Best Books of 2025

Continuing the tradition from last year, here is the round-up of the 76 books I read in 2025 (one more than last year, just), what kinds of books they were, how I read them, and brief reviews of some of my favourites. The goal for next year: read my height.

As ever, please befriend me on Goodreads 🙏

In no particular order:

Fiction

American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth

While reading this I found myself frustrated more than a few times: at Roth’s ferociously overwritten prose style, rambling tangents, seemingly reactionary politics and misogyny — he is trying so hard to write The Great American Novel. But he may well have succeeded. Roth’s hero, the Swede, hidden behind two layers of unreliable narrator, feels so real, is so empathetically drawn, so complete. He deserves to stand alongside the Willy Lomaxes and Jim Caseys and all the other great victims of the Americn Dream. The frustrations and perfections of AP were brilliantly summed up by Richard Ford, writing after Roth’s death:

“The fusing powers of Roth’s imagination, conviction and raging intelligence are everywhere evident and exhilarating. There is about it a profound and heartening sense (and it is a profound book) that the verbal construction you’re undertaking as a reader represents absolutely the only way this mighty story could ever be brought into existence. American Pastoral stares back at me audaciously unblinking as a great novel. And although such a rambunctious piece of artifice can inevitably not be perfect, it is nonetheless in all its ways right.”

Perfection (2022) by Vincenzo Latronico

An incisive little book that subjects cynical, insecure, commodified, self-involved, desperate, slightly pathetic Millennial (and elder Gen Z) yuppie life under uncomfortable scrutiny. Hit a little too close to home. Good stuff.

Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier

All the suspense of gothic horror without a smudge of the supernatural. The narrator is extremely relatable as an insecure young woman that slowly finds her voice, but never truly steps out of Rebecca’s looming, ever-morphing shadow.

The Tartar Steppe (1940) by Dino Buzzati

An incredible book, somehow both mysterious and completely unsubtle. A feature-length spiritual predecessor to Pink Floyd’s Time that will freak you the fuck out and make you resolve to finally do That One Thing that will change your life for the better. Maybe next month.

“That very night time began to slip by him beyond recall… The sun shines high in the sky and it seems to have no wish to set. But at a certain point we turn round, almost instinctively, and see that a gate has been bolted behind us, barring our way back.”

Chilling stuff.

War and Peace (1869) by Leo Tolstoy

I’m sure I will think about this for the rest of my life. It’s a slog at times, particularly some of the War segments, and the unbearably didactic Epilogue Part II (way to stick the landing Leo), but there is just so much in this book to love and in which to find yourself. To read War & Peace is to feel Tolstoy reaching across the centuries and grasping your hand and saying “I see you, we are both human. I have looked around and thought hard, and this is everything I see and understand about humanity put to paper.”

It’s been said of Ulysses that “all of life is contained within its pages”. I haven’t read it, but I’d be willing to bet that War & Peace fits the description better.

Non-fiction

Pour Me (2015) by A.A Gill

Gill’s concise, romantic memoir of alcoholism and becoming a writer after failing as an artist is an arrogant, acerbic barrage of non-stop solid gold absolute fucking bangers. A strong contender for the best memoir I have ever read.

How Migration Really Works (2023) by Hein de Haas

This should be required reading. 22 myths (both left- and right-wing darlings!) about migration debunked. It’s infuriating that Starmer and every other world leader either knows the contents of this book already and is ignoring it to serve political aims, or is wilfully ignorant of the facts.

I’d say the main takeaways are these: — The impacts of migration, positive or negative, are almost always very small — Big business is pro-migration as it makes them (slightly) richer. Meanwhile, governments pass legislation that benefits big business at the expense of workers, while turning workers against one another by blaming migrants for these problems. — Anti-migration legislation increases net migration: it does little to stop people coming in, and actively encourages them to get in ‘before it’s too late’, while preventing them from leaving again.

