Favorite Books Read in 2025

Oooh...I was kind of on a hot streak all year, starting last January, when I went on a torrid pace that was nearly a book a day.  Much of that was graphic novels, but as the year progressed, I think I turned the tide, but at any rate, I chased and conquered and obliterated my Goodreads era totals.  2015 had been my record for a number of years with 134 books read until 2022, when I hit 138, and then 2023 I hit 144, and in 2024 I fell short of that with 139, which was a kind of bummer, so I think I took that at a subconscious level when I made 145 the new mark somewhere in the middle of 2025 after having cruised past 100 easily.  I ended up with 152.  Page numbers was another one, which is always a relative accomplishment, since there are books I don't finish reading (and there were some notable entries to reach that ignominious fate, a whole series I'd obviously been hoping would be considerably better than that I won't name here, among them), but I couldn't help but crush the previous benchmark of 36,582 from 2023 by clocking in, technically speaking, at 39,586.  But what were my favorites?

1. The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, a book in hindsight I cannot believe I hadn't read before, a part of local lore growing up in Maine by how it helped elevate Joshua Chamberlain into a hero of the Civil War.  I consider it a classic just waiting to be officially enshrined, perhaps after the later volumes of Jeff Shaara and the films Gettysburg and Gods and Generals have faded from memory.  This certainly isn't the era in which that'll happen, but it would do wonders if we could remember, or even consider, that regardless of our differences, Americans hail from a common country.
2. Conclave by Robert Harris, tied up with how much I adored, and still do, the 2024 film of the same name, carrying much the same story and as such, all the same thrilling moments, including the sermon on certainty that the modern era (by which I mean, basically the past five hundred years) needs hearing more than anything.
3. Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, very much like the above book inspired by the movie (Mickey 17) that was adapted from it, though in Ashton's case there are plenty of differences to be found in the prose, and while its sequel (Antimatter Blues) is worth reading, too, I wasn't nearly as wowed when I read past Mickey Barnes.
4. Across the River and into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway, the second of two books I added to my very late appreciation of Papa in 2025, a late entry that has unfairly gotten very little respect.
5. Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff, the highly experimental, much-delayed and easily best work of fiction published in 2025.
6. The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith, the climactic eight mystery investigated by Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, in which their relationship comes closest to finding resolution.  To date!
7. Maria La Divina by Jerome Charyn, the latest and for me seemingly most mesmerizing portrait of a historical figure, an opera star whose fate becomes entangled with Aristotle Onassis (and/or a certain miss Jackie O).
8. The Land of Sweet Forever by Harper Lee, demonstrating all over again that her literary legacy extends beyond To Kill a Mockingbird.
9. Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon, a most welcome return to literary form from one of the true giants of American letters.
10. The Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which I also very much appreciated finally reading, showing the true military genius of the man, not through boasting, but his brilliantly maneuvering as well as insights into the Civil War.

Favorite books read in 2020

2020 was a less than stellar experience in a lot of ways but in terms of reading, for me it was a very good one. Here’s my ten favorite reads of the past year:

1. Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu - I thought his How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe was a work of genius. Well his second book is at least as brilliant.
2. Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith - Arguably the best of the Cormoran Strike books to date.
3. V. by Thomas Pynchon - I read a number of Pynchon books, this was the earliest, the best, and most influential.
4. Green Lantern: Earth One, Vol. 2 by Gabriel Hardman and Corinna Bechko - The best new comic book material I read this year, as much a revelation as its preceding volume.
5. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - Her long-awaited next book is certainly shorter than Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell but equally imaginative.
6. Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger - The author of The Time Traveler’s Wife produces a miracle of a book nearly its equal as her follow up. 
7. Cesare by Jerome Charyn - I have read and admired many books by Charyn, but this incredible true story of wartime Germany is perhaps the book he was born to write.
8. The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln by Stephen Carter - What in later years seems unthinkable to most Americans was certainly probable in Lincoln’s own lifetime. This is the story of an alternate history where he survived the assassination, didn’t become overnight a beloved national hero, and instead faced the response to his controversial wartime policies.
9. Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants by Matthias Énard - A brilliant short historic novel focusing on a little-remembered anecdote from the career of Michelangelo.
10. The Ickabog by J.K. Rowling - Obviously I listed both of her books published last fall despite the massive backlash she faced online, all of which was informed by a total misunderstanding and inability to remember what it is she actually writes, much less what she actually wrote. Well.

