I ended last year with a flurry of Oscar Wilde’s short stories, declaring I’d read all the plays in 2025. I mean, there were only five, sadly, due to the homophobic violence of his own society. I know these plays so well. When I re-read them it seriously is like sitting down with an old friend. I KNOW what they’re going to say but I love them and I can’t wait to hear it. I read a lot this year and I read all over the place. I read children’s books, I read the Romantics, I read 20th century totalitarian warnings. This year I am going to read all of Shakespeare’s plays. (Re-read should be understood.) I did a full read of all of them maybe ten years ago. I am feeling the yearning again. 2026 here we come. There’s so much to read, old and new, I have to at least have a SKETCH of a plan moving forward. I can’t just leave it ALL up to chance.
Here’s what I read in 2025.
1. Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus , by Mary Shelley
2025 was the year of Frankenstein for me, although so was most of 2024, since I “got the job” in March of 2024. I carried Shelley’s book with me everywhere. I referenced it constantly. I can recite long passages of it by now. Writing my book was a BEAR but I miss “hanging out” with all those people, the artists who made the film, and Mary Shelley and her friends.
2. Instead of a Letter, by Diana Athill
I can’t remember how this memoir came on my radar. I hadn’t heard of it, although apparently it was beloved by generations. I love it when that happens. I am not an academic or a scholar, and so I have blind spots and blank spaces and there’s a bunch of stuff I don’t know. This book must have been referenced in something else and it intrigued me. Athill was an editor for almost half a century, and she wrote a number of memoirs. This is the important one, the one everyone knows. She details her childhood vividly, but the central event is the love affair she had as a young woman. They got engaged and then World War II started. Long separations ensued, and he basically married someone else without even letting her know. This shattered Athill to such a degree that one could say she never really “got over it”. She was “disappointed”, in some ways, for good. She ended up remaking her life, all while feeling like the other life – the one with HIM – had more reality than the one she was actually living. The life she had was second best. But life must be lived nonetheless. There is no cozy neat catharsis here. She doesn’t “come through to the other side”. What she DOES do, however, is make a life for herself ANYway. And what an extraordinary life. She writes about heartbreak so vividly I could feel it. As someone who went through a similar “disappointment” in my late 20s, with a similar aftermath (albeit not with a World War involved), this was a painful book for me to read but I am very glad it exists.
3. The Children’s Story, by James Clavill
I read this wee story in high school and it scared the shit out of me. Granted, I was tail-end-of-Cold-War child, but I wasn’t looking at it in a Red Dawn way. It just scared me because of the TONE of it. It does lay out how easy it is to control others, particularly children. This was turned into a television movie: Gen X kids will remember. I actually couldn’t remember who wrote it and I couldn’t remember the title, but it was vivid in my mind – including the cover. So I had to get creative with Google searches to find it.
4. The Portrait of Mr. W.H: Uncover The Identity of The Enigmatic Dedicatee of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, , by Oscar Wilde
I first read this in 2023. I couldn’t believe there was an Oscar Wilde I hadn’t heard of. It’s a portrait of obsession and madness, a companion piece to Dorian Gray, with a similar feverish tone.
5. Intentions, by Oscar Wilde
This small book is made up of four essays: “The Decay of Lying,” “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” “The Critic as Artist,” and “The Truth of Masks” – all extremely important artistic statements of purpose by Wilde, essential reading. My first Oscar Wilde “phase” was in college, so these are all like well-worn sweaters to me and I love revisiting them.
6. The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, by Oscar Wilde
I was only familiar with the title essay which is, rightly, famous and very provocative but the other pieces I hadn’t read before.
7. Salomé, by Oscar Wilde
It’s hard to believe this was written by the same guy who wrote Ideal Husband.
8. Lady Windermere’s Fan, by Oscar Wilde
This was Wilde’s breakthrough. His first couple of plays – the bizarrely wooden Nihilists and the dreary Duchess of Padua – weren’t produced. He had written Salome, but it hadn’t been produced yet. Wilde decided to aim at the upper-class, and basically throw out everything he had been working on before. He took a trip to the Lakes region – where, like Wordsworth and Coleridge before him – poets went to get inspired and fill the well. He wrote Lady Windermere’s Fan, which, incidentally, has my favorite Oscar Wilde quote – or, let’s just say, it’s the one that pops into my head most often. “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
9. A Woman of No Importance, by Oscar Wilde
After the smash hit of Lady Windermere, anything else would be a come-down and this one was. It still had a nice healthy run though. A real ensemble piece, with like 10 people onstage at any given moment, everyone speaking constantly. I actually have never seen a production of this.
