2025 in Books

As in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 I logged the books I read. Here's the 2025 list, followed by some brief comments.

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1. Very Recent History — Choire Sicha | 1.6
2. Real Estate — Deborah Levy | 1.10
3. If the Dead Rise Not — Philip Kerr | 1.11
4. Teaching a Stone to Talk — Annie Dillard | 1.20
5. Malibu Burning — Lee Goldberg | 1.27
6. Last Things — Jenny Offill | 2.7
7. Revelation Space — Alistair Reynolds | 2.9
8. Stella Maris — Cormac McCarthy | 2.11
9. Field Gray — Philip Kerr | 2.24
10. The DaVinci Code — Dan Brown | 3.8
11. A Wild Sheep Chase — Haruki Murakami (Trans. A. Birnbaum) | 3.16
12. The Idiot — Elif Batuman | 3.17
13. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love — Raymond Carver | 4.1
14. Revelation — C.J. Sansom | 4.6
15. The Goddess Effect — Sheila Yasmin Marikar | 4.11
16. January Window — Philip Kerr | 4.15
17. List of the Lost — Morrissey | 4.19
18. No New Things — Ashlee Piper | 4.22
19. The Resisters — Gish Jen | 5.2
20. Naked, Drunk, and Writing — Adair Lara | 5.8
21. Open Season — C.J. Box | 5.12
22. Savage Run — C.J. Box | 5.15
23. Groundskeeping — Lee Cole | 5.18
24. Season of the Raven — Denise Domning | 5.19
25. Winter in Madrid — C.J. Sansom | 6.4
26. Always Crashing in the Same Car — Matthew Specktor | 6.7
27. Season of the Fox — Denise Domning | 6.8
28. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd — Agatha Christie | 6.9
29. The Black Orchestra — J.J. Toner | 6.20
30. Frindle — Andrew Clements | 6.25
31. How to Submit — Dennis James Sweeney | 6.28
32. Lost Innocents — Denise Domning | 6.28
33. The Summer I Turned Pretty — Jenny Han | 7.1
34. The Moviegoer — Walker Percy | 7.5
35. Draft No. 4 — John McPhee | 7.5
36. The Secret Race — Tyler Hamilton & Daniel Coyle | 7.11
37. Anne of Green Gables — L. M. Montgomery | 7.13
38. Mitz — Sigrid Nunez | 7.18
39. The Man from Berlin — Luke McCallin | 7.21
40. An Accidental Death — Peter Grainger | 7.22
41. Mary Jane — Jessica Anya Blau | 7.28
42. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes — Caitlin Doughty | 7.29
43. Hell’s Angels — Hunter S. Thompson | 7.31
44. Annihilation — Jeff Vandermeer | 8.3
45. Let them Eat Pancakes — Craig Carlson | 8.4
46. The Rhine — Ben Coates | 8.11
47. The Situation and the Story — Vivian Gornick | 8.14
48. Call the Midwife — Jennifer Worth | 8.16
49. The Dropouts — Liv Parkinson | 8.21
50. Crossing Open Ground — Barry Lopez | 8.23
51. Gods Without Men — Hari Kunzru | 8.28
52. Bird by Bird — Anne Lamott | 9.3
53. Ghost Train to the Eastern Star — Paul Theroux | 9.8
54. Magic Seeds — V.S. Naipaul | 9.16
55. Special Topics in Calamity Physics — Marisha Pessl | 9.28
56. Mountains of the Mind — Robert Macfarlane | 10.20
57. The Man in the Wooden Hat — Jane Gardam | 10.26
58. The Magician‘s Nephew — C.S. Lewis | 10.26
59. Take Control of Devonthink 4 — Joe Kissel | 10.28
60. Ensorcelled — Eliot Peper | 10.29
61. The Art of Noticing for Writers — Rob Walker | 10.31
62. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe — C.S. Lewis | 11.1
63. The Horse and his Boy — C.S. Lewis | 11.7
64. The Eye of the World — Robert Jordan | 11.12
65. Prince Caspian — C.S. Lewis | 11.15
66. Überraschung im Café am Rande der Welt — John Strelecky | 11.18
67. The Man Who Watched Trains Go By — Georges Simenon (Trans. Siân Reynolds) | 11.18
68. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader — C.S. Lewis | 11.19
69. Escape Everything! — Robert Wringham | 11.21
70. The Way Home — Mark Boyle | 11.26
71. Icarus — Jeffrey Eugenides | 11.27
72. Mindfulness in Plain English — Bhante Henepola Gunaratana | 12.1
73. All Fours — Miranda July | 12.2
74. Goodbye, Things — Fumio Sasaki (Trans. Eriko Sugita) | 12.6
75. On the Calculation of Volume — Solvej Balle (Trans. Barbara Haveland) | 12.8
76. White Nights — Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Trans. Ronald Meyer) | 12.17
77. The Silver Chair — C.S. Lewis | 12.18
78. Chop Wood, Carry Water — Andrew Taggart | 12.20
79. The Anxious Generation — Jonathan Haidt | 12.22
80. Berlin — Bea Setton | 12.22
81. Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the fight for the Soul of America — Will Bardenwerper | 12.27
82. The Last Battle — C.S. Lewis | 12.30

2025 was a year for reading very popular books that I'd given a miss: The DaVinci Code; the full Chronicles of Narnia run, in C.S. Lewis's preferred order (I never read this as a kid, nor did I do so when my own kids were young); Annihilation; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (which was also my first Agatha Christie novel!); The Summer I Turned Pretty; Eye of the World, the first in the Wheel of Time series. These were mostly ok? I didn't love any of the Chronicles—too heavy-handed with the symbolism, not enough characters to truly root for, save Puddleglum (and an honorable mention to Reepicheep).

