Books I Read 2025

 See the 2024 edition here.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Started the year off with a real stinker. I decided to read this given that the author was just awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and that it’s supposedly about a vegetarian. I’m vegan, so this seemed like a relevant subject matter to me. However, this novel is in the same vein as the horrible 2016 French horror film Raw, where vegetarianism isn’t actually vegetarianism, it’s a metaphor for some other shit. The main character of the novel decides to stop eating meat after having a nightmare, and her shitty husband and dad freak out about it. This isn’t entirely unreasonable from them, because she is also being unhealthy. She’s barely eating anything at all and is not able to explain her decision clearly, so the sudden change would actually be concerning. She is then exploited and arguably raped by her artist brother-in-law who decides to put his shitty video art over his morality. Men being bad, how original.

From what I can tell, the main character makes a sort of reductio ad absurdum with regards to food. She first stops eating meat, but then stops eating altogether and by the end seems to be trying to turn herself into a plant. She doesn’t want to bring harm to anything in the world, which is impossible for a living creature that isn’t a plant, which can live off only sun and water. This impossibility of absolute nonviolence towards life is an interesting theme, but not sufficiently explored in my eyes. Maybe if it was written by an actual vegetarian?

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

I read this after loving Coates’ recent book The Message. I knew this was one of his original claims to fame so went for it. I’m writing this several months after actually reading it and am struggling to remember specifics, which is usually a bad sign for a book’s quality in my personal estimation. It’s about how being black in America sucks, and advice for his black son about how to deal with the systemic, embedded racism of the country. I enjoyed reading it, but the lack of takeaways is troublesome. I guess the racism thing is a pretty tough nut to crack, though.

James by Percival Everett (Audiobook)

I read Huckleberry Finn for the first time at the end of 2024, and this novel was getting a lot of buzz so I decided it would be a good pairing. I had also been long interested in reading one of Everett’s earlier books, Erasure. I immediately loved James because it starts by pointing out something that bothered me about Huckleberry Finn, which wasn’t the infamous and rampant use of the n word, but the dialect in which Jim and other black characters spoke. I simply refused to believe that real people actually spoke in the same way minstrel performers do. It reminded me of the Sojourner Truth “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech, where there are two written versions. One is recorded by Marius Robinson in standard English, while the other by Frances Gage uses an absurd dialect that Truth surely didn’t speak in (her first language was Dutch and she came from New Jersey, not the south), but it was more understood by white audiences to be how black people talked. Everett takes this in an interesting direction – the slaves put on the dialect deliberately as a survival strategy, to make them appear dumber than they are.

I found James to be more entertaining, interesting, and mature than Huckleberry Finn. While it doesn’t follow the original exactly, there are many parts of the original that I didn’t like, and those were exactly the parts that were removed. The Duke & King play much reduced roles, which is great because their hijinks were really annoying and overlong in the original. Jim also just has much more going on internally than Huck, who is basically just a child running on instinct who Jim must manage to keep himself safe. Big recommend on this one.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin (Book Club)

An early feminist novel from the late 1800’s. It’s a classic story of a married woman who cheats on her husband then kills herself, in the tradition of greats like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. At least this one was actually written by a woman instead of a man. I had previously read Chopin’s short story “The Story of an Hour” which I quite liked and thought was morbidly funny. The Awakening is much more serious, and as a novel is as interested in the protagonist Edna’s interiority as the setting of fin de siecle New Orleans.

I think my favorite part of the book was the opening section where they’re at the beach resort, since the sense of place was so strong. The book’s early feminist sentiments feel a bit dated and limited by today’s standards, but I’m sure they were good for the time. My biggest complaint with Chopin’s feminism is that it is very class-insensitive. Edna decides to move out of her husband’s house, and makes a big deal about living “by herself”, but she takes servants with her to her new abode. Harping on about individualism and self-governance while living off the labor of others is one of my biggest pet peeves (looking at you Thoreau), and while I appreciate the historical necessity of feminism arriving in the upper classes first, it leaves a sour taste in my mouth anyway.

