Books of 2025 Part 4: Top Ten

 Not sure if this needs a preamble, but this is obviously the last of my book posts for 2025. I'll take some time soon enough to post a list of my top albums and songs of 2025 as well but otherwise this is all I'll write on my blog until the same time next year. Or maybe not, who knows maybe I'll get into blogging again somehow in 2026. (Narrator: he won't)

But let's start the final countdown with...

10) Travels with My Aunt - Graham Greene

This is officially the last book I read in 2025, as I started it in December and finished it early in January to trigger this blog series, it was quite funny that I had this book left over from my previous visit to the library when I had Something to Answer For by P.H. Newby arrive as an interlibrary loan, largely because I was reminded of Greene while I was reading that book, so I ended up following it up with an actual Greene novel I hadn't read. I think I've seen this before at my library but passed it over because "travels" is already a bit of a turn-off for me, while "with my aunt" doesn't exactly ameliorate my personal aversion to aimless travelogues which I've mentioned frequently in previous book posts (cf. going back to my original reading challenge of TIME's best books, Kerouac's On the Road and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises with a nod as well to last year's A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke, among others). But as Newby did with his Greene-esque setting, Greene himself surprised me with this book. I will admit that from the title that I thought this would be more autobiographical and observatory in style, while it instead tells a fictionalised story of Henry Pulling, a recently retired bank manager who refreshes his acquaintance with his elderly aunt Augusta (who I kept feeling was also one of the names of one of Bertie Wooster's many aunts) at his mother's funeral, and obviously - no spoiler alert necessary - subsequent goes on at least two trips with her. It's worth noting that there are some passages of describing landscapes, making observations while exploring unknown cities, which are typical of 'travel' literature and I found less compelling even in Greene's very capable hands. However, what makes this book compelling is the character of Aunt Augusta, who is almost a prototype of the 'manic pixie dream girl' figure as she enters Henry's stuffy, boring existence looking after his dahlias and shakes up his world to get him out into seeing the world. But more than just being an inspiration and energising figure, Aunt Augusta is also a morally ambivalent one, who narrates many dalliances she's had with larger than life figures throughout her life, and much of the travelling narrated in the book are spent in search of old acquaintances, or performing particular tasks for old acquaintances and lovers of hers. She's quite an incorrigible figure, strongly outspoken and while her fate seems to be intertwined with Henry's while also jolting him out of his humdrum existence, this never seems to be a particular design of hers but just the inevitable influence she has on people around her. The frequent coincidences that happen throughout their travels, where the same figures crop up everywhere or people with improbable connections to earlier acquaintances, don't tend to fall into Dickensian cliché but are rather part of Greene's comedic vision here painting a version of global hegemony that's manipulated by small, everyday players. And I can't help but read Henry's ultimate fate in this book as a kind of indictment from Greene on how most of us live our lives, keeping out of trouble by steering clear of adventure, while small changes could make us part of something bigger, more exciting and potentially gravely dangerous as well. But it's all delivered with an affable irony that reminds me of why I like Greene in a number of different writing modes.

9) John Dies at the End - Jason Pargin (writing as David Wong)