10. Ex-Wife, by Ursula Parrott
A bestseller in 1929, published anonymously. For I suppose obvious reasons. It’s about a divorce. Even the Jazz Age, I guess, found some of the city shenanigans a bit too shocking. The events, including an abortion, are presented without euphemism or even moralizing. It’s franker than Sex and the City about the realities of dating/sex. Despite the book being a smash hit, it subsided into total obscurity. I mean, I’d never heard of the thing. Someone I know posted about it on Instagram, in such glowing tones, I bought a copy immediately. Obviously, the book has recently been rescued and issued by the publishing arm of McNally Jackson. It’s SO good. What a find.
11. An Ideal Husband, by Oscar Wilde
One of his best plays! The film – with Rupert Everett – is very good (at least in my memory it is. I saw it at the Angelika!)
12. Poems in Prose, by Oscar Wilde
These “poems in prose” were also new to me. There are six and all in this collection, and they’re meditations on different aspects of art and creation, as told from different perspectives.
13. Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde
Not too many plays can make you laugh out loud just by READING them.
14. The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa
See my earlier comment about blind spots. My Bloomsday friend Therese was in Portugal and posting all of these pictures of herself in Lisbon, referencing this book and Pessoa, posing next to his statue, sitting in the cafe where he wrote. She said that he is the main inspiration for all the writing she has done. I felt stupid. And I love Therese and she loves Ulysses – it’s how we met! – so how could I have never even heard of this? I didn’t take CLASSES in this, so nobody informed me! lol This book is hard to explain or even describe, and clearly I am shamefully late to the party. But I was absolutely entranced by every single page of this … sui generis … book. Difficult and suicidal, often, it’s not an easy read. As with James Joyce, the movement of this book is confined to one city – really, to a couple of blocks. The “movement” is mostly internal. I got almost as interested in Pessoa as I did in his work, and the stuff I read ABOUT him – and how he kept creating these other characters, with full biographies, and would write AS them – his “alters” – fascinating. Difficult book, though. I really had to concentrate.
15. Lynch on Lynch, by David Lynch
David Lynch died and the world felt comfortless when he passed and in many ways it still does. I immediately did a full re-watch of all of his films as well as all of Twin Peaks, while also reading work by him and about him.
16. Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney is a romantic. I think I didn’t clock it right away since her characters often talk about Marxism and late capitalism and she makes stabs at showing class differences (Normal People being the most famous example). Sometimes I listen to Sally Rooney speak and it feels like she might not understand her own work, and I realize this is incredibly obnoxious of me to say. Her characters have endless time to think about their own relationships and dissect them and discuss them. Which, fine, they’re all young people and this is what young people do. They are self-involved! I was too! My relationships were everything! But because of the focus on interpersonal relationships (so much so that relationships seem to be the only game in town), when the characters go on and on about Socialism or Marxism or whatever-ism, it has a tendency to sound mannered or performative. You could even say that Rooney is gently mocking their self-serious pretensions. But is she? Listen to her speak in interviews. I don’t feel like she’s mocking these things. She’s writing about it from the inside of it: she observes the trends, she writes from the center of it. She’s now so famous that in this, her latest novel, one of the characters is a famous novelist, who hit paydirt with her first novel, which captured the zeitgeist or whatever, exactly the response Rooney got for Normal People. You know how after rock bands or musicians become famous all they can write about it is the rigors of the road, and how wild it is to be famous. It becomes their only subject. I think, honestly, love is Rooney’s only subject, the thing that interests her the most, although you’d never know it from her interviews. She’s an easy read. Her prose is not fancy. She is precise. She’s fun to talk about and think about. Anne Enright’s essay is good.
17. Collected Poems of Oscar Wilde, by Oscar Wilde
His poetry is often pretty mannered, with flashes of brilliance, but all in all a challenging read. I was having fun with it though. I am a completist.
18. A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated, by Oscar Wilde
Speaking of being a completist …
19. Epigrams, Phrases, and Philosophies, by Oscar Wilde
Ibid.
20. Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, by Mark Frost
It’s been a difficult year, a difficult couple of years. Twin Peaks has been there for me when things got bad. 2017 … I CLUNG to “The Return”, it helped me so much during that horrendous year. I basically cleared the deck, and inhaled the dossier. It’s all so bittersweet but David Lynch had such a profound relationship with “bittersweet” – his work is so full of it – I really needed this.
21. The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, by Jennifer Lynch
If you haven’t read this … I read it back in the day. It’s tough. A very tough read. Haunting. There are more profound thoughts but along with the toughness of this year, and how hard I have been working, I have been a little tapped out in going deep (in my words, that is). “The Secret Diary” makes me cry. Repeatedly.