The Iliad by Homer (Emily Wilson translation)

This shit rules! I had never read a full translation of Homer’s works but heard good things about Wilson’s work so I decided to tap in. It’s the first full translation of Homer by a woman, and she chose to use simple, unadorned language, with the goal of replicating the experience of reading it as a fluent speaker of Ancient Greek. She makes modern-day common sense choices such as using the word “slave” for slaves, rather than a euphemism like “servant” or something. Another reason I decided to take the plunge is that I remember reading in Chris Hedges’ War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning that he recommended that soldiers going off to war read the Iliad, and that soldiers returning from war read the Odyssey. Following that mental arc, I read the Iliad first and will be reading the Odyssey later this year.

The story has so much momentum, people are giving epic speeches constantly, it’s full of action, I feel like any boy would get a kick out of this if they approach it with an open mind. The core theme of the story in my mind is simply: death. Human beings are condemned to die, and this story is filled with characters who struggle against that fundamental reality. Achilles especially expresses this angst, wondering what the point of all his glory is when he will die the same as any other soldier on the battlefield. The existence of deathless gods in this universe only serves to drive home our lowliness in this regard.

I read this while my wife was playing a medieval combat game and hearing the sounds of war cries and clashing iron (though the Greeks were of course using bronze) was the perfect soundtrack, highly recommended.

Pinball by Haruki Murakami

Unfortunately the best part of this book is the first few pages, where Murakami waxes philosophical about pinball to introduce the novel. I had read this passage a long time ago (on 4chan’s /lit/ board, don’t tell anyone) and was the main reason I decided to pick it up. I’ve read Murakami before and have a bit of a love/hate relationship with his books. They are very readable and keep my interest, but I always step away from them wondering what the point of all that was and even have trouble remembering many details of the plot. He also has that weird (read: horny) way of writing about women.

The opening says that “this is a novel about pinball” but pinball is not even mentioned until about the halfway point. This was disappointing, because I actually do really like pinball and wanted to read a novel dedicated to the game. Most of the plot is the aimless wanderings of the protagonist, who has a good job and lives with female identical twins that he sleeps with but cannot tell apart. He feels like something is missing though (gasp), and begins a quest to hunt down a pinball machine that he used to love playing. The twins are certainly the most problematic part of the book, I don’t understand why the protagonist treats them the way he does. He sleeps with them but mostly seems to think of them as children, and doesn’t get any emotional fulfillment out of the relationship. This is in fact due to a lack of trying.

Even when he finally gets to the pinball machine, held in a classic Murakami locale of a freezing cold dream-like warehouse, we don’t get any more interesting thoughts about the game. He just plays. Maybe that’s my biggest peeve with Murakami in the end, his books are filled with characters taking interesting actions, but their reasons and thoughts are rarely elucidated with much clarity. I think that may be part of the point, but I’d like it a bit more explicit.

The Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi (Dropped)

The anime adaptation of this novel is one of my all-time favorites. Thus, when I heard that there was FINALLY an english translation of the book I had to check it out. You’ll see I didn’t finish it, so what happened here?

I first watched the anime in late high school/early college, around the same age as the unnamed protagonist (“Watashi”). I identified heavily with him, and found his combination of awkwardness, pretentiousness, horniness, and fear of social relationships to be relatable. Crucially, Watashi transcends these shortcomings and embraces life as a result of his Groundhog’s Day style ordeal. The anime utilizes the episodic format beautifully, with each episode starting with Watashi selecting a new club and fleshing out the world just a bit more, before finally culminating in that transcendent finale where he gets the girl.

In the book, Watashi gets the girl first try, but still feels like he failed somehow. Why? I cannot for the life of me figure out what he feels like he needs to “re-do” at the end of the first section, triggering the time loop. I realize this is the original and the anime is the adaptation, but it felt like the novel was missing a core piece of the narrative to me. Additionally, the protagonist who I once identified with revealed himself to be HIGHLY ANNOYING, but it may simply be that I am now past the point where his journey is necessary for me to hear. I’m already a grown-up, and being stuck with a childish protagonist irritated me and made me regret ever thinking that I was anything like him. I’m scared to rewatch the show now.