Mason & Dixon

The last time I read Thomas Pynchon, it was Against the Day, and it took me from November 2009 to April 2010 to finish it.  It's a big book, and for some people that would still count as impressive.  I don't like to compare myself to fast readers, or people who spend most of their entertainment time reading.  Still, that stands in all the time I've been maintaining a Reading List (Day was the fourteenth book in a log that began in December 2008) as the longest it's taken me to complete a book.  It wasn't because it was a long book that it took so long to read, because that was in the middle of a period where I was reading a lot of long books.  Rather, it was because of Thomas Pynchon.

Have you ever read Pynchon?  I've now read two of his books, having just concluded Mason & Dixon.  I'd say that he's incredibly dense aside from being long-winded, and I mean both descriptions kindly.  I've read plenty of other books that don't read quickly, and most of the time it's because the writing is impenetrable for entirely negative reasons.  I recently gave a fairly glowing review to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, I think partly because I survived the experience, but also because it still feels like an important work of literature to me, regardless of what else he's accomplished and that critics have long pegged it as such.  Even us literary folk love the bandwagon.  Most readers only exist to hitch themselves to the bandwagon.  It's a fact.  Same as any other medium.  Mason & Dixon is the version of Blood Meridian that is truly brilliant, and it shares and transcends many of the same things that made both difficult to read the whole way through, Mason & Dixon far less so because of the lively writing.

One of the things Pynchon definitely does not have is an internal editor.  The books I've read seem to take on a life of their own, and he's the incredibly rare writer who can get away with that.  One of his spiritual mentors, Laurence Sterne, didn't really get away with it, but we all appreciate the legacy of Tristram Shandy anyway.  I'm told James Joyce wrote like this, and perhaps this is why I've only been brave enough to read The Dubliners.  William S. Burroughs wrote a condensed version of this type in Naked Lunch, and although it was patently an experiment that he delivered, it's nowhere near as continually vital as Pynchon, and Pynchon is said to have been inspired by the Beat Generation.

No, I wouldn't compare Pynchon to the Beats.  I compare him instead to writers like Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, and Jerome Charyn, who fearlessly pursue their stories and their unique inspirations wherever they lead.  In comic books, this is exactly what Grant Morrison does, though I'm sure it's harder for mainstream audiences to approve because he does it with superheroes.  Yet Pynchon fills Mason & Dixon with such outlandish tangents as talking dogs, mechanical ducks, and vegetables big enough to live in.  It's as close to a true mythological America as you'll find, tracking the famous surveyors/astronomers as they establish parts of the borders of what would become four states.  In Pynchon's view Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon are a classic odd couple, yet their banter is as timeless as his fiction.  He doesn't let things like history get in the way of his storytelling, and very much like Sterne's Shandy Mason & Dixon takes the shape of a very unorthodox bedtime story, with frequent interruptions that remind the reader of this.

Like Huck and Jim before them, Mason and Dixon are inseparable, identifiable in association of each other, not just because their names are only remembered today that way, but because they need and balance each other out.  Theirs is a journey of incredible wonders and experiences, and by the end, when Dixon has died ahead of him, Mason makes a pilgrimage to his grave, one last grand adventure.  Throughout the narrative we're reminded that Mason is grieving the death of his wife, and it's not hard to see that Pynchon has fashioned Dixon to replace her.

I don't expect a lot of people to read this one.  It's a big book.  Most people only read big books if they're fantasy.  This one is an achievement that could inspire (and in fact already has) years of scholarship to begin breaking all of it down.  Against the Day is remarkable in its own right, but Mason & Dixon is more complete a narrative.  When I'm feeling brave enough again, I'll tackle Pynchon's earlier books, which seem to have more acclaim (though Harold Bloom says this one's his best).  I'll be reading his relatively brief The Crying of Lot 49 soon.  He's got another book coming out this September, Bleeding Edge.  I may have to splice it into the Reading List when it's released.

It took me less than two months this time, and part of that is because I read three other books somewhere in the middle, so this time it was with a break and it still took far less time.  Perhaps another reason why I'm feeling better about one than the other.  But it's now clear that it's hard to go wrong with Pynchon.