Trivia time!

I read 59 books originally in English in 2025; two each translated from German, Russian, and Spanish; one each from Indonesian and ancient Greek.

22 were non-fiction, 45 fiction.

31 were written (or edited) by women, 35 by men, one by a man/woman team.

One was published before […]

• Jia Tolentino: “Trick Mirror” — wants to be a fresh take on Our Very Online Lives, but filters everything through feminist academese until it is obscure and clichéd

• Richard Wright: “The Outsider” — the writing was so bad, and none of the ideas were good enough to redeem it

• Hilda D. Spear: “Iris Murdoch” — manages to make the study of Murdoch’s fiction utterly dull

• Shunryu Suzuki: “Becoming Yourself” — transcripts of often impenetrable lectures reimagined into essays by the editors, unsuccessfully

• Pramoedya Ananta Toer: “This Earth of Mankind” — more an […]

Now for the books I think you can safely skip: ones I picked up with hope and put down with disappointment. Learn from my fail:

• George Eliot: “Impressions of Theophrastus Such” — except for one chapter that eerily prefigures today’s debate about AI Doom, it’s a snoozer

• Iris Murdoch […]

• Jan Westerhoff: “The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy” (the Buddha warned against treating his teachings as intellectual philosophy, but fools like me rush in, and Westerhoff is an excellent guide)

• Richard Wrangham: “The Goodness Paradox” (examines the theory that human morality is […]

Other nonfiction that impressed:

• @agnescallard “Open Socrates” (one can still find something new and important to say about Socrates in 2025)

• Roger Crisp & Michael Slote (eds.): “Virtue Ethics” (best collection of important essays from the modern virtue ethics revival)

• Larissa […]

OK: Nonfiction time. My favorite was Julia Annas’s “Intelligent Virtue,” which was a careful and enlightening attempt to answer the question most virtue-ethicists side-step so they can get to what they really want to talk about: What is a virtue anyway? I’m a virtue-ethics nerd, so I gobbled […]

Other fiction that impressed:

• Claire-Louise Bennett: “Pond” (fresh!)

• William Faulkner: “Absalom, Absalom!” & “Light in August”

• Varlam Shalamov: “Kolyma Tales” (barely-fictional stories from Siberan work/death camps)

• Jose Carlos Somoza: “The Athenian Murders” (a genre-bending murder […]

So much for binging. My favorite of the fiction I read last year was Shirley Jackson’s “Hangsaman.” The writing was just so triumphantly good from beginning to end. It should have been the phenomenon that “Catcher in the Rye” became instead.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16171283-hangsaman

I also launched a new binge-author — Kazuo Ishiguro. I’d read “Remains of the Day” a few years back and enjoyed it but it didn’t make me hungry for a second helping. But this year I read “Klara and the Sun” and immediately wanted more more more. I thought “Never Let Me Go” and “The Unconsoled” […]

...a short story (“Something Special”), a collection of letters (“Living on Paper”), a play / Socratic dialog (“Acastos”), John Bayley’s “Elegy for Iris,” and Hilda D. Spear’s “Iris Murdoch.”

Of those, I liked “The Philosopher’s Pupil,” “The Unicorn,” “The Sandcastle,” “The Sacred and Profane […]

In fiction, I continued binging @irismurdoch, reading 14 novels (“Nuns and Soldiers,” “Jackson’s Dilemma,” “The Philosopher’s Pupil,” “Henry and Cato,” “A Fairly Honourable Defeat,” “A Severed Head,” “The Unicorn,” “The Sandcastle,” “The Time of the Angels,” “The Sacred and Profane Love Machine […]