Stories of Your Life & Others by Ted Chiang (Book Club)

Jack chose this short story collection for book club, containing “Story of Your Life”, the source material for the (good) movie Arrival. This book was actually already on my reading list so I was quite pleased that it came up for book club. I was surprised at how much these stories dealt with religion, given that they’re billed as science fiction, and given that Arrival is pretty “hard” sci-fi that contains lectures on linguistics.

The Tower of Babylon was one of my favorites, it’s like if science fiction was written in 2000 BC. It’s about a team of miners who climb to the top of the eponymous tower in order to dig upwards through the vault of heaven. The story imagines how an ancient society would go about such a task, with people living their whole lives halfway up the giant tower since the trek up and down is so long.

Many of the stories ask “what if” and spin out the implications of that “what if”: What if a human’s cognitive abilities leapt far beyond what we know? If some humans have superior cognitive abilities, what does that leave the rest of us to do? What if there was a way to not register differences in the beauty of others’ faces? What if angels appeared on earth kind of like they do in the bible, as terrifying natural disasters? What if the discipline of pure mathematics was found to be totally inconsistent? If these sorts of questions are the kinds of things you like to think about, these stories will be up your alley.

¡No Pasaran! by Matt Christman & Chris Wade

Like many college students, I went through an anarchist phase. And like many young anarchists, I saw revolutionary Catalonia as an ideal for society, a model to be emulated. I of course read George Orwell’s classic Homage to Catalonia, his account of the Spanish Civil War of which he was a participant. Orwell only wrote a few pages in broad strokes describing the atmosphere of Anarchist Spain, but the broad strokes allow a young man to fill in the gaps with whatever pleases him.

I listen to Chapo Trap House and Matt Christman is by far my favorite member of the podcast, because he seems to be the only one who is well-read in any capacity. This book was originally planned as a podcast series, but Christman suffered a stroke while recording it. Since he is still in recovery, this book was prepared as a substitute. Orwell’s book is my only previous experience with this subject, so I’m by no means an expert, but No Pasaran is a much wider historical work describing the major players in the conflict and their motivations, rather than a “feet on the ground” account. I unfortunately am struggling to remember much of the content of this book, which is in negative contrast with Christman’s previous historical work, the “Hell on Earth” podcast series about the 30 Years War. That series felt like it had much more of a central thesis, that this war was the bloody birth of capitalism from feudalism. I would recommend that podcast series first over this book.

The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han

This is a formulation of a major ideology in capitalist societies today, reminding me of Deleuze’s idea of “societies of control” (which is a VERY short and good read, check it out here). Han argues that the top-down control in our society is no longer “negative” (as in, thou shalt not) but rather “positive” (thou shalt). We are encouraged to work hard and hustle within the neoliberal framework and get a leg up on everyone else. This leads to anxiety about “not doing enough” and burnout, hence the title. It was interesting to hear a philosophical approach to this concept, and though he does lose me in some parts (such as an inscrutable diatribe about “tiredness”) I enjoyed reading this one and it didn’t take up an excessive amount of my time, which is a real blessing from a philosopher.

Dune & Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

I tried to read this in college but didn’t get very far. It was hard to get a handle on the society it was describing (not even the sand planet stuff, more the interplanetary feudalism stuff). After watching the movie on a plane ride, I wanted to give it another go now that I know the general plot and can focus on the lore/worldbuilding/characters etc. 

It’s hard to know what to say because there are so many angles you can analyze this series from. One fascinating aspect of the narrative is how deliberate elites are in utilizing religion for their goals. They purposefully introduce myths to planets to make them more easily controllable. Paul purposefully leans into a “messiah” role to get revenge on the Harkonnens. He is in fact a special boy with special powers, but it’s made clear that that doesn’t make him some kind of universal savior, even though he is treated like one. I especially liked the idea in Messiah that no matter how powerful or intelligent you are, it’s impossible to fix a “perfect” political system in place. The uncaring universe is not fundamentally made to support humans despite our striving, and besides, there are just so many people generally. I’d say my main problem with the story is just how much power Paul has, it can be a bit annoying to read about how he can see the future all the time.