22. Diplomatic Prelude 1938-1939, by L. B. Namier
I had to track this one down. I can’t remember how I got onto it – it had to have been mentioned either in a footnote or in passing in one of my many “Europe in the 30s” books. Nemier was a historian and he published this in 1948, the whole thing based entirely on the “dossiers” passed back and forth in the diplomatic services during that crucial terrible year, 1938-39. France, Poland, German diplomats. Nemier had access to all of their “books” and this book is the result. The march towards a continent’s doom. Highly recommended.
24. De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde
I dreaded reading this again. It’s so hard. You can feel his desperation, the betrayal, the hurt. It’s terrible. Why did I put myself through this.
25. Essays, Letters, Journalism, by Oscar Wilde
This was invigorating, a lot of it new to me. I love his journalism, book reviews, essays.
26. Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey, by Janet Malcolm
This made me want to dig into his short stories. I’ve only read a handful.
27. Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942-1943, by Czesław Miłosz and Jerzy Andrzejewski
I’ve had this book for ages but never read til now. I’ve always admired Miłosz, as a poet, a dissident, an essayist and thinkier, his courage to look the evil of tyranny in the face and then … have the wherewithal to dissect it, name it, name what happens to society and its people under it – in his masterpiece The Captive Mind, which I’ve read probably five times. I’ll read it again. At any rate this is a fascinating book, written by two writers and friends, letters passed back and forth in occupied Poland. Two very different men, and probably risking a lot to be pouring forth in this way about the situation and what they were experiencing. Jerzy Andrzejewski was new to me, and I set about rectifying that blind spot immediately.
28. The Bad One: A Memoir About Growing Up a Scapegoat, by Erin Tyler
Oh God. Real old-timers – people who have been reading blogs since the early 2000s – will (maybe?) remember her. She ran a blog called The Bunny Blog, and it was “appointment television” back in the day. She once dated the infamous Tucker Max – ! – and they remained friends, which, considering Max’s reputation, is fairly hard to believe. Long ago, Tucker Max set up his own … domain maybe? which hosted blogs of all of his friends, many of whom went on to have their own stand-alone success. Erin was the sole woman in that sausage fest. WHAT a writer. She was feral and funny and heartbreaking and smart. She made her living (still does, apparently) as a graphic designer. She’s an artist. Tucker Max’s domain went away and Bunny Blog sank into the maw of forgotten time. There are a lot of younger writers around now, getting lots of praise, but none of them hold a candle to Erin. We lost a lot (in my opinion) when she went away. There was a real VOICE. On occasion I’d look for her over the years, Googling her, looking in the Wayback machine. I really missed her. Well, recently, I got a hit – a major one. She published a book! And, apparently, Tucker Max – him again – now has a publishing business? Not sure how that all worked but she came out with a book about her childhood and young adulthood, and it’s filled with her illustrations. I cannot say enough good stuff about her and also how much I have missed her voice.
29. Karaoke Culture, by Dubravka Ugrešić
She is a recent-ish discovery, and I am playing catch-up. She died recently, which saddened me, because her perspective – as a dissident Yugoslav (of all things) – is so invaluable. She was basically forced into exile in the early 90s for not being rah-rah enough about the Balkan wars and/or not getting on board with the rise of Croatian nationalism, and also for being a feminist. A price was on her head. She was called a witch from the highest offices in the land. The country became not safe for her. Her The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is a wonderful book about living in exile. She was hilarious and razor-sharp, and did not “play well with others”. She writes about serious stuff, like misogyny and nationalism, but she also digs into things like pop culture. Every sentence is a gem. They tried to silence her. Cowards always do. They failed.
30. The Fifty Year Sword, by Mark Z. Danielewski
He has a new one out! Any new Mark Danielewski book is an event. You write House of Leaves and I will follow you everywhere. Even here!
31. Ghost in a Four-Room Apartment, by Ellen Raskin
Things were falling apart, or I felt like I was going insane in the spring, so I reverted to childhood. Ellen Raskin was a childhood fave – her The Westing Game is an O’Malley obsession – but there were others I remembered and I bought them all second hand. This is a funny picture book and her illustrations are fabulous.
32. Spectacles, by Ellen Raskin
I haven’t read this since I was seven years old. I remembered the illustrations. I just soaked them up.
33. Crush, by Ellen Conford
Ellen Conford was a favorite of mine in what we now call the Tween years. Great high school romance stories, nothing too sappy, witty and a little bit screwball. I wish there was more like this now. Now it’s all dystopia and vampires. No shade against dystopia and vampires, but a little hopeful light-hearted romances, and shenanigans and misunderstandings, with broad types revealing different sides, etc. … Ellen Conford was positive. Not naive. But positive. She cares about this stage of life and you can feel it. Interpersonal relationships are everything in junior high.
