Books read in 2025, most recent first. # indicates books read with my book group
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf#
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan
Terra Nostra, Carlos Fuentes (partial; postponed until later)#
Pompeii, Robert Harris
The Moment of Caravaggio, Michael Fried
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway (in progress)
To Have and Have Not, Ernest Hemingway
The Torrents of Spring, Ernest Hemingway
By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolaño
Picasso and Truth: from Cubism to Guernica, T. J. Clark
On Breugel, T. J. Clark
The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell#
Ake: The Tales of Childhood, Wole Soyinka#
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway#
Return to Damascus, Jonathan Sa’adah
The Testament of Mary, Colm Tóibín
Long Island, Colm Tóibín
Lies and Sorcery, Elsa Morante#
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard#
Dora Bruder, Patrick Modiano
Intimacies, Katie Kitamura
The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz
Electric Light, Seamus Heaney
A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles #
A Separation, Katie Kitamura
Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck (DNF)
Doctor Copernicus, John Banville
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Jose Saramago #
The Promised Party, Jennifer Clement
The City and its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami #
Reading and music have kept me sane during this political nightmare of a year, when so many of the words coming across my screen are things that just make me angry, or are sheer drek that doesn’t deserve to be called “writing.” There’s a limit to how much our brains can take in, and we have to choose what it’s going to be. Thanks to my intrepid book group, I got through a number of big books again in 2025, though when I look back over my list, it doesn’t seem as ambitious as in some of the years past. Considering what we have all been dealing with, I am not going to judge! I’m grateful to have had the concentration to read as much as I did, and grateful for companionship for a big chunk of it.
A few comments, then, working from last January forward…
The recent Murakami is not one of his very best, but it’s good. Like many readers, we felt he left too many threads hanging (ok, it’s Murakami, he’s not going to explain everything) and that the ending was unsatisfying but the book itself was enigmatic and enchanting in the ways we’ve come to expect from this writer.
I had read The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, byJose Saramago, once before and liked it even better this time around.
Kairos, by Jenny Erpenpeck, was too much for me. Once I figured out where she was going, I decided to stop and spare myself the pain. I also put aside Terra Nostra (Carlos Fuentes) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway) because the graphic violence and cruelty were not what I wanted to subject myself to, not right now. I will go back and finish the Hemingway (which I read long ago but don’t remember very well) because it is simply too well written a novel not to finish. I also want to read the Fuentes, because of my deep interest in Mexico and its history. He starts out, however, with Philip II of Spain and the excessive cruelty and craziness, in the name of Spanish religiosity, are over the top.
However, I liked both books by Katie Kitamura – A Separation and Intimacies. Both deal with violent events, but the narrative and characters are treated in a sensitive and restrained way; there’s nothing gratuitous.
A lot of readers have liked A Gentleman in Moscow, but I found it amusing and forgettable.
Lies and Sorcery, by Elsa Morante, is a good book but it goes on far too long, and that means you spend a long time with the narrator, who comes off as a really unpleasant person. Our group loved Arturo’s Island, by the same author. It’s also about a child with an unreliable, absent parent, but far more about the delights and discoveries of growing up, and less about anger and scores to settle.
Best written books of the year? Probably A Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Each one is brilliant and unique. I’d read the Hemingway before but somehow had never gotten around to Mrs. Dalloway.
Also worth mentioning were several books of art history and criticism. I was given On Breugel by T. J. Clark – a small book that I sat down and read in two evenings, coming away knowing much more about Breugel than I had, and captivated by Clark’s non-academic style. I immediately went to the Bibliotheque nationale, which has a great collection of art books, and took out Clark’s book on Picasso. It was equally intelligent, and like the book on Breugel, takes an original approach to a subject that’s been analyzed to death. It’s technical but was compelling enough to keep me reading. By contrast, I learned a lot from Michael Fried’s book on Caravaggio, but it was derived from lectures he gave at the National Gallery of Art, and written in the academic art-history-speak that tends to put me to sleep.
Lest this list seems too highbrow, it includes two books that were not literary but that I enjoyed a lot, set in places I care about: Jennifer Clements’ The Promised Party, a memoir of her bohemian childhood in Mexico City, and Robert Harris’ Pompeii, which I raced through in a couple of days: even though it had “made for a movie” written all over it (a No. 1 bestseller; Harris is the author of Conclave), it was an entertaining and well-researched novel of the last days of that ill-fated city, through the eyes of the “aquarius” – the Roman official in charge of the Aqua Augusta, the huge aqueduct that served the whole region near Vesuvius.
I also read, and re-read for editing, my husband’s new book of photography and essays, Return to Damascus, which is described in detail here.
Toward the end of the year, I found myself using the library more. I usually read e-books, and almost never buy new volumes because my own shelves are full, but it was a pleasure to read (and hold) some books on paper. I had a trial subscription to the New York Review of Books last year, but am not sure I’m going to renew the paper subscription; I can read this journal through my library membership. I’ve also cut way down on the amount of news and commentary I’m reading, choosing quality over quantity, which frees up more mental space for reading books.
How about you? Has it been hard to read this year, or a welcome refuge? What stands out in your own list? Please share!