Erewhon by Samuel Butler (Book Club)

I suggested this one for book club, as this novel is often cited as the first depiction of Artificial Intelligence in fiction. I have mixed feelings on the book as it’s simultaneously ahead, and of, its time. Much of the satire is directed specifically at Victorian England, most glaringly in the Erewhonian’s worship of Ydgrun. Ydgrun is an anagram of Grundy, a stock character in England at the time who doesn’t have much relevance to the modern reader.

The stuff that did age well is quite interesting though. The centerpiece is surely the “Book of the Machines”, an Erewhonian book that describes how machines are advancing at a disturbing rate, and will soon surpass humans as the dominant form of life on the planet. In response, the Erewhonians purposefully destroy all advanced machinery. This is the origin of the Butlerian Jihad in Dune.

Other funny little bits include the description of the “banks” in Erewhon, analogues of churches, that everyone in Erewhon insists are very important but they can hardly be bothered to attend. Another is the treatment of the sick as criminals, and the criminals as sick. It’s a cute way to point out the hypocrisy in how both of those groups of people are treated. I wouldn’t say I’d recommend this book, but there are definitely parts worth reading. It’s also the sort of book that’s more fun to think/write/talk about than read.

Mood Machine by Liz Pelly

I was first inspired to pick this book up based on an excerpt on “Ghost Artists” in Harper’s. I wrote a bit about that in this blog post, which also links to the Harper’s piece in question.

The whole book is basically an exposé on Spotify. Chapters focus on well-known practices such as payola, “discovery mode”, and the paltry per-stream payments to artists; as well as on lesser-known aspects of Spotify such as the aforementioned ghost artists and the fact that Spotify was not founded as a music streaming service, but as merely a platform to serve ads. That’s right, Spotify was about ads before it was about music. I don’t really have much commentary to add to the book, but if you want to get a better grasp on the exact details of how fucked up Spotify is, I certainly recommend it.

Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova (Book Club)

This was a recent horror novel about a woman who keeps a piece of her dead son’s lung, and the lung begins to turn into a monster. I liked the premise, and I liked the concept of it being a four-part book with four narrators. My biggest issue was that most of the narrators didn’t feel like they had distinct voices, and that despite many of the main characters being Mexicans who speak Spanish, the Spanish language is rarely actually used. Sometimes the author will note whether a particular line was spoken in English or Spanish, but it’s always related in English. Let a white boy read a little español!

Additionally, the mother character makes some really outrageous decisions, and I’m not even talking about the lung thing. She says that she “knows Monstrilio isn’t really her son” but calls the monster by her son’s name. She also has a big art show where she publicly cries over her dead son’s pajamas and is surprised that Monstrilio reacts negatively. I wish I got to understand what she was thinking a bit more.

The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin (Audiobook)

This is a book on American history focused specifically on our concept of “the frontier”, and how that concept has changed over time. It’s a good way to understand how America has gotten to where it is, especially in the central metaphor of the “safety valve”. The frontier acted as a safety valve to any domestic pressure in the early centuries of the country, since anyone who was dissatisfied with the political situation could get a plot of land out west for cheap. This led to urgent political problems being kicked down the road perpetually, until finally there was no frontier left, and America clamped down on what land it grabbed with border fences and intense paranoia. It’s a very useful lens to view America through and I recommend it to pretty much any American.

Surviving Death by Mark Johnston (Book Club)

First and foremost fuck Alice Ehcks for making me read this shit. This was one of the most difficult and dense books I’ve ever had the displeasure of sitting through. It’s a work of philosophy about what happens to your consciousness when you die. The nature of the self (or “the hard problem of consciousness”) is one of the biggest hot topics in philosophy today, and is notoriously difficult to talk about. There are interesting parts of the book, but Johnston’s choices in what is worthy of the time to talk about is a bit questionable. The first chapter is 100 pages of debunking the idea of your soul being brought to the afterlife a la christianity, which no reasonable person needs explained. Not recommended.