I grabbed an eBook of this for a couple of reasons, but it was mainly triggered by a thought I had while reading Jason Pargin's later book, I'm Starting to Worry about this Black Box of Doom, which was: knowing that he wrote this similarly foreshadowingly-titled book, is that a whole stylistic motif of his, to write these books that basically give away events in the title only to then rein in how foreboding the doom is as the book goes on? In this case, the answer's a little more complicated. I kind of knew that there was a "John Dies at the End" series but the upshot of the ending of this particular book - without any major spoilers here - is that it being a series, John doesn't actually die at the end of this book. But the other reason it's complicated is because it almost doesn't matter whether John dies, at the end, or at all during this book. Because it's kind of a bonkers chaotic tale about death and reanimation and cloning and parallel multiverses and so forth. Again no major spoilers but John is at some point indeed dead in this book. So is David, our narrator. So are lots of people. But they also have this tendency to exist outside of the usual time-space continuum and outside the usual constraints of causality. So this book is a fair bit more of a wild ride than IStWAtBBoD and is in the same way a lot more convoluted. It's an interesting question as to whether I've read these books in the correct order, since the latter book is far more controlled and far more targeted in its themes and the ideas it explores, whereas this is a messy Jackson Pollock of a novel, and I think I enjoyed them both but preferred IStWAtBBoD if only because it was easier to follow what was going on. That said, this like the latter, is a very funny book and I think the way to enjoy this book is to just let go of piecing together the narrative threads and just enjoy the ride. One thing I did find a little odd about this book though is how politically incorrect a lot of the language is. I'm not exactly a prude when it comes to things like this but I simply couldn't see the reason for the narrator's constant use of the word "retarded" to describe something broadly 'bad'. It didn't seem to serve any character-building purpose (i.e. we weren't meant to see David as especially politically incorrect because he's using this word all the time), and therefore I couldn't really see it as necessary at all yet it's constant throughout, along with a few instances of the n-word that were more couched in "I'm just referring to someone else saying this you understand" kind of terms. Anyway, it wasn't a huge damper on my enjoyment but it was a questionable choice by Pargin that never really seemed to reconcile itself with any purpose at the end of the book and therefore could easily have been avoided completely. But willing to overlook that, there were a number of chuckle and even laugh-out-loud moments for me; even sometimes just at the silliness and absurdity of the situation our two buddies found themselves in. John as a character is definitely the one to latch onto in a lot of the ways where the first-person narrator becomes merely our eyes and not necessarily a fully-fledged character in his own right, while John is far better drawn and textured while also just being a strange conduit for such supernatural goings-on as the book describes. A pretty chaotic bit of nonsense but undoubtedly a very amusing diversion.

8) The Sisters Brothers - Patrick DeWitt

Following on from reading Paul Theroux's Mother Land which I didn't care for at all, this was a welcome tonic. This one was given as a birthday present from Catie, who I can imagine told the clerk at the book store some of her own favourite books and then asked for a recommendation for the diametric opposite in order to hit on something that would appeal to me. And it chagrins me to say that this approach, or the book clerk, were spot on with this because I did very much enjoy it. It's a very blokey story of course, being a western tale about two brothers who are hired killers travelling from Oregon to California on a hitman mission from their wealthy landowner employer. Eli Sisters, our narrator, is the younger and more sentimental of the brothers, and spends much of the book trying to forge connections with people as well as dreaming of a peaceful life beyond the pattern of killer-for-hire that he and his brother find themselves in. His brother Charlie is more ruthless, cynical but also with a more mercurial personality who finds greater success with personal interactions than Eli despite Eli having more need for that connection. I did find the book had an entertaining moral ambivalence to it, where the brothers are cold and clinical in their dispatching of people who stand in their way, and it's entertaining just in the same realm as westerns generally - at the frontier of civilisation where laws are mutable and survival is the end goal. So the brothers make for interesting protagonists as they have this invulnerability to them (you might even call it plot armour in an ungenerous reading); their efficiency with their guns makes them feared and respected, but Eli as our narrator tends to gravitate towards trying to find an end point and it always feels like he's stuck in a life and destiny he can't escape from. I did find that the ending of this story was a little bit too chaotic; DeWitt kind of forces a turning point into the story where the brothers have a choice to make where they can end the cycle of violence they find themselves in, while also injecting a number of different roadblocks that mean that neither path is clear for them to take and everything seems to involve more misfortune and more violence. As a result I do find myself remembering fondly a number of the mid-points of the story and a lot of the key events as it unfolded, but with little to no feeling about the conclusion of the book, which was fairly open-ended as well as somewhat ambivalent. And given the inconclusive nature of the ending it also leaves me wondering about some plot points that never seem to have been resolved throughout the story. It was an entertaining series of events, but the inconclusive nature of some of them left me feeling a bit unsatisfied, despite the fact that of course real life doesn't always follow a pattern or logical sequence.

7) Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves - P G Wodehouse

I always get that line from Black Books in my head whenever I consider reading Wodehouse - "Hang on, I've read this one - that's the trouble with Wodehouse, isn't it?". In fact when I was picking this one up from many options in the library, I was also considering another one that I realised I had, in fact, read. But the reason that line is particularly relevant to this particular book is that throughout this book I had to keep questioning to myself whether in fact I had read it and just forgotten about it, years ago. It would have pre-dated my blog summaries since there's no mention of it, but the main reason why I kept second-guessing myself is basically because this book feels fairly late in Wodehouse's Jeeves & Wooster oeuvre and therefore it contains a lot of references to previous escapades and old stories, plus a fairly pastiche approach to a lot of the hijinks that ensue here. This is very much a sequel to the earlier book The Code of the Woosters in that it marks a return to the dreaded Totleigh Towers for Bertie and Jeeves and continues on a number of the disagreements, misunderstandings and suspicions of the previous book (which I'm pretty sure I have read and hence also why so many plot points of this book felt familiar). So there is that pastichey feel to this and a feeling that Wodehouse is treading fairly familiar ground: Bertie's getting himself into hot water and bailed out by Jeeves, unwanted romantic attention, delightfully sardonic barbs being exchanged by Bertie and more insufferable members of the aristocracy, etc. For that reason it doesn't quite land all of the plot points as well as it could and it ultimately follows a somewhat predictable path through its back-and-forth chaos, but what does shine through as strongly as ever is the wonderfully underhanded wit on the part of Bertie and his affected superiority of all those around him. The book I read immediately prior to this - Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami - elicited a few small tears from me during its more moving passages, while this one had me frequently wiping my eyes throughout from laughing so hard. I don't think this particular book is necessarily the pinnacle of Wodehouse's work but I think it clearly represents Wodehouse at the pinnacle of his powers, full of an innate cognisance of the humour of sarcasm, false civility and the intrinsically absurd nature of gentility.

6) Persepolis (The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return) - Marjane Satrapi

I haven't watched the film based on this book, and I'm glad that I chose to read the graphic novel before watching the film, simply because I can already completely picture how the film would be presented and effectively it's really just putting animated movement into these pictures and the dialogue, explication, etc. can pretty much remain unchanged. That's all to say that this is a very vibrant and evocative graphic novel. Satrapi's art style is fairly simplistic which allows for plenty of emotion and narrative function to be served by changes in facial expression, gestures and so forth (which I believe is one of the tenets of animation, keep facial characteristics simple so that changes are obvious). But it also does mean that the book is largely dialogue-driven, and the fact that it's presented in graphic/comic form really is an artistic choice rather than a necessity to deliver the same story as she does. It does also though frame this as fairly episodic, so it's told in a series of vignettes that are broadly chronologically arranged but don't necessarily lead from one to the other and therefore it feels like the kind of book that can be picked up at random and you can enjoy one isolated story just as much as you can enjoy the full thing. But overall it provides a deeply personal and interestingly faceted story of personal identity, starting from her childhood in Iran as the Islamic republic takes power and begins gradually but steadily to erase individual freedoms and particularly the identity and freedoms of women. It then follows her life as an emigrant in Austria followed by her return to Iran and her attempt to forge a new individual identity in a far-advanced Islamic republic. Her stories are largely light-hearted and follow the foibles of her own personality, but often they do reach climaxes where great dramatic truths or personal revelations are detailed, and she makes some trenchant commentary about Islam, Iranian identity and the particular elements of subjugating women as she goes along - usually casually delivered as part of a more individualised story which makes them hit harder. I do at times find Satrapi an ambivalently sympathetic figure though - her personal development feels erratic at times, and some of her individual choices feel questionable wherein I feel she's as much the engineer of her circumstances as much as she's a victim, but this is something that's very much laid bare by her warts and all self-portrait. One story late in the piece though did feel tonally divergent from the remainder of the piece - in this story she panics at the sight of some approaching guardians of the republic, and in order to save her own hide she accuses a random passerby of lewd behaviour and gets him arrested in her place. This could have been quite a poignant story if she portrayed herself as desperate and clutching at the only possible means of escape, but instead she portrays herself as finding the situation amusing, and that just fell flat to me even though she gets redressed for her behaviour later. It just doesn't seem consistent with her level of self-awareness and wordliness throughout most of the rest of the story. So that felt like a strange diversion very late in the piece which blunted the overall impact of the story somewhat just because of how much it flew in the face of everything that came before it, and otherwise how astute and adept the social observations and commentary are throughout this book.

