Books of 2025

Micro-reviews of the first 12 books I read in 2025

My annual round-up of the books I read in 2025 was pre-empted by a request from Research Professional News (RPN) to write 250 words on my favourite reads of the past year. The article, which includes selections by others, is for subscribers only but here is what I wrote (edited to straighten out some of the text’s original convolutions):

In a year in which the world appears to be going to hell in a hand cart travelling at the speed of a SpaceX rocket, I turned to two books to try to get a grip on the overwhelming immiseration of politics at home and abroad. Renée DiResta’s Invisible Rulers: The people who turn lies into reality provided a penetrating analysis of how influencers and propagandists have worked the attention economy of social media into a frenzy that daily perverts our public discourse. Sadly, her proffered solutions seem to me likely to fall short.

The far-right ethno-nationalists who have ridden to power on the toxic currents that sluice through these media channels were brilliantly unmasked in Quinn Solobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards. They are, it turns out, a highly organised but motley crew of thinkers and philanthropists who have wrapped themselves in the threadbare, foul-smelling rags of scientific racism to proselytise for a socioeconomic vision rooted in division. I was left with a visceral sense of just how much they despise the wealth and diversity of our collective humanity.

I found relief from these troubling vistas in Kathryn Schulz’s Lost & Found, a beautifully written and deeply soulful tale of losing her beloved father and finding the love of her life. It is a book that overflows with human kindness. As does Middlemarch, I have belatedly discovered. George Eliot’s compassionate masterpiece on the many and various foibles of beloved characters who leap vividly from the page surprised and delighted me time and again. With uncommon wit and wisdom she weaves a tale of provincial, everyday cares to articulate, in ways that still seem fresh after 150 years, profound and moving insights into the human condition. I am indebted to this nineteenth century writer for resurrecting my hopes for twenty-first.

As is my long-standing habit, I also briefly reviewed each book in a BlueSky post as soon as I’d finished it.  You can click on the composite images of these posts to see higher resolution versions, or look up the year-long thread starting from here.

Micro-reviews on BlueSky of my reading in the 2nd half of 2025

As you will see if you read the whole thread, apart from the four titles I highlighted for RPN, it was another mixed year. On the novel front I really enjoyed Laurent Binet’s intriguingly structured HHhH about the assassination in Prague in 1942 of the high-ranking Nazi, Reinhard Heydrich, and the exploits of Dashiel Hammett’s gloriously cynical Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, a character immortalised by Humphrey Bogart in the film of the book.

Colm Toibin’s Long Island memorably and movingly picked up the threads from Brooklyn twenty or so years later to tell the story of the loves and losses of Eilis Lacey, who has made her life in America but still feels the tug of her fraying ties to Ireland. To this Irish ear it resounded with the familiar ache of the emigrant.

Otherwise I was mostly disappointed with novels that others have found enchanting. I couldn’t finish Jonas Jonasson’s The Hundred Year Old Man who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared, while Anne Cleeves’ Raven Black and Robert Harris’s Imperium both left me cold. I also failed to connect with Ursula Le Guin’s masterwork The Dispossessed. The faults here are partly my own, particularly in the case of Le Guin, I suspect.

Non-fiction titles that have stayed with me, apart from the two mentioned above, include Angus Hanton’s eye-opening but depressing Vassal State, an account of how the British economy has become a dependency of the USA, and James Baldwin’s collection of writings in The Cross of Redemption, which gave such a blistering insight into the state of that benighted country.

All in all not a bad year – enough reward to make me want to carry on. I am already enjoying the first book that I will finish in 2026, Matthew Cobb’s brand new biography of Francis Crick.

Happy new year dear reader!

P.S. For round-ups of previous years and other book reviews, follow this link.