The Odyssey by Homer (Emily Wilson translation)

I expected to enjoy this more than the Iliad, but I actually liked it much less. I was excited to read the well-known fantastical episodes of Odysseus’ travels, such as the land of lotus-eaters, scylla and charybdis, and polyphemus the cyclops. Some of these were indeed quite fun, but I was surprised at how little of the text they make up. A full half of the poem takes place after Odysseus arrives at Ithaca, and many of the chapters before then focus on Telemachus exclusively. The best part of the tale was when Odysseus washes up in a foreign land and needs to beg the king and queen for safe passage to his home, it’s the only time that Odysseus feels weak.

I’ll comment a bit on Wilson’s translation since it’s controversial among right wing guys who like antiquity. We all know the men online dislike it because Wilson is a woman and doesn’t unilaterally call everything that Odysseus does “heroic”, but they usually compare her translation negatively to earlier english translations that used more flowery language like Fitzgerald or Fagles. She defends this position by saying that the original greek was rather direct, and also that people read Homer expecting something “old”, and to an english speaker “old” means writing in the style of the 1700’s-1800’s. Wilson argues that the English of our grandparents is just as removed from Homer’s greek as our modern english is, and felt it to be a fabrication. Given that this is my first exposure to Homer, I don’t really have any point of comparison besides screenshots I see online, but I felt like the translation read well and her arguments for her stylistic choices makes sense to someone who can’t read greek. If someone who actually knows anything about greek has something to say about it I’m down to hear them out.

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

I read this in one sitting at a library when I had a couple hours to kill. It’s a really heartbreaking story, and I’m sure that everyone has someone in their life who reminds them of Willy Loman, maybe even themselves. Willy has been hustling his whole life but never made it to the easy life of luxury that the American Dream promises. He’s entering the decline of his life and spends a lot of time talking to himself and planning his suicide. Everyone keeps up the lie of his life to not break him, but he breaks anyway. He takes out a life insurance policy (“you end up worth more dead than alive”) and plants some seeds in his backyard (“A man can’t go out the way he came in, Ben, a man has got to add up to something”) and kills himself. Bleak but powerful.

Little Bosses Everywhere by Bridget Read

This is a book about the history of Multi Level Marketing (MLM) in America. These are business-cults that operate on an exploitative model, where you make most of your money by bringing in more people to your “downline” to kick money up the chain. It’s a pyramid scheme, but MLM companies fight like hell to not be seen as one, because pyramid schemes are illegal. Some of the best known MLMs are Avon, Amway, Herbalife, and Mary Kay.

I’m not sure how necessary it really was for me to read this book, as I already know that MLMs are scams and I am in no danger of joining one. What was fascinating was the way in which they became “legal”. Basically, there was a court case where a judge decided that there is such a thing as a “good” MLM and a “bad” MLM, and of course none of them would claim to be one of the bad ones. Through the power of legal precedent, this has allowed these companies to exist relatively unchallenged for decades. The scariest part of the book was the fact that these companies are starting to expand overseas, there’s an anecdote about car washing soap being “sold” by a whole town in India where no one owns a car.

Piranesi by Suzanne Clark (Book Club)

This book resulted in the largest ever meeting of my book club, 13 attendees if I remember correctly. It was an engaging read and I blew through it quicker than maybe any other book I read this year. The initial mystery is fascinating and the slow drip of information about what’s going on in this universe withholds just enough to keep you going. My biggest criticism is that the mystery is too fully explained by the end. My favorite part of the book is the beginning where you have no idea what’s going on, with the main character wandering around this surreal landscape. The way in which the setting is described creates a striking mental image, which I feel was somehow cheapened by explanation. But perhaps the point is that we no longer have access to that immediate view where everything just is and cannot be explained or understood in its entirety.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

I had so much fun reading Homer that I wanted to check out some other epic poetry. Gilgamesh is arguably the oldest story we have, so I went in. Most of the fun of Gilgamesh is in seeing episodes of the epic that reappear in our other tales, such as the serpent who steals the fruit of life or the myth of the great flood. I also read this at the same time as Piranesi, and found similarities between the main character and the assumed audience of Gilgamesh. A person walking around ancient Babylon would likely be in total awe of their surroundings, and the Epic of Gilgamesh answers the question of who to thank for the city.

