Sixty-five in ‘25

I finished the year’s reading with a few ultraviolent but still managing to be lovely all the same Dave Robicheaux novels by James Lee Burke: “Or maybe even old compatriots in butternut brown wending their way in and out of history—gallant, Arthurian, their canister-ripped colors unfurled in the roiling smoke, the fatal light in their faces a reminder that the contest is never quite over, the field never quite ours.”

Robicheaux provided a curious counterpoint to a year that began with eight, count them, P. G. Wodehouse novels: “He looked through the trees to where the lady bishopess, escorted by Jane, was examining a lobelia through her lorgnette with just the right blend of cordiality and condescension.” To begin the year with blissful silliness and end it in an orgy of bad feelings, death, and eloquence (and also rock and roll, but more on that later), well, there is surely some insight to be gleaned. But my inner eye is clouded as to any deeper meaning.

My reading habits of 2025 were informed by new and old interests, curiosity, a desire for escape and entertainment, a love of good storytelling, and an occasional kindling of the flame of intellect. In the end, feeding my habit amounted to reading sixty-five books over the course of the year—which, depending on where you stand on the scale of the love of books, is a number either too many or not nearly enough. For me, as with the position I typically try to take in political discussion, it is right down the middle.

For some reason this past year I was moved to read more fiction than usual. I took in all stripes, including contemporary, historical, classic, genre. I consumed (as in popcorn) a lot of detective fiction, among which were a good dozen John Sandford novels, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie (one short-story tome of Poirot, another of Miss Marple), and a few Peter Livesey novels. The Old West Josey Wales novels by Forrest Carter I read appropriately as the vengeful heat of mid-summer was rising from the baked landscape. If you have been deprived of reading his books or watching the best Western ever filmed (The Outlaw Josey Wales, based on Carter’s first novel, Gone to Texas), know that the author is a bit like C. McCarthy … just vastly more enjoyable (ducking now).

A binge of John Buchan novels, inspired by the well-written and researched Substack by Brian Shepherd, caught me in their spell late summer. The fact that his books, many printed in the 1920s in beautiful red cloth bindings, are still dirt cheap accelerated my collecting habit and led to my reading four of his novels: “Speak up, man, he roared. I canna hear a word ye’re sayin.” If there’s one novel of his I could press into your hands as an introduction (that is, if you are of the discerning type), it would be John Macnab. It’s one of a handful of titles I usually reread each year.

Paul Kingsnorth and Chris Smaje (Against the Machine and Finding Lights in the Dark Age) were highlights this fall that helped fan the flickering light of intellect that warms the inside of my skull. Both are scheduled for a reread at the start of this year.

Throughout 2025 various readings for a man trying to make sense of the idea of God took shape in the form of Douthat’s Believe (this may be unfair: boring); Sutterfield’s Wendell Berry and the Given Life (inspiring); Capon’s Supper of the Lamb (spirituality served up in the layers of an onion, fascinating); Thoreau’s God by Higgins (interesting but not arresting); the four Gospels (why is “the word of God” so damned obscure, inscrutable, and in the end, of course, revolutionary?); A Field Guide to the English Clergy (laugh-out-loud funny); Surprised by Joy by Lewis (powerful, enjoyable, and in parts disturbing); and finally, Taking Religion Seriously by Murray (a memoir by a scholar of his struggle to believe, and his eventual acceptance of belief).

The rest of the year was filled with delights, discoveries, and more rereads. A Gentleman in Moscow and then onto Beyond Dark Hills (a beautiful, violent memoir of life growing up in the Kentucky hills—a description far too limp for such a powerful book); old loves such as Puck of Pook’s Hill and A River Runs Through It, the latter deservedly reread every year: “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”

While wallowing in that violent world of James Lee Burke at year’s end, I also made time the last week to read Rush: Wandering the Face of the Earth. An eight-pound behemoth of a Christmas present, it includes a summary of every concert by Rush from 1968 through 2015. Details include how many fans were arrested for pot possession at the shows I attended in Lake Charles and Monroe, Louisiana, in April of 1982 (as my sister quipped, “Well, at least they didn’t list names, Brian.”). And, yes, tickets are purchased for the Cleveland and Charlotte shows (thank you, Travis) later in 2026.

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My sixteen favorites of 2025 are as follows, in the order they were read:

1. Philandering Angler (A. Applin)

2. Wendell Berry and the Given Life (R. Sutterfield)

3. My Lady Nicotine (J. M. Barrie)

4. The Leopard (G. Lampedusca)

5. Gone to Texas (F. Carter)

6. Angels in the Cellar, Notes from a French Vineyard (P. Hahn)

7. Penhally (C. Gordon)

8. Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the Old South (J. Taylor)

9. The Big Sleep (R. Chandler)

10. A Gentleman in Moscow (A. Towles)

11. Supper of the Lamb (R. F. Capon)

12. The Color of Hay: The Peasants of Maramures (H. Woods McLaughlin)

13. Witch Wood (J. Buchan)

14. Surprised by Joy (C. S. Lewis)

15. Beyond Dark Hills (J. Stuart)

16. In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (J. L. Burke)

My top six in order of preference:

1. Beyond Dark Hills (Stuart)

2. Surprised by Joy (Lewis)

3. Penhally (Gordon)

4. A Gentleman in Moscow (Towles)

5. The Leopard (Lampedusca)

6. In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (Burke)