5) The Man Who Saw Everything - Deborah Levy

This is the third book from Levy that I've read and I think it's fair to say that I haven't fully 'got' any of her books just because of the way she writes, but at the same time I think this has been the most affecting as well as the most devastating of her books I've read. It tells the story of Saul Adler, a historian specialising in the psychology of fascist dictators, as he prepares to travel to East Germany in 1988 to research life on the 'other side' of the Berlin wall. But Levy writes in a dreamy, surreal way that reminds me a fair bit of Kazuo Ishiguro except where Ishiguro's prose is often subtle and fluid in its dreamlike state, Levy reverts often to strange surreal jolts where unexpected twists are injected into the story, and it gives her dreamlike narrative more of a nightmarish quality. The fact is that she layers these sudden jolts into the story from the get-go (and this is true of the other two books of hers I've read, too) so when the narrative more explicitly starts to blur the lines between reality and unreality and between the past and present, I was prepared for the uneasiness of the feeling and the ambiguity. However, what surprised me was how captivated I was by that feeling of unease, of feeling disoriented and disembodied as Saul struggles to keep hold of what's real, imagined and present vs memory following a traumatic car accident. Levy layers into the surreal narrative a lot of wry humour that almost feels like fourth wall breaking in the sense that it's a clear nod to the audience that what is going on in our first-person narrator's head is not part of reality, so there's a sense of dramatic irony in how deep his delusion and even Stasi-inspired paranoia from his time in the GDR goes. There's a fleeting quality to the narrative overall as a result of this fracturing of reality, so it's hard to get a feeling of full empathy and clear adherence to the steps of the story - and this is how I feel generally about Levy's stories, they can be captivating but often from afar because the prose and its meaning are often quite elusive. However in this case it's an interesting and claustrophobic examination of trauma and how it affects our protagonist's relationship with his past, with the various loves and losses throughout his life, and how he deals with the regret about choices made and not made, while looking back on and reliving his past existence through a kind of morphine-induced haze. As captivating as this experience was, it's kind of a devastating read, with even the most humorous and sentimental elements being tinged with that nightmarish and surreal quality of regret and uncertainty about past, present and future.

4) I'm Starting to Worry about this Black Box of Doom - Jason Pargin

This was my first read of the year and it was a book group choice. This was the first book group book since the revival that I've genuinely enjoyed, but my enjoyment does have a limit to it, which I'll get to. The title of this book is obviously a story in and of itself, and it's part of Pargin's clever writing and plotting that the 'black box' that is tangibly central to the story actually has no real doom to it at all - instead the 'black box of doom' of the title is a metaphor referring to how people feel when they are addicted to doomscrolling and online communities - i.e. they are trapped in this black box where only they and their inner circle think the same way, and everybody who disagrees with their point of view is secretly plotting their doom and the destruction of the world as they know it (sound familiar? Get off the fucking internet). So this book tells the story of a madcap cross-country journey undertaken by Abbott, a Lyft driver, and his client who goes by the name "Ether" who needs to transport a mysterious black box from California to Washington D.C. within three days. The story then becomes a pointed and delightfully farcical parody of internet discourse and how a small rumour can spiral out of control into the most extremist conspiracy theories and absurd fantasies, all while maintaining a very humanist viewpoint at its centre. Essentially Pargin has an agenda - or more kindly, a thesis - at the heart of this story which is spelled out in multiple occasions on the story, namely that in order to save the world, we need to disconnect from our devices and actually have a conversation with people in real life - in doing so we may still disagree but we'll get a deeper understanding of how people reach differing viewpoints to ours and thereby maintain our mutual sense of each other's humanity. Where I felt this book maybe over-extended itself is that I found it both engaging and entertaining, but also quite stressful, as the car trip goes awry in multiple ways and the internet discourse that somehow arises about this car trip becomes more and more unhinged. But it reaches a fairly 'explosive' climax at one point and yet it's only about two thirds of the way through the book. And I feel like Pargin should have tidied up the plot points a little better to ensure that the story actually culminated in that 'explosive' climax, because everything that follows after that feels like a bit of an afterthought even though there's plenty of action and plot still left in the story including some actual resolution following the second 'climax'. The fact is that part of the conceit of the story is that there's so much telegraphing of potential doom-filled scenarios, and the whole book hinges on the contents of that black box, but the black box then becomes more of a conduit of doom rather than the Pandora's box itself, and so an astute reader (which - I'm on record on this blog as stating, I'm incredibly not and I'm very happy to be suckered into book conceits) can easily tell that the contents of the box itself are most likely to be a red herring or anticlimax themselves based on Pargin's clearly demonstrated understanding of irony and satire. And I felt that the elongation of the story beyond its most dramatic point felt like he was enjoying his own conceit a bit too much, and wanted to inject a few more Dickensian coincidences and characters coming to terms with stuff, when I personally think he could have achieved that in a few pages of resolution and instead organised for all of the climactic events to happen at once - it's all a bit chaotic anyway so the book felt like it overstayed its welcome a bit, even though that welcome was warmly granted by me throughout most of the read.