I should note that we still don’t have Gilgamesh in its entirety, though we can guess some of the missing passages from context clues and from other stories that we do have. Copying Gilgamesh was how scribes were trained to write in cuneiform, so that’s why this story has remained over all these years, and we keep finding more of it. I hope to one day read the whole thing.

The Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp (Book Club)

This was a book of reporting that came out this year about the rampant crime in North Carolina’s military base Fort Bragg. Most of the information included in the book came from these soldiers' mothers and ex-wives/girlfriends, since the code of silence is a point of pride for many of the operators stationed there. The book covers a lot of ground from a lot of angles, but there were two major points that stuck with me.

First, and most obvious, is the fact that these soldiers can get away with pretty much anything. The police in Fayetteville, NC drop murder, drug trafficking, and rape charges against these guys constantly; and the military courts also try their best to cover up what goes on at the base. One telling story was of a female service member who was raped outside a bar by a Delta Force operative, who fought like crazy to bring him to justice. The military put up every possible hurdle for her to move forward with the case, until years later she finally gave up, exhausted, realizing that these guys are trained in getting away with murder too.

The second point was that many of these guys at Fort Bragg are Global War On Terror (GWOT) veterans. Army doctors prescribe them adderall, xanax, and opiates freely to make them able to carry out the dirty work of the USA in the middle east, and they take this baggage home. That’s how a lot of them end up trafficking and using illegal drugs, and their PTSD makes them liable to fly off the handle and kill Americans. We can’t just inflict wanton violence on the rest of the world and expect ourselves to stay normal.

The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio de Maria

This was a pleasant surprise. This obscure Italian novel was just translated into English just under a decade ago. It’s a ghost story (this phrase is in English even in the original Italian version) about how the city of Turin as a whole underwent a strange bout of insomnia one year, along with some unexplained deaths/disappearances. I won’t spoil who killed them, because the point is more about how people talk about the events rather than the events themselves. 

This book is a thinly disguised metaphor for the “Years of Lead”, a period of violence and terror perpetrated by both the political left and right. This is an era that you should know about, because America feels pretty close to entering its own version of it. The other interesting aspect for the modern reader is the Library, a storehouse of extremely personal diaries that you can pay to read. It’s like a physical Twitter feed, and as depraved as our modern one. I’ll leave you with a quote that really stopped me dead in my tracks. Note that by this point the book had established motifs of a slurping, sucking sound and the vision of a bone-dry riverbed that appears in dreams or when the protagonist comes close to the source of the murders:

‘“I never believed anyone who put the insomnia epidemic down to the heat, or the drought, or those toxic, vinegary fumes that were supposedly drifting through the air. If anything, we were the ones going rancid . . . But how?” Fervently, the mayor continued: “Do you think human beings are really like bottomless wells? That we can drain ourselves endlessly without sooner or later finding our souls depleted? In all likelihood, that’s what people did believe, otherwise we would have stopped soon enough; but, unfortunately, we preferred to let the vampires drain everything, with the most extreme consequences. And so we saw!”’

Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov

I had already read The Fort Bragg Cartel by the time it had been suggested for book club, so I had the month to read something longer than usual. This was a book that had been on my to-read list for quite a long time, since I usually am a sucker for 19th century Russian novels and this one had a particularly funny premise. It’s essentially about the laziest guy of all time. The wikipedia page states that “In the first 50 pages, he only manages to move from his bed to a chair.” If you don’t think that kicks ass then we have very different thoughts about art.

Oblomov is naturally the butt of many, many jokes, being a member of the landed gentry who has food brought to him in bed every day just because he doesn’t feel like doing anything. Who hasn’t dreamed of such a leisurely life? He’s not a mean person either, he’s actually quite sympathetic and you end up wishing him well throughout the book. I found it absolutely delightful, recommended for fans of Welcome to the NHK.

Currently Reading: Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

I’m liking it so far.

TLDR:

Larfen Book of the Year Awards

Best Fiction: Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov

Runner-up: The Iliad by Homer

Honorable Mention: The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio de Maria

Best Nonfiction: The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin

Runner-up: The Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp