engaging memoir written by the indominable Doris Kearns Goodwin is only in part a love story, even less an actual memoir; rather, it really is a history of a decade that resists any big picture effort to tie it together. This decade and the early Seventies are still being fought over in our everyday political and cultural life. This makes this uneven but intimate telling of iconic moments in the American Century so compelling. If you do read it, I strongly suggest you go on-line to the SVWC site and download her speech(s) to the attendees. The ultimate dinner party guest …
The Old Friend Award: John Le Carre … this “category” is a growing one as I get older. An “old friend” is a writer I deeply explored at some moment in my life. They include my early joyous romps with the adventures of Alistair Maclain, Michael Crichton, John D. McDonald and Raymond Chandler. These romps would grow more literary with the likes of Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, Thomas Hardy, George Orwell and so many others. Recent “old friends” include Jane Gardham, Hilary Mantel, Kate Atkinson and this year’s honoree, John Le Carre. I have reread Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People in the last twelve months. He remains in a place of his own. He owns the Cold War spy genre and wrote as well as anyone in the last fifty years. While much of his later work could not match the brilliant originality of his Smiley novels, his contribution to the joy of reading is incalculable.
The Best Memoir of 2025: Exit Wounds … I wrote about this stunning memoir written by Peter Godwin back in April and I think it best to simply quote from that brief review.
Exit Wounds is “a memoir that is so much more than that. Godwin’s book is as good a piece of non-fiction as I have read in the past five years. A symptom of its greatness is how much it resists any kind of summary. His origin story, his war correspondent background frame a life littered with contemporary relevance. His dying mother is straight out of a Maggie Smith cameo. The diction is extraordinary with words that vibrate with meaning. It is a beautifully layered story with historical and philosophical digressions that attracted marginalia like moths to a flame. It was one of those reads that leave you at a loss as to what to read next.”
Yes, It IS a Classic: Mrs. Dalloway … I taught Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse several times and have often thought it the great English language novel and, most certainly, her finest. Yet … because Mrs. Dallowayso often supplants my favorite on the endless greatest books lists, I felt I had to return after thirty years to the single day in the privileged life of Clarissa Dalloway. Reading bits out loud, never allocating less than 30 minutes to each read, I reveled in the world of Woolf’s language. NOBODY captures the modern sensibility of time and space like Virginia Woolf. I get it. Clarissa’s day is a monumental literary achievement on par with Stephen & Molly Bloom’s day captured in Ulysses. I continue to believe, however, that the deep thematic core of To the Lighthouse sets it apart from the more technical brilliance of Mrs. Dalloway. Ultimately, just one reader’s opinion … the difference is just another of those wonderful Godfather I v Godfather II debates that so enrich our lives.
Yes, It Will Be a Classic: Mothering Sunday … Graham Swift’s 2016 novel is short and perfect. That was what I thought when I first read it ten years ago. My recent reread served as a simple affirmation. It 192 pages cover a lot of territory ranging from class to war to young love and time itself. Never has a bed stain reverberated so profoundly and never has a private library been examined more intimately. It is very likely I will read it again. There is a poetic intensity to its diction and structure that is often the rarest quality in great fiction. This quality is reinforced by its superb length.
There it is … hope you enjoyed it.
Thank you for reading it
…