3) Fever Dream - Samanta Schweblin

I picked this one up for the same reason I picked up the read previous to this - Yan Lianke's The Years, Months, Days – i.e. it was short, but unlike the latter which took me a good week or so to read despite being less than 100 pages in length, this was around 150 pages and I finished it in less than 24 hours. That's not even a function of this prose being lighter or the subject matter being more pleasant (neither is the case) but because I found this utterly compelling. It helps that this is written in a style that's consistently fascinating to me, and it's no spoiler to say that it's effectively a literary dreamscape. I mean presumably that's not a spoiler since that's the title of the book, but moreover it's clear from the first few sentences that our narrative is going to be fragmented and feverish. It largely takes the form of a dialogue between our first-person narrator Amanda, and David - a strange boy who we soon learn she met on holiday through David's mother, Carla - and becomes a kind of therapy session wherein David is trying to help Amanda solve the mystery of how she ended up in this state in this hospital clinic by going back through the details of her last few days. As mentioned, this kind of narrative is consistently fascinating to me - see how much I loved the disjointed yet strangely fruitless prose of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (my #1 book of 2017) - and this book reads (even in translation from the original Spanish) like a nightmare tour through memory and the subconscious. Every action is strangely surreal, while characters flit in and out of the real and the dreamlike; the dialogue between David and Amanda is a key conduit into the strangeness of the goings on as David keeps prompting Amanda to focus on the details, and insisting that she will know when they get to "the really important part". The fact is that the whole story is a foggy, blurry, mishmash of a nightmare and it doesn't get to a place that makes everything clear or explains all of the unsolved questions. I remember thinking to myself at some point that I was mesmerised by the narrative tricks Schweblin was pulling, and wondering if after all these prosaic gymnastics if she'd be able to stick the landing. And that's honestly a question that's hard to answer, because the book doesn't provide us with any easy answers, and it certainly doesn't allow us a pleasant ending to the dream where Amanda figures out what's going on or wakes up and resolves the issues. On the contrary, the whole book is a journey to an unforgiving world where people are paranoid, the environment is toxic, and it's a constant struggle and threat to keep your loved ones close and safe from harm. As an objective sidenote I think there’s quite a lot of social commentary Schweblin is injecting here that I’m not familiar enough with Argentine eco-politics to fully understand, but it’s just worth noting that I feel there’s likely a lot to this book beyond the fact that I loved it. I'm not sure if I recommend reading this in the quickfire, breakneck method that I did which felt a bit breathless in the end - but the fact is that if you're drawn in like I was it'll be hard to avoid it. It's quite a relentlessly dramatic read.

