From mid-August on, all of my book tour trips were done solo. So I got a lot more reading done in the back half of the year, with almost twenty plane or train legs without a very grabby baby on my lap.
These are my favorite books I read in 2025 (regardless of when they were published). I list them chronologically, unless there’s a thematic grouping.
His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life
by Jonathan Alter
I read this ~800 page biography on and off throughout the year, mostly on planes. It was excellent, and a good reminder of how dense with history the past is, even though it was boiled down to a few pages the first time you encountered it. It made a strong case for Carter as a profoundly good man whose stubborness limited his effectiveness. In this, it reminded me strongly of Candice Millard’s spectacular The Destiny of the Republic, a double biography of President James Garfield and his assassin.
Reading His Very Best spurred me to pick up at least two, and plausibly four related books that felt like I’d stumbled on an accidental curriculum:
King of Kings
by Scott Anderson
Anderson’s history of the fall of the Shah and start of the Iranian Revolution obviously complemented my Carter reading, but it also reminded me of last year’s The Occasional Human Sacrifice, in that there’s rarely a tremendous mistake without at least one person beating themselves bloody against a brick wall trying to raise the alarm.
An American operative is tipped off that elite Iranian air force commanders forestalled a walkout by promising their troops they’d lead a coup for Khomeini, and gets chewed out by the head honchos in Tehran and in DC for sending in such implausible reports. The Americans don’t have enough Farsi speakers in Iran to listen to Khomeini’s speeches and report on what he’s promising to do. We live in the aftermath.
The Path Between the Seas
by David McCullough
I picked up this history of the Panama Canal because it was mentioned in His Very Best as playing a role in convincing Carter that America couldn’t sustain its claim on the canal. It’s the kind of book that introduces a French financier and impressario leading an effort to build the canal, and then will have a brief parenthetical calling forward to his eventual fraud trial.
There’s a funny genre of history book (Angels in the Sky is in this category, so is Six Frigates), where you know how the history turned out, but it is completely implausible as you’re reading that (in reverse order), America won the War of 1812, the nation of Israel survived 1948, and the Panama Canal exists.
But this book has everything: mosquito eradication campaigns, details of careful lock controls design, an administrator who devotes one day a week to hearing and judging grievances, a lot of “fake it till you make it” which occasionally works.
The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald
by John U. Bacon
Ok, I’ve gotta say it: the best ever song about a maritime disaster on the Great Lakes is Stan Rogers’s “White Squall” with Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” in second. Also, this is the most tenuously grouped with the Carter reading, but, uh, I was really thrilled to read about the Soo Locks, since their designer also did the Panama Locks.
As with all the books listed so far, I read a lot of this aloud to my husband, including several pages of history of a different wreck, and the moments when rescuers (as they did for the Fitz) decide to steam into a shipkiller storm because there is a small chance they may find survivors. Bacon makes you feel the radiating loss of each of the 29 crewmen. Some men took demotions voluntarily to be able to work on the Fitz and under her excellent captain. You get the impression that, when the call went out that the Fitz was missing, the prayers in all the nearby ports had something of the feeling of Paris when Notre Dame went up in flames.
The Triggering Town
by Richard Hugo
(We’re out of the Carter-ish curriculum now). In about a year, my husband and I will be married for ten years, and I want to be able to give him a passable sonnet (he has written me three good ones). This is part of my curriculum, and I loved seeing Hugo rewrite poems to be better and worse, so he can let you see the gears of this very challenging art form.
Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare
by Edward Fishman
A fascinating recent history of sanctions, and what America has gained and lost by finding a way to fight war by other means. Fishman lays out how financial advisors try to precisely calibrate the pain they’re inflicting on rival nations. How far can you go using the global banking system as a weapon before you push other nations to try to fracture the global economy rather than play by America’s rules? If you (like me) look forward to Matt Levine’s Money Stuff four days a week, you’ll love this.
The Philosophy of Translation
by Damion Searls
One of the books that I bought my own copy of while I had it out from the library. A wonderful, warm book with lots of worked examples. E.g.:
We have to pay attention not only to the original’s associations but also to the translation’s. Fosse’s latest novella, about an everyman figure wandering in a forest, getting lost, and encountering presences who appear as shining auras of pure white, is called Kvitleik, which means “whiteness”: kvit = white; -leik is the ending that turns an adjective into a noun. However, calling an English-language book Whiteness in the 2020s would suggest a whole universe of concerns around racial privilege. A race-sensitive reading of Fosse’s Kvitleik is of course possible and interesting, but it would be very misleading to suggest to readers that race is what the book is primarily about. Since “Whiteness” has other associations in the English-speaking world today, it can’t be the title here; the publishers and I went with A Shining, taking advantage of still other associations not in the Norwegian, but this time suitable (spooky Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick).
Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World
by David Van Reybrouck
A period of history that was a complete blank in my mind. This was a detailed and thrilling history. (Picked up on Tyler Cowen’s recommendation). Like the Panama Canal book, a notable example of where America’s rising power swamped both native governments and powers of Old Europe… and it doesn’t even figure heavily in America’s story of itself. I’m glad to know a little more about how little I know.
Melting Point
by Rachel Cockerell
A strange and wonderful book. Cockerell’s book is inspired by a relative’s attempt to found a Jewish safe haven in Galveston, Texas, due to his misgivings about Zionist projects in Africa and Israel. The book is a collage of contemporaneous primary sources. We get introduced to major players through snippets of descriptive paragraphs in a range of papers (sympathetic and not).
As someone who grew up with Avi’s (fictional) documentary novel Nothing But the Truth, I loved this. Cockerell does a brilliant job assembling her fragments into a coherent mosaic, and the whole project feels like a miracle. How could there be, so often, two sources so perfectly in dialogue? It really reminds you how at the mercy of prior writers a historian is, and how profoundly grateful we must been for the faithful recorders of the past and present.
A Short Bright Flash: Augustin Fresnel and the Birth of the Modern Lighthouse
by Theresa Levitt
I saw this recommended somewhere, and Fresnel’s name caught my eye. (I’ve hung plenty of “fresnels” while working stage crew in high school, without a thought for the origin of the name of the light or the peculiar striped pattern of the lens.
Fresnel invented a lens that could throw light so far, so brightly, that the limiting factor for a ship seeing shore was the curvature of the Earth, not the weakness of a lighthouse. The lenses were so critical that the Confederates made a point to steal or destroy lenses as the Civil War kicked off in order to hamper the Union blockade. Another wonderful entry in my favorite genre of “biographies of things that aren’t people.”
Intimacy and Intelligibility: Word and Life in Augustine’s “De magistro”
by Erika Kidd
A short, beautiful book on Augustine’s dialogue with his son Adeodatus on what it means to teach something to someone else.
For Augustine, prayer turns out to be a matter not of informing but of intimacy. The bedroom of the heart, a space both private and shared, is a place of spiritual intimacy, where God and the soul dwell together. The soul does not enter the bedrooms of the heart looking simply for satisfaction of its own desire. What draws the soul there is a desire to be with God, a desire to be where God is. It is a place where God and the soul attend to one another. Prayer in the bedroom with God is not good because it is wordless and not mixed up with external things. It is wordless because it is so good, and the soul needs no more reminders, no more signs to focus its attention.
Prayer is not a matter of informing, but a matter of intimacy. Augustine says nothing like this— he says very nearly the opposite but his image suggests it. This moment is the first of several in De magistro where Augustine’s explicit views are in strange tension with the passage or images he explores. As I detail in subsequent chapters, Augustine sets up this tension for good pedagogical reasons. At this point, however, we need only notice the tension between Augustine’s stated view that prayer is only for informing and his evocative image of prayer in the heart’s bedroom. This intimate image of a shared inner space is the text’s first hint that ordinary speaking might turn out to have something to do with intimacy too.
A Ghost in the Throat
by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
A Irish poet translates an 18th century noblewoman’s lament for her murdered husband. Doireann Ní Ghríofa blends her historical research and her weighing of just the right word with her mornings spent pumping milk for vulnerable babies (and her long vigil in the NICU for her own child).
In choosing to carry a pregnancy, a woman gives of her body with a selflessness so ordinary that it goes unnoticed, even by herself. Her body becomes bound to altruism as instinctively as to hunger. If she cannot consume sufficient calcium, for example, that mineral will rise up from deep within her bones and donate itself to her infant on her behalf, leaving her own system in deficiency. Sometimes a female body serves another by effecting a theft upon itself.
The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person’s Guide to How a House Works
This one was on my list of books to read in 2025! I want to grow into the kind of person who does more home maintenance, and this was a wonderful introduction to what kind of problems my house is built to solve, and what kinds of failures builders tend to decide are most acceptable. A big theme of the book is that houses are permeable boxes, and much of the structure (and failures) are about giving excess water/humidity ways to exit the house. When the next thing goes wrong, I’ll have a better sense of why and what to do next, and, I hope, a little fondness for how hard my house resists entropy in its long defeat.
And if you’d like more, here’s my best of list from 2024.