But I loved The Idiot. One of the best novels I’ve read in a while. Made lots of highlights. Loved the setting and time—freshman year at Harvard, in the early 90s, at the dawn of email. Funny and sad and wistful and true.

I liked Morrissey's Autobiography, which I read in 2014. I'm aware not everyone felt the same, and I'm keenly aware that he's a polarizing figure. What I didn't know, until this year, is that he wrote a novel called List of the Lost.

As a lyricist, Morrissey is clever and engaging—often funny, often touching, often irreverent, often direct. As a novelist, he leans far too much on tricks that work well in lyrics, but that fall flat in a sustained story.

Here are a couple examples:

• “The priest prattled confidently whilst reading a book of debatable origins, and the mourners mourned in the way that mourners must mourn in fear of not seeming to genuinely mourn.”
• “Whoever put the pain in painting had also put the fun in funeral.”

By the end of the book, I was exhausted by these turns of phrase, mostly because they so conspicuously draw attention to themselves rather than to the story.

The novel made me think of something George Saunders wrote in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain:

“A well-written bit of prose is like a beautifully hand-painted kite, lying there on the grass. It's nice. We admire it. Causality is the wind that then comes along and lifts it up. The kite is then a beautiful thing made even more beautiful by the fact that it's doing what it was made to do.”

“‘This isn’t a man. It’s a broken kite,’” Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five.

List of the Lost isn’t a novel, but a broken kite, so weighed down by ornate decoration that it never gets off the ground.

I enjoyed Groundskeeping, by Lee Cole. It’s set in Louisville in 2016, and it’s filled with Lou place names and haunts—Germantown, Butchertown, Clifton, a hipster bar called Schadenfreude, actual restaurants in the city, etc. The protagonist is an aspiring writer who works groundskeeping/landscaping at Ashby University, a fictional version of Asbury.

The plot focuses mainly on the relationship between the protagonist narrator and a visiting writer on fellowship at Ashby. It's a nice trip through Louisville, Lexington (briefly), Kentucky in general, and what it means to be a Kentuckian and a writer.

Mary Jane was phenomenal—what a perfect portrait of the time and place (Ford’s presidency), the stifling nature of WASPy upper middle class America, and coming into one’s own by exposure to different realities and ways of being.

Calamity Physics was a s l o g. I hated the characters—both protagonists (father and daughter) sucked, and antagonists (the blue bloods, Hannah Schneider) were either flat or just uninteresting. There was almost nothing I liked about the characters or the story, and Blue Van Meer’s ponderous references to everything ever written were tiring in the extreme. And despite all that I made over 50 highlights. Pessl can craft sentences and she has a crazy ability to come up with metaphors and similes over and over and over again. She’s an incredibly talented writer, but this was not a world in which I wanted to spend time, so it took forever to get through the book.

I definitely enjoyed The Eye of the World. It took me a long time to read, but I appreciated it very much by the end and it set me up to watch the Amazon series while I log endless miles on the trainer this winter.

Really loved The Man Who Watched Trains Go By—it had the creepy wandering solo male vibe of Remainder, Hunger, Nausea, and The Universal Baseball Association. It was the first book in a while where I felt immersed in the world, and where I wanted to get back into that world instead of spending time in my own world.

The opening scene of All Fours had to be inspired by the first movement of Lost Highway. And the plot is itself a story that hinges on getting lost (off the highway!) and finding oneself. Not the best book I read this year, not my favorite book, but definitely thought-provoking and interesting. Very polarizing in the online discourse. Lots of people squicked out by the spectrum of human sexuality, lots of people reading contemporary fiction literally but not metaphorically. Want a book club read guaranteed to get people talking? Choose this. Also: all fours = sex, stability (this is a key quote near the end of the book), yoga, cleaning, grief, etc. Is it about sex or is it about loss? Yes, it is.

I started using Pagebound in the late fall. I love its indie, anti-AI and anti-Amazon vibe. But I've been pretty underwhelmed by the quality of book discussions so far. It's a cool concept: each book has its own forum, and discussions there are intended to be evergreen, so that any time you might pick up a book you'll find other people who are (or have been) discussing it. But in my experience so far, those discussions are facile and reactionary rather than thoughtful and inquisitive. The comments on All Fours drove me crazy—just lots of “eww, she did WHAT?!” and few thoughtful explorations of the writing. You know how TikTokers show up and ruin a hidden tourist spot? Using Pagebound often feels like that—BookTokers showing up in droves with nothing to say beyond inane hot takes. But I'm hopeful! Maybe it'll be better in 2026.

I'd like to read your 2025 list, if you have one. Find me on Instagram (@bmcnely) and share!