In which I pick some Books of 2025

I have been meaning to do this for a wee while, but also I am a priest and this time of year is full of Other Things to do. School nativities are great, just FYI. Also, while I’ve enjoyed quite a lot of things this year, I’m not sure I’ve read much that really really sang to my soul in a ‘will want to go back to this in a decade’ way

But there were some good thing, and you’ve still got time to do a weekend tootle to the bookshop and pick up some things. They might even have time to order something in for you.

StoryGraph (to which I have moved my list keeping) tells me I’m on book 62, but a good half dozen of these were Chalet School books  that I read on my summer holiday to Austria when we visited the Achensee (aka the Tiernsee). If you’ve never read them and you like early to mid-C20th girls boarding school stories, then you should get into them. They are one of my great comfort reads. Also, if you love children’s literature and like me have a strong sense of nostalgia for your childhood reading, I just finished Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood:  a history of childhood reading, which was a delightful trip through the evolution of children’s books as A Thing with lots of visits to old favourites.

Other favourites of the year include….

Flat out top of the pile

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

You know when you buy a book because one of your favourite people won’t shut up about it and then it turns out to live up to the hype? Yeah, this was that. Wide, deep, huge, surprisingly (to me) funny and queer, and probably the best writing about the hypnotic beauty of the sea I’ve read for a long time if not ever.  But also, I should have bought a smaller edition, I had to sit  cross-legged with it on my knees.

Some non-fiction options

The Hare with Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal

Only a mile after everyone else had read it, and getting into de Waal’s work through his Library of Exile - I finally picked it up as I went to Vienna on this delightful Austrian holiday (really, I do recommend Austria), and went to the Jewish museum there, which has a number of the netsuke. I love the way de Waal explores memory and family history and personal connections to places and stories, and this was a lovely, and moving journey across time.

Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose - Sandy Balfour

I stole this from my mother about a decade ago in my bid to learn to do cryptic crossword, and I wasn’t quite expecting it to be quite such a charming memoir about identity and home, through the medium of learning to do crossword clues.

To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen

I really loved Nguyen’s novels  (The Sympathiser and The Committed), and he’s become one of my fave (and most challenging) thinkers and commentators. This is his Harvard Norton lectures, on the outsider in literary writing. He’s always fascinating and insightful, a little wry, a little righteously angry. They’re great lectures, and literary without being Too Much.

General fiction

Orbital - Samantha Harvey

I got to the last year’s Booker winner as the next one was announced (record timing), and I’m not sure what I had expected but it wasn’t  quite this beautiful meditation on the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. A small delight.

On the Calculation of Volume I, II, and III - Solvej Balle.

What would it be like to be stuck repeating the same day, when you’re aware of it and no one else seems to be? Not all the mechanics seem to make sense (at this stage) - why do some things reset (money) but not others (food supplies), but it’s a fascinating way of thinking about what makes life liveable and meaningful, and how do different experiences get in the way of relationships.

The Other Valley - Scott Alexander Howard

A community in a small valley repeats in twenty year jumps: over the mountains to the east is twenty-years behind; over to the west is twenty-years ahead. With permission you can visit and see things: but what happens if you do, or you see someone else doing it, and how might things change if you affected past time?  This is delightfully smart about the philosophical elements without being too smart, and the fact it is, at heart, about teenagers making big life decisions really makes it sing.

A Grain of Wheat - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

One of those ‘classics for a reason’ books, a story of living, loving, and surviving colonialism and rebellion in different ways. Hard to describe without making it sound simple and banal, when it’s just deeply profound, and so much richer than much of the UK argument about the British empire would have you believe.

Europe in Autumn / Europe in Winter - Dave Hutchinson

The first two of a tetralogy set in an alternative Europe where nations are fragmenting into tinier and tinier entities, a railroad seems to run through it all, and there may be a strange parallel universe. Or perhaps two. And there are spies. No, I’m not sure how this series will turn out to hold together,  but each individual book has been an intriguing and gripping ride.

Perspectives - Laurent Binet

A murder mystery story set in Florence, with art, European politics, and a bit of Michelangelo. How long does it take to ride around Italy??? I got about a third of the references in this, but it was delightful fun.

We Do Not Part - Han Kang

Han Kang is about the only Nobel literature laureate I’ve been ahead of the curve on and I’m so proud. Also her books are so great. This is a bit of partner to Human Acts which is my favourite of hers:  it continues to explore the memory and legacy of trauma, here through members of one family. It’s moody and haunting and sorrowful, and utterly beautiful.