David's Reading Life: 2025
Greetings one and all. This will be the last post until the first week of January. I wish good stuff for all of us—especially The United States of America.
[Let the record show that the paragraph-long rant that briefly occupied this space has been thought better of. You’re welcome.]
As I was saying, may joy find you the rest of this fraught year. See you soon.
[***Update about footnotes: All books are now hyperlinked in the list. Only those with further references/links/razor-sharp comments from the flight deck are footnoted.]
When I finish reading a book, I write title and author on my yellow pad. The really good ones get a star/asterisk. The really really good ones get two.
2025’s Two-Star Books:
The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff (2023)
Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy (2022) [reread]1
The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki (2021)
Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead (2021)
My Absolute Darling, Gabriel Tallent (2017)2
Other Contemporary Novels:
The Land in Winter, Andrew Miller (2024)
Night Watch, Jayne Anne Phillips (2023)
Not-So-Contemporary Novels:
The Singapore Grip, J. G. Farrell (1978)
The Great Fortune, Olivia Manning (1960)6
Ten Speculative Novels:
Private Rites, Julia Armfield (2024)
In Ascension, Martin Macinnes (2023)
Axiom’s End, Lindsay Ellis (2020)
Sleep Donation, Karen Russell (2020)
Girl in Landscape, Jonathan Lethem (1998)
Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler (1993)9
Little, Big, John Crowley (1981)
Inverted World, Christopher Priest (1974)10
Four Nonfiction Works:
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder [history], David Grann (2023)
Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution [history] H. W. Brands (2021)
Family [memoir], Ian Frazier (1994)
West With the Night [memoir], Beryl Markham (1942)11
Fiction in Translation:
Leopard-Skin Hat, Anne Serre (2024) [France]
Of Cattle and Men, Ana Paula Maia (2013) [Brazil]
Death and the Penguin, Andrey Kurkov (1996) [Ukraine]
Transit, Anna Seghers (1944) [Germany/GDR]
Best Novel By a Friend:
Big Sausage, Rick Krizman (2025)12
Books I Read That Left No Trace in My Mind:
My Husband, Maud Ventura (2021) [France]
Tasmania, Paolo Giordano (2024)13 [Italy]
Eternal Summer, Franziska Gänsler (2022) [Germany]
No One Is Ever Missing, Catherine Lacy (2014)
Anthony Trollope Novels Logged This Year:
Dr. Wortle’s School (1881)
John Caldigate (1879)
The Vicar of Bullhampton (1870)
The Claverings (1867)
The Three Clerks (1858)
Long-Time TBR Title Finally Read:
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe (1959)14
First Books on 2026 TBR List:
Audition, Katie Kitamura (2025)
What We Can Know, Ian McEwan (2025) [England]
The Adversary, Michael Crummey (2024) [Canada]
Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood (2023) [Australia]
I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman (1995) [Belgium]
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison (1970)
Stella Maris: This is the shortish companion to McCarthy’s final novel, The Passenger (2022). From Wiki:
The novel follows Alicia Western, a math prodigy conflicted by her father’s contributions to the American development of the atomic bomb. The entire novel is set in 1972 in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, at the titular Stella Maris, “a non-denominational facility and hospice for the care of psychiatric medical patients,” as stated on page 3 (the only page that is not written in dialogue). The novel consists of a “series of conversations between Alicia and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen, written like a play but with no exposition, stage directions, or dialogue tags. The subjects include mathematics, quantum mechanics, music theory, and obscure philosophy.
On the off-chance you haven’t heard me yak about this one already, the gist of my thoughts: a) I don’t argue about McCarthy’s novels; they’re not for everyone, b) Alicia’s talks with the doctor are a dance between two conflicting urges within her, to tell and not to tell, c) Alicia is one-of-a-kind human presence and I was thoroughly locked onto her voice, her depiction of her inner and outer lives. She’s extreme (as is Turtle Alveston in My Absolute Darling) and is, for all her messed-up-ness, a bright, human image. Moreover, at this point in my reading life, conventional stories feel less worthy of my attention—which may be why I read more speculative fiction these days (but only the kind where the writing is as sharp as the ideas or world-building).
My Absolute Darling: The reviews all say, Tough read but couldn’t put it down—
I came to this with no prior knowledge, disappeared into it for a large part of Thanksgiving holiday/weekend. Writer/critic William Gass says a memorable character is a bright, human image” [cf. above]. The memorable character here is Turtle, aged fourteen when the novel starts. If I start telling you what befalls her in the story, I’ll slip into the worn grooves of labeling—I’ll resist that temptation. She’s not an example of anything, she’s a complex one-off of a character. The book has the fierce forward momentum of a thriller (one not for the faint of heart), but I could not stop reading it.