Blackshirts and Reds (1997) by Michael Parenti

A slim (~170-odd page), iconoclastic grenade of a book that will challenge your Western liberal consensus ideas of 20th-century communist movements. B&R can feel so bombastic and bitter at times that you will find yourself recoiling at some of the claims. Much like for ‘actually existing’ socialism itself, don’t let the fact that this book isn’t perfect let you dismiss it in favour of an deeply flawed capitalist system/story that feels inevitable (i.e. Fisher’s capitalist realism)

Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023) by Yanis Varoufakis

Ambitious to the point of perhaps over-reaching slightly, but excellent. Explains clearly, and makes a compelling case against, big tech’s ability to exploit free labour from its users. Makes a compelling case that our economic system has shifted away from products in competition to monopolies parasitically extracting rent from both physical assets and a carved-up digital commons. Clearly and fascinatingly explains the emergence of big tech monopolies directly from post-2008 low interest rates. (Varoufakis’ frequent refrain, “socialism for bankers, austerity for everyone else” is funny, tendentious, and basically fair.) His vision of a universal basic dividend and anarcho-syndicalist markets-without-capitalism paints a pretty picture of a utopia of democratised companies and small-scale publically-owned algorithms. The best of Varoufakis I have read; go for this over Another Now.

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2024) by Naomi Klein

Honourable mentions: two excellent general (i.e. mainly political) histories I read this year, of the United States and postwar Britain respectively, were These Truths (2018) by Jill Lepore A History of Modern Britain (2007) by Andrew Marr.

Full list

(11 books, marked with italics, were re-reads)

Fiction (21)

• My Friends (Matar)
• New York (Rutherfurd)
• The Trial (Kafka)
• Eurotrash (Kracht)
• Return of the King (Tolkien)
• The Tartar Steppe (Buzzatti)
• War & Peace (Tolstoy)
• Another Now (Varoufakis)
• Perfection (Latronico)
• The Hound of the Baskervilles (Doyle)
• The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin)
• Rebecca (Du Maurier)
• American Pastoral (Roth)
• The Hallmarked Man (Rowling)
• La Belle Sauvage (Pullman)
• The Passion According to G.H. (Lispector)
• The Secret Commonwealth (Pullman)
• The Rose Field (Pullman)
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Fitzgerald)
• Tropic of Cancer (Miller)
• A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings (Dickens)

Non-fiction (19)

• This Land (Jones)
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
• The Colossus of New York (Whitehead)
• These Truths (Lepore)
• Technofeudalism (Varoufakis)
• Saving Capitalism (Reich)
• The Use of Knowledge in Society (Hayek)
• A History of Modern Britain (Marr)
• The Fran Lebowitz Reader
• Economics: a User’s Guide (Chang)
• Hostage to History (Hitchens)
• Socialism Utopian and Scientific (Engels)
• Blackshirts & Reds (Parenti)
• How Migration Really Works (de Haas)
• A New World Begins (Popkin)
• Washington Bullets (Prashad)
• Supremacy (Olson)
• Talking to My Daughter About the Economy (Varoufakis)
• Homage to Catalonia (Orwell)

Fiction Audiobooks (15)

• Babel (Kuang)
• Odyssey (Fry)
• The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Doyle)
• Northern Lights (Pullman)
• The Subtle Knife (Pullman)
• The Complete Yes Minister (Lynn, Jay)
• The Amber Spyglass (Pullman)
• The Casual Vacancy (Rowling)
• The Running Grave (Rowling)
• The Martian (Weir)
• Project Hail Mary (Weir)
• Heavy Weather (Wodehouse)
• Blandings Castle and Elsewhere (Wodehouse)
• Lord Emsworth and Others (Wodehouse)
• HP & the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)

Non-fiction Audiobooks (11)

• Strong Female Character (Brady)
• The Trading Game (Stevenson)
• Everything is Tuberculosis (Green)
• Unruly (Mitchell)
• Get In (Maguire)
• Politics on the Edge (Stewart)
• Minority Rule (Sarkar)
• Atomic Habits (Clear)
• Pour Me (Gill)
• Hamilton (Chernow)
• Doppelganger (Klein)

Plays (1)

• The Invention of Love (Stoppard)

Poetry (4)

• Selected Poems (Whitman)
• Paradise Lost (Milton)
• Delicious Laughter (Rumi, Barks)
• The Waste Land and Other Poems (Eliot)

Graphic Novels (3)

• The Complete Maus (Spiegelman)
• Paradise Lost (Auladell, Milton)
• Watchmen (Moore)

RPG Sourcebooks (2)

• Alice is Missing
• Delta Green: Need to Know