2) Breasts and Eggs - Mieko Kawakami

I remember reading a Mieko Kawakami book I picked up randomly at my local library a couple of years ago, but mainly I remember the jacket of that book was full of praise and hype for this book, Kawakami's debut, so when I found this in my not-quite-local library I snapped this one up. And in a word, this was far the superior of the two Kawakami books I've read although I enjoyed the other quite a bit too. But if I'm honest it's kind of hard to convey precisely what makes this book so compelling and brilliant to read because the setting is somewhat mundane, and also there's no doubt in my mind that there's a fair bit lost to me in translating this from the original Japanese. The translation is brilliantly rendered but it feels like there would be quite a lot of poetic language and turns of phrase that really gets to the heart of what our narrator is experiencing which just doesn't fully come across in English. This tells the story of Natsuke, an aspiring writer when we first meet her (and it's never made explicit or clear whether she's a semiautobiographical stand-in for Kawakami herself, although I suspect she is) as she awaits a visit from her older sister and niece. At first the book feels like it's going to be exclusively about the conflict between Natsuke's sister and niece, the latter of whom is at the time not speaking to her mother at all. But part one concludes with the visit and then the book jumps ten years into the future where Natsuke continues to live in Tokyo, continues to stay in touch with her sister and niece, but is now a published author and her mind is turning to other things that are commonplace for a woman entering her thirties. Essentially that's a summary of the book, but what makes it compelling is how rich a portrait Kawakami paints of the interior life of a woman in modern-day Japan. She takes us through both the day-to-day life and her encounters with friends, long drinking binges and deep and meaningful conversations, and her research into projects that she's set her mind to. It's a thorough and comprehensive interiority and psychology, at times with the whimsicality and surrealism of a Murakami heroine (Murakami himself provides a recommendation for this book, calling it "breathtaking" on the front cover) but always with a fascinating perspective on the expected role of a woman and how she and others find themselves intermittently both compelled to and repulsed by traditional roles of femininity. But this is also contrasted by Natsuke's encounters with men in her life and how she finds herself often incompatible with what men expect of her in relationships and unable to conform generally to what everybody expects of her. She's a fascinating narrator in other words, and her story comes to an emotional head when she confronts some of the demons of her past with her tortured and frustrated desires for her future life and plans. I found myself quite profoundly moved by where she ends up, and even though the journey that she'd taken me on to that point was essentially just her living her normal life, it felt like a strangely wild ride that exposed a number of profound and important truths about female identity and societal expectations.

1) Fun Home - Alison Bechdel

I had this uneasy feeling that I may have read this before, and I think it's for that reason that I had left it alone on previous visits to the Graphic Novels section of my library. But I realised in reading it that I'd just listened to an interview with Alison Bechdel on the now-defunct but missed Studio 360 podcast where she talked about this, including explaining the meaning behind the title. And I remember really enjoying that interview, but still this book was a huge revelation and was generally a complete delight from start to finish. It certainly isn't consistently upbeat by any means, as it largely centres around Bechdel trying to make sense of her father's possible suicide but officially accidental death, but nevertheless she imbues the sadness of the story with a huge number of thoroughly engaging and charming anecdotes and plenty of wry and at times sardonic humour. What I found most enthralling about this narrative was how Bechdel relates the story of her life and her relationship with her late father in parallel with and in dialogue with dissections of a number of literary works that she and her father had discussed, including Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time. And the truth is that kind of personal and critical reflection is absolutely my literary catnip. Bechdel's central thesis - or at least concern - throughout the book seems to revolve around her own coming out, and how her sexuality manifested in ostensible personality 'quirks' throughout her childhood and then into adulthood where she was able to put a name to her feelings. Which then becomes a deeply personal engagement with her father who it is revealed early in the story had multiple affairs with younger men throughout his marriage to Bechdel's long-suffering mother. The parallel Bechdel draws with Proust throughout the chapter on In Search of Lost Time I found the most profoundly affecting, as she finds a great number of parallels between her father's struggle and Proust's, and how Proust effectively disguised his own homosexuality in a memoir narrative about a young man's fixation on pretty young girls while manifesting them in such florid prose about botany that, in Bechdel's view, demonstrates that he was quite obviously a gay man in some kind of repression. But more than just dedicating a chapter of this book to Proust, I feel that Bechdel conducts a personal reflection on her childhood that is every bit as profound and insightful as the amount of Proust that I've managed to get through (three out of the six volumes, I've been stalled in acquiring the remainder and hence finishing them). The fact that this memoir is told in graphic novel form is, apart from being Bechdel's medium of choice, actually immaterial to me as most of the story is told through her narration anyway and I was enthralled throughout by her turns of phrase and at times bemusing and poignant reflections on life and its vicissitudes. But this medium allowed for a number of side observations that no prose novel would be capable of and that are often light-hearted notes of humour that help to puncture how deep into the collective consciousness we're delving. It really makes the best use of the graphic medium while at the same time I found the words alone an exhilarating dissertation on internal struggle, family dynamics and the modern American experience.