A short review of every book I read in 2025

A Month in the Country, J. L. Carr

A fun, quick read about trying to live a normal life again after the Great War. A young man gets a lucky job in rural England restoring a mural in a cathedral, and permits himself the cautious optimism to enjoy nice dinners and make friends and fall in love with women. In supremely British fashion, our narrator only tangentially even brings up that he was even in the war, emphasizing that he was a radio operator or something that kept him away from combat, and that his shell shock isn’t so bad. The appreciation of Anglican murals, a pretty lady who is married to a severe man in a giant and poorly kept house, and the social textures of the English village make for a nostalgic story about the idea of a more heartfelt, first “post-war order” for an author writing from the middle of the second one.

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

Straight banger. An epistolary novel from the perspective of an old, dying man, a preacher in the rural American town of Gilead in the 1950s, writing to his very young son as a kind of time capsule. It is carefully submerged in a kind of intrigue (how did this strange man meet and fall in love with his much younger wife? Why is he so cagey about this neighbor kid?) that pulled me into his story, which focuses on the conflict between his father and grandfather (both preachers) and how he views his own family and the future he imagines for his son. It’s moving and very elegantly done as well.

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin

I loved this one so much I already wrote about it, check it out.

Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov

Truly unlike anything I’ve ever read before. Weird in a way that I assume will turn me into a House of Leaves guy. A novel stylized as an epic poem about living in small town New England, posthumously published and extensively commentated on by the poet’s friend, a completely delusional maniac. Puzzling out how this guy has made someone else’s autobiographical, strictly metered take on William Carlos Williams all about himself is where the fun is. Footnotes indicate other footnotes hundreds of pages away as if his navel-gazing could actually be used as reference material for a poem that is maybe one fourth of the book. Challenging but in a satisfying way, literally laugh out loud funny, and the kind of thing that promises I’d discover more and more on each re-read. Five strapping young male courtiers out of five.

Chain-Gang All Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

A fantastic twist on American Battle Royale. I think I finished this book the fastest out of all the books on this list, even though I was reading some others on beach vacation and had way more time in the day for them. In near future America, prisoner conscript gladiatorial combat has become the most popular pro sport and entertainment product in the world. Really twists the knife as clarifying footnotes go from describing sci-fi tech stuff, to the laws of fictional evil president Bobby Bircher, to real facts about real American prisons and policy.

When the Clock Broke, John Ganz

A story of right wing washouts of the 90s (Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, David Duke, etc) modeling the political force of conspiracy and resentment. It doesn’t spend too much time with him but the thesis is this is the political soil in which Trump could grow. Ganz has a blog about history and politics and an offputtingly pugnacious twitter/bluesky presence, but is more constrained here, threading the needle between neutral historical account and slamming these weird losers for sucking.

The Book of The New Sun, Gene Wolfe

Four books, if we're keeping score. A fantasy giant whose reputation precedes it. Many conversations about this book feel like catching up on 40 years of discourse, but in short, it’s a science-fantasy epic about a young professional torturer named Severian. He’s exiled for breaking the rules, and is writing his own autobiography about navigating ruined future Earth and eventually becoming Super Space King. Weirdly similar to Pale Fire in that you’re highly reliant on an unreliable narrator to interpret a bizarre world that they think is completely sensible. So despite the fact that this is a fantasy novel with a rich and detailed world, a lot of it is only vaguely alluded to in contradictory fashion and you have to trust the word of a mean young freak with too much power, or at least understand his limitations. Still thinking of it often.

Thousand Cranes, Yasunari Kawabata

A domestic drama about a young guy tasked with maintaining a tea ceremony, house, and loyally attached mistress he inherited after his parents die. I was somewhat wary of a Japanese novel earning nobel prizes and then getting lauded by white Americans for its “uniquely japanese” “painterly [and] sensual” understanding of the world on the back, but that conjured up a warm and nostalgic Orientalist image that the book quickly puts to bed. All these people’s obligations to traditions and each other are a suffocating mass that squeezes out everything else and is so omnipresent it can only be addressed indirectly. Escaping into a featureless, contentless career in the city that important guys are supposed to have now is so empty there’s even less to say about it.

I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman

A horror story about a group of women who escape a secret underground prison, told from the perspective of a girl who was born in it. I briefly thought this was a recent novel but it becomes very clear this book was written by someone who lived through the holocaust. What is technically fiction is so unmoored from time and place by the narrator’s inexperience that only the cruelty is left, and the empty holes left by its absence. The real horror isn’t only the idea that there’s nothing else, but that there’s no way to know for sure.

The Republic For Which It Stands, Richard White

I’m growing really fascinated with this period of history, and this was recommended by Jamelle Bouie so I picked it up. As far as academically researched and sourced giant tomes go, it’s really compelling and readable. White (re)constructs this cultural narrative of Americans trying to realize a totemic ideal of The Home, and how that ideal shifts based on the speaker and suffers from or reinforces the corrupt and extractive institutions that shape it. The number of times someone with good intentions tries to make something happen that White has to sadly note doesn’t find any purchase for decades, outside the scope of this book, is funny and maddening. If nothing else, it confirmed FDR invented the federal government as I know it and before that it was so much calvinball bullshit.

The Tainted Cup, Robert J Bennett

Flew through this one at mach speed after 900 pages of history. A fun murder mystery in a cool fantasy Rome built around magic symbiotic plants. The beginning is a bit clunky to get all the pieces in play, but finds its stride leading into a more classic giant-monsters-and-swordfights finale. I may have only gotten this sour impression coming off the weirdo shit I read this year that was challenging me to figure it out, but the opening consisted of our young, newly promoted detective interrupting his own thoughts to remember explanations of the fantastical elements of his life in a distracting, off-putting way. As soon as that stops the world and mystery are engrossing and fun enough that I will be checking out the new one next year.

Worth noting: I wrote these up in December/January because that’s when I had the idea. It’s fun that these mostly consist of what stands out in my memory after awhile, but I intend to do them as I go next year to get a better picture of where I’m at while reading and then be able to reflect on it when putting the list together.