The Wall: This is both speculative and translated, but I’m listing it here. It has one (never-explained) element that separates it from straight realism. It proves to be a story of adaptation, re-invention, doing without—also a story about the nature of solitude, daily work, and the double-edged sword of bonding with non-human creatures. There’s a lot of I went here and did this, then this, then this . . . but that’s the nature of her task she’s set for herself—to record, to say what went on (even if no one will ever read it). In addition: it contains more cow milking than most novels.
Headshot: A debut novel about a two-day U-18 girls’ boxing tourney in Reno. She doesn’t mess it up by trying too hard; good, in-the-moment description, attention to detail, not laden with the weight of symbolism. Longlisted/shortlisted/finalisted for a bunch of major awards. And she’s blessed with an unforgettable name. I’ll read whatever she writes next.
Sandwich: Bought this on a whim. A family’s week at the cottage on the Cape they rent each summer. It’s not Anna Karenina, but I read it happily. Closely observed domestic life. It has a sequel, Wreck (2025).
Olivia Manning: She was one of the trilologists we looked at here (see footnote 7). This is the first book of her first trilogy, The Balkan Trilogy. She sticks with same couple in a subsequent trilogy, The Levant Trilogy. All six books, taken together, are known as The Fortunes of War. Both trilogies have been reprinted by the New York Review of Books Press.
Tilt: Hugely pregnant young woman goes shopping for a crib at an IKEA in Portland, Oregon . . . when “the big one” hits. The through-line is her survival in the ensuing chaos, her refusal to succumb. That’s pretty much the whole story—but it’s a short novel and I think this is enough. I read it straight through.
Oddly, I wrote a flash story a couple of years ago about a guy whose car is on one of Portland’s massive bridges when it collapses—he and his rig end up trapped in a pocket between cement slabs. My story may have its origin in my noting the rusted rebar emerging from the concrete of the bridge deck each time, way up in the air, I cross the Williamette.
Piranesi: This is a shortish speculative novel readers gush over. I liked reading it—the created world’s imagery is attention-capturing, and not knowing what’s going on propels you forward. Both excellent qualities. Yet I found the reveal disappointing. Long ago, when I taught poetry to kids in Montana schools, I’d sometimes encounter one who wrote something different, something new, but it would end: . . . and then Mom woke me up for school. I’d feel a little sigh of letdown—kid can only own the imagery by saying it was a dream.
But, oh, endings are hard—finding the right embodiment of an ending’s two necessary qualities: surprise and fulfillment. You need both (often, in my experience, writing, the best ones just appear—not haphazardly, but the result of immersion in the material with right brain and left brain, both). In Piranesi, you can’t exit the story without some explication for the strangeness, but the denouement pops the bubble in a way that left me feeling, Oh, OK, huh, not Wow, that’s so cool! There are books that don’t explain—Kafka doesn’t explain, Ishiguro’s marvelous cipher, The Unconsoled, doesn’t explain . . . Maybe I’ll go back and have a second look.
Sower: Think of this as a two-book set—the other is Parable of the Talents (1998). I was expecting a lot more woo-woo; instead, it’s straight-forward near-future realism. Very readable. I can’t speak to her other books, but she’s revered by fantasy readers.
Priest: Here’s a bit from the Wiki:
The opening sentence of this novel, “I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles,” has generated comments by many readers. Critic Paul Kincaid writes that “it has justly become one of the most famous in science fiction.” James Timarco says similarly, “From the first sentence, ‘I had reached the age of 650 miles,’ readers are aware that something is deeply wrong about this world. We know it has something to do with the relationship between space and time, but beyond this we can only guess.”
Nick Owchar, in the Los Angeles Times, writes that a “reason for the story’s appeal is the way in which Priest, with the novel’s very first sentence, immerses us within a strange new reality . . . time in this world is measured best by distances.”
Priest wrote several dozen speculative novels under his own name and several others, won awards, was well-regarded by other writers. Among his other novels was The Prestige (1995)—Wiki terms it a science fantasy psychological horror mystery novel. Dueling Victorian stage magicians. Christopher Nolan (Memento, Interstellar, Oppenheimer, Dunkirk) made a film of it [Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale].
[And here’s Priest’s Top Ten Slipstream Novels from the Guardian (2003).]
Sausage: Really, you should buy a copy.
Tasmania: A bestseller in Italy, written by a particle physicist—he published the earlier bestseller, The Solitude of Prime Numbers (2010).
Achebe: Another trilogy opener followed by No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964).
Szalay: Winner of 2025 Booker.
David, "a bright human image" is such a vivid way of describing certain characters we can't look away from. I thought I had done all the Cormac I needed/wanted (love his writing but not sure that what the stories do to me is, ultimately, good), but now Stella Maris is going on the list.
All the best (or at least BETTER) to you and all of us in 2026!
Charlotte Wood’s book is titled Stone Yard Devotional, and it is wonderful.