34. The Magic Finger, by Roald Dahl
I adored this at 8 and I adore it now. It’s Carrie for grade schoolers.
35. Ashes and Diamonds, by Jerzy Andrzejewski
After a short break reading picture books and short stories about high schoolers, I caught up with Jerzy Andrzejewski, as I promised I would after Legends of Modernity. I’m so glad I did! The novel takes place in the final few days of World War II, the post-war power struggle already beginning in Poland, with the resistance being suppressed, the anti-Communist groups crushed, a violent power grab already in play. A sliver of time I hadn’t ever really read about. Because of course … Poland was going to be trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Their resistance to Nazi Germany was so ferocious. How did power consolidate the other way? Andrzejewski lived it. Fascinating.
36. The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020, by Rachel Kushner
Haven’t really read much by her – maybe because her Flamethrowers was so damn good I didn’t want to risk being let down. She’s an interesting woman. She speaks plainly. The “plain-ness” of her language is one of the startling characteristics of Flamethrowers: how upfront and non-writerish she sounds. Very confident.
37. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski
I hung around in Poland for much of this reading list. Borowski’s stories about being in Auschwitz (and other camps), are shocking and also not what I expected. They’re horrific but it’s not just violent and death they portray: the stories are portraits of boredom, endless boredom, and the minutiae of life under those conditions: pretending to work hard but sneaking in breathers, how things worked, how you got in line for the soup, etc., how information traveled by word of mouth. Borowski’s life story is horrific, caught between two murderous dictatorships. He was born in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. His father was sent to a gulag for some bullshit, his mother was deported to Siberia for some bullshit. Murderous bullshit. His family was then deported to Poland in a prisoner exchange. They arrived in Warsaw, poverty-struck and traumatized, just in time for Hitler’s ascent. They were Jewish. They were doomed. Borowski did survive the camps but he killed himself in 1951.
38. To Write as If Already Dead, by Kate Zambreno
I was so impressed with Zambreno’s Heroines and Screen Tests. This book made me think maybe I don’t need to be a completist in this case. It’s interesting, but her tell-tale style was a little tiresome in this format. When you love a book as much as I love Heroines, you want to keep going back. Haven’t read her fiction. Not sure it’s my thing.
39. Good Morning, Midnight, by Jean Rhys
A woman-wandering-the-streets book. A classic of this niche sub-genre. I read this ages ago and it was fun to re-visit. I love adrift women, socially unacceptable women, obsessive messes who can’t seem to get out of bed sometimes, and find a strange comfort in travel and the anonymity of hotels.
40. If This Is Love, I’ll Take Spaghetti, by Ellen Conford
I adored this book at 15. I haven’t read it since! Another short story collection of high school romances. There’s one – a first date – written entirely in dialogue. It’s very creative, and you can totally tell which one is speaking. Snappy witty dialogue. Echoes of screwball. She’s excellent.
41. Journey to Russia, by Miroslav Krleža
Dubravka Ugrešić introduced me to this genius’ work, a legend in Croatian literature, mostly not known to us due to translation issues. His Banquet in Blitva is a stone-cold masterpiece, a great work of political satire, and it should be as well-known as any other book in that rare genre. I was blown away. There are a couple of other books available in English translation, this being one of them. Krleža was already a celebrated writer in 1924, when he got on a train and traveled from Yugoslavia to Russia. The Russian Revolution was a success and he wanted to see it first-hand. We have so few reliable witnesses to those years, since it was a revolution of ideology, so many people had so much to lose if they criticized what they saw. Prop up Russia. Everything Russia does is right. Here, he focuses on the details: the sense of ecstasy, the collective “high”, but also the disturbing undertones. It’s travelogue and reportage, by a master.
42. Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats, by John Keats
My obligations to my book were over and I missed reading the Romantics. I spent a year in their company! I decided to do a Keats deep dive, always worthwhile. His life was so short but he left such a footprint: so many poems, so many letters, every word profound. He was the James Dean of that short-lived generation, and his death a tragic one. Reading “Endymion” is fascinating – his juvenilia, basically – it’s Hellenic fanfic, if I’m being honest, and it’s obvious why older poets were so torn. They mocked it, they hated it, but Keats clearly was something new. His poetic development was so fast, the learning curve so steep, it is as though he knew he would die young. Those ODES. You just can’t believe those freakin’ ODES. If you read the work in chronological order, it’s like they come from out of nowhere. Suddenly … there they are. Astonishing.
I must quote Dorothy Parker:
A Pig’s-Eye View of Literature
By Dorothy Parker
The Lives and Times of John Keats,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron
Byron and Shelley and Keats
Were a trio of Lyrical treats.
The forehead of Shelley was cluttered with curls,
And Keats never was a descendant of earls,
And Byron walked out with a number of girls,
But it didn’t impair the poetical feats
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley and Keats.
43. The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power, by Robert D. Kaplan
I have a LOT to say about this writer. And I’m just too tired to get into it right now. I’m sorry! Let’s just say I have been reading him, regularly, for over 20 years. And he’s prolific: a book a year or so. This was really interesting. I had this weird sense he has been struggling, maybe even with depression. He “opens up”, and it’s admirable, particularly when he has had to admit he’s been wrong about so many things, so many big things. A lot of people can’t manage it. This is about approaching life with a tragic mindset: an understanding of the past does not give us much hope for the future, but thinking about the past with a “tragic mind” is our only way of facing the challenges dooming us. He’s not a comforting writer, and I have disagreed with him often, and for long stretches of time – he went off the deep end – and he realizes it now and deeply regrets it. I value his transparency, his willingness to say “I got it wrong.” The sense of having gotten things wrong has haunted his books now for almost a decade.
44. Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, by John Keats
The whole Fanny Brawne aspect of Keats’ story just adds to the tragedy. If you haven’t seen Jane Campion’s Bright Star, what are you waiting for?
45. Somebody with a Little Hammer: Essays, by Mary Gaitskill
She’s always a little bit scary.
46. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, by Ian MacDonald
I had so much fun with this. It was my summer project. I kept making projects for myself, I guess I didn’t know what to do with myself once my obligations to Frankenstein were over, once the manuscript was locked. I went through it song by song, listened to each song – songs I have heard 100s of times – 1000s? – and still not “over” any of it? How is this possible? Especially since I have no “nostalgia” for them and they pre-date my existence on the planet? What can I say: I grew up with aunts and uncles who loved them and passed it on, as well as our very memorable grade school music teacher. Our 4th grade music classes were unofficial Beatles-history lectures. Anyway, I went through song by song, reading each entry, listening again, going into the deep catalogue of different takes on the anthologies. It was a BLAST and I will do it again.
47. Essays in Criticism, by Matthew Arnold
This was a long time coming. I’d always wanted to read his essays on criticism, but it seemed daunting. He’s not exactly an easy writer. And he’s so learned he makes me feel like a dumbass. His name comes up constantly in all the reading I do, and I can recite some of “Dover Beach” by heart, and I am well aware of his stature but I’d always wanted to do a first-hand experience of him. I am always trying to better myself in completely meaningless ways. I have no idea how Matthew Arnold could ever be of any “use” to me in my “career” but I like learning things that have nothing to do with anything, learning things that CAN’T be used. He is not an easy writer but I really liked reading this.
48. We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, by Fintan O’Toole
One of THE reading experiences of the year for me. This was a gift and it’s horrifying but I can’t remember who gave it to me, so I can’t thank them. It’s hard to describe but I never wanted it to end. It’s memoir and cultural/political history: his life intersecting with Ireland’s, the history of Ireland – and his own – over the last 70 years. Fantastic. It made me miss my dad.
49. Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, by Robert Louis Stevenson
When I was in Edinburgh for the Frankenstein shoot, Guillermo and Kim bought this for me as a little “thank you” gift. (And a picture of them walking on the streets, holding the bag in their hand, showed up in the newspapers the next day and Kim was identified as “Mia Goth” and we died laughing. Kim pointed at her hand: “Look. There’s your gift.”) So thoughtful. They inscribed it too. Very meaningful for me and I was very touched. I finally read it. I love Robert Louis Stevenson and it was fun to read his impressions of the city, which – honestly – sounds like it hasn’t changed much.
50. Late Fame, by Arthur Schnitzler
I believe this short story/novella was found in his copious papers after his death. The story of a writer who came out with a book of poetry long ago that didn’t really make much of a stir – he left it all behind – until he is “rediscovered” by a young group of bohemians, who treat him with reverence and awe, reinvigorating his life and self-esteem. Until … it’s a devastating piece of work, brutal and short.
51. Happy Hour, by Marlowe Granados
I’d been hearing a lot about this one, so I decided to check it out. I INHALED it. It is often laugh out loud funny. It reads like a bat out of hell. It’s Le Cote Basque for the New York Gen Z set. And if you understand that reference, and can take the metaphorical leap, you have my deepest gratitude.
52. The Anatomy of Fascism, by Robert O. Paxton
Paxton has been giving a lecture on fascism for many years and he finally put it in book form. It’s not a new book (2004), but fascism doesn’t change much. Why fix if it isn’t broke? Understanding how these things work has been an ongoing interest of mine ever since I read 1984 in high school and so it’s always somewhere on my radar. It’s been useful.
53. Judge On Trial, by Ivan Klíma
I read this one years ago and remember loving it. It’s so good: a judge returns to his homeland (clearly Czechoslovakia), working for the new regime, handed cases where the outcome is “understood” beforehand. He knows the verdicts he is supposed to pass down. But he is conflicted. He is also highly blackmail-able. Initially banned in Czechoslovakia, it’s a major work of literature.
54. No Judgment: Essays, by Lauren Olyer
People love to hate her. Her “hit” piece on beloved author Jia Tolentino is how she came on my radar, because it got everyone talking. Tolentino is a media darling, and Olyer went for the jugular. I am not familiar with Tolentino’s work – although I’ve read some things and liked them very much – so I have no dog in this fight. But Olyer stood alone against the tide of praise – and I admired her for it. There are some interesting pieces here. I liked the one on Sally Rooney.
55. Our Philosopher, by Gert Hofmann
Hofmann’s book is told through the eyes of a child, a German child in the 1930s, who watches what happens to his next-door neighbor, a professor and philosopher. Since the book has the POV of a child, he has no understanding of larger events and does not realize his society is sick. He participates in youth groups, and parades, and still loves his neighbor, having no sense the neighbor is “Jewish” or what that might even mean. The persecution of the neighbor begins. The boy asks questions, the adults evade, he notices changes, he keeps marching in parades, he does not connect the dots, he is too young. The words “Nazi” and “Hitler” are never used. It’s extremely effective.
56. All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, by Becca Rothfeld
A regular reader mentioned this book in a comment here so I picked it up. The timing was fortuitous: the book was a good companion piece to Lauren Olyer’s book, although Rothfeld is a better writer, and she thinks about things in a deeper way. Rothfeld incorporates herself in her work in more thought-provoking and vulnerable ways. Olyer is interesting but she is not vulnerable. One of Rothfeld’s essays is also about Sally Rooney. Like I said, Rooney is fun to talk about and think about, wherever you come down in the spectrum of responses. Having read Rooney’s latest earlier in the year, it was fun to sit with both Olyer’s and Rothfeld’s analysis.
57. Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, by Lord Byron
God, these are fabulous. They’re written slapdash – full of dashes – breathless – he’s totally open. Sexually frank. He’s constantly battling an STD, or fearing STDs, the promiscuity of mania. There, let me diagnose him. I am not the first to do so. You can FEEL his charisma, the charisma everyone talked about back then. He regales a friend with one anecdote about how he almost gently ushered a woman into the waves in Venice, because he forgot about the water part of the city’s equation. He went to help her into a gondola, forgetting the “street” was not solid, and the way he tells the story is hilarious. Screwball. Like I said, I have loved “hanging out” with the Romantics, and I “used” them in my research for my book, so much so that I missed them!
58. One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, volume 1, by Whitney Webb
Whitney Webb is controversial, so much so she’s completely ignored by the mainstream media, but she’s connected the dots. She should be used as a resource because she’s done the hard grueling work of piecing together a historical narrative, digging through archives and probably bombarding various offices with endless FOIA requests. The book is really not about Epstein, although volume 2 moves more specifically into him: these books are about the world of blackmail which created him. She’s not an elegant writer. These books read like facts-only dispatches from some war-torn front. There’s no emotion or even editorializing. It’s about how things are connected, providing histories of the Bronfman family (who ended up funding NXIUM as well – shady people), Les Wexner, and etc. I could have used a flow chart with all the names. I’ve seen her on podcast appearances and I’ve visited her site. She’s an investigative journalist, and her footnotes are essential. So many primary sources, which – in this day and age – breeds trust. Congressional reports, declassified reports, gained through FOIA. She lives in Chile and has a couple of kids so I have no idea how she got all this done. She has a couple research assistants.
59. How We Survived Communism & Even Laughed, by Slavenka Drakulic
Slavenka Drakulic is a Croatian writer, a novelist and journalist. Saying she’s Croatian is complicated, since she grew up in the former Yugoslavia. This book came out in 1993, directly following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the explosion of various civil wars in the Balkans. How We Survived Communism very quickly became a feminist classic, since she interviews women throughout the former Yugoslavia about their lives, their everyday activities, how they are “doing” under the rigors of what is a failing system. I had never read it. It’s terrific.
60. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, by Timothy Snyder
You can read this in like an hour. Nothing I didn’t already know but there are good tips here to keep your mind sharp, to be conscious of what is happening.
61. Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World, by Julia Cooke
This is coming out in February and the author kindly sent me an advance copy. It details the journeys of Emily Hahn, Martha Gellhorn and Rebecca West, and it is amazing. I’ll be writing more about it.
62. Seductio Ad Absurdum – The Principles & Practices of Seduction, A Beginner’s Handbook, by Emily Hahn
Starry and Restless added about 20 books to my “to be read” pile. I have read all of Rebecca West, but none of Emily “Mickey” Hahn, so I am going to rectify that this year. This is her “dating” book, her first book I think. She was a young woman in 1920s New York, sexually liberated, and this is her comical handbook of how to deal with different seductive situations. She ended up traveling to the Congo, by herself, before moving to Shanghai, where she lived for years, working as a teacher and journalist. I’ll be reading her books on those experiences next, but this was fun.
63. One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Organized Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, Vol. 2, by Whitney Webb
Volume 2. These were not easy reads. It’s basically a 700-page info-dump. The books came out simultaneously. She is a regular podcast guest and she has her own site, where she employs other investigative journalists to do deep dives into stories not getting covered. She’s being ignored by the mainstream. She’s been doing the work they should have been doing. Right-wingers have embraced her, but she is not “one of them”. She’s a lone wolf. And as a journalist, she’s a dog with a bone. I can’t verify any of her facts. I don’t trust anyone. But her approach is so practical and non-hallucinatory-it’s-all-because-of-a-liberal-cabal-conspiracy that I find her more trustworthy than other commentators, who adhere to one political ideology and want to crush the other side. You’re ruining our world with your bullshit and I want no part of it. Webb’s guiding philosophy appears to be “I wish everyone in charge weren’t criminals” and I don’t think you can credibly argue with that at this point.
64. The Hive, by Camilo José Cela
This was so good! Written in 1950, it takes place in the Madrid cafe culture of 1943, with the stultifying Franco regime consolidating its power, sending everyone scurrying. It’s not a long book but there are literally hundreds of characters, I had to make a little index just to keep everyone straight. There are multiple cafes where everyone gathers, there are political intrigues, social intrigues, you track each character. Not surprisingly, it was banned in Spain initially. I loved it.
65. The Art and Making of Frankenstein, by ME.
First time I’ve ever been on my own year-end reading list. It was a strange sensation to actually sit down and read it start to finish. Putting the book together was such a puzzle: I really had to come up with the approach before I wrote a word, since I had so much information at my fingertips. Writing it felt more like building a Frankenstein creature than actual writing and so I am pleased to say: it reads well! Go, me!
66. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
A retreat into the familiar. I needed it.
67. Selected Prose, by Charles Lamb
Like William Hazlitt, his name comes up constantly in my reading about Byron and Shelley and Keats (to echo Dorothy Parker). He knew everybody and everybody knew him. His backstory is notoriously horrific. His sister Mary was mentally ill and killed their mother, stabbing her with a knife. Charles ended up caring for his sister for the rest of their lives. They wrote a book on Shakespeare’s plays together. He himself was institutionalized for a bit (and in those days, “institutionalized” didn’t mean a nice hospital like McLean but horrific places like Bedlam.) He could not afford to be a full-time artist or writer. He worked for years as an accountant for the East India Company, doing his writing “on the side”. He was friends with Coleridge, Hazlitt. He’s a beautiful writer, warm and funny and human. He focuses a lot on food and drink, multiple essays are about eating too much. There are stories of him getting way too drunk at parties and behaving “inappropriately”. Everyone was like, “Oh, that’s just Lamb, he’s just like that.”
68. Good Material, by Dolly Alderton
My sister Siobhan told me about this book last summer and then gave it to me for my birthday. She has such good taste in new fiction: I have loved everything she’s recommended. Good Material is excellent! It’s about a low-level stand-up comic in England, who goes through a breakup, and is so distraught it seems impossible he will get over it. The novel is about his healing process, which makes it sound rather sentimental. This is the opposite. It’s very funny and insightful, great characters, an accurate depiction of the haunted-quality of post-breakup life, where everything everywhere reminds you of that person. I was surprisingly very moved by the ending. It’s terrific!
69. The Melancholy of Resistance, by László Krasznahorkai
Béla Tarr turned this masterpiece of Hungarian literature into the film Werckmeister Harmonies (which, turns out, I wrote about here). I’d only seen the film, not read the book. The book is about a circus that comes to town, a circus with a huge rotting whale in a trailer, the main attraction. Is the circus just a circus though? Or is it a harbinger of something else? Chaos? Mob rule? The circling of the planets makes an appearance: something cosmic is happening. The book is written with no paragraph breaks. Almost 400 pages of text, with no breaks except for chapter breaks. RIGOROUS. I did a lot of rigorous reading this year. I need to keep SHARP. This is scary brilliant, especially when you consider the time in which it was published – the late 80s – and it continues to have resonance today: the forces of chaos unleashed on streets, the breakdown of society, the feeling of threat, the crushing of the individual, the hopelessness of any meaningful change in how we deal with living together on this planet … It’s heavy.
70. Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art , by Celeste Marcus
Celeste Marcus is the managing editor of Liberties magazine, and the editor of my column, which I will get back to in 2026 after my “leave of absence”. This is her first book, on the French-Jewish artist Chaim Soutine. Celeste is a painter herself and she poured her knowledge of paint and color into this fascinating biography, the first English-language biography of this major figure. I learned a lot! Congratulations, Celeste. Her book and mine came out on the same day.
71. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China, by Robert Jay Lifton
More light reading. Robert Jay Lifton is still alive, still writing, and still using his vast experience studying brainwashing (what he calls “thought reform”) to understand what is happening now. This is the start of it all. Published in 1960, it’s based on his large study of first POWs from Korea, but then Westerners and Chinese intellectuals, who experienced thought reform in the “revolutionary colleges” in Communist China. Lifton is a psychiatrist and became interested in the phenomenon, the nuts and bolts of it. His work has been used as a reference point ever since, every time a cult emerges and its members do some crazy shit. He broke down what needs to be present for successful “thought reform” into eight criteria. As someone who’s been reading about cults for most of my life at this point, Lifton comes up constantly and I can rattle off his eight criteria by heart but I had never actually read the TOME – and it is one – from whence it all came.
72. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter
I re-read this slim emotional book in preparation for reviewing the film, which I did not care for at all, mainly because the director’s adaptation left out the whole central metaphor … the freakin’ CROW. I mean, the crow is present but the director has excised the scaffolding, which is the crow is Ted Hughes’ crow, stepping out of the poet’s famous 1970 collection. The main character, a grieving widow, is a Hughes scholar – in the book, that is. Like, why even adapt the book to film if you’re going to leave Ted Hughes out of it? You can read this in an afternoon. Our family has dealt with a lot of grief in the last five, ten years. The book comes out of Porter’s own experience (his father died when he was a child), and it’s about the confusion and chaos of grief. It brought me to tears.
73. Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age, by Robert D. Kaplan
Kaplan again! Here, he travels from Ravenna down to Corfu. I’ve got the travel bug again and this is the area of the world I want to go to (again). I won’t say where but I planned my itinerary and now I just need to plan for it, and how I am going to do it. I’ve been wanting to get back to Zagreb, which I loved – even though I was there for less than a day. My experience of it was “I have to come back here!” It’s also a good jumping-off point for all of these other places. Anyway. Loved it.
74. The Chronology of Water: A Memoir, by Lidia Yuknavitch
I read this astonishing book when it first came out. It’ll blow your hair back. I re-read before watching Kristen Stewart’s film adaptation, which I reviewed. I’ve had two proud moments this year (well, besides the obvious). Greil Marcus sent me an email complimenting me on my essay about Marion Keisker and Elvis. !! And he knew Marion. He told me he learned some new things from the piece I wrote. Then he sent me an advance copy of the 50th anniversary edition of Mystery Train, where – cherry on top – he said he was just sorry he hadn’t read my piece in time, because he would have liked to include it in the “notes” section for the Elvis chapter. Listen, this is why I do what I do. You can’t PLAN for something like that, you just have to follow your own star and keep doing your thing. That piece was ignored by my fellow critics, like nobody cared about it. I was a little hurt because I had been wanting to write it for years. Whatever. I got it out there into the world and I pleased myself, which is most important. Cut to: a year later – I hear from the legend himself. So I guess I was writing it for HIM and I didn’t even know it. The second proud moment was Lidia Yuknavitch writing a little Facebook post about my review, saying I didn’t just write the review – I “inhabited” it. I said in my review that Stewart “gets it” and Yuknavitch made the connection to me: “Sheila gets it.” Listen, it’s a cold world out there. I don’t do this for the applause of course. But to have something I wrote – get to the source – to have the source herself link to it – the only review she linked to – well, that’s something. I’m proud.
75. Venus and Adonis, by William Shakespeare
Okay are we ready for the Shakespeare journey? I started with the poems. I haven’t read these since the one Shakespeare class I took in college. I learned Shakespeare the best way possible: through trying to act it in acting classes. I think it’s ideal. I’m not as familiar with his long poems, so it was fun to read. Venus is so butch, and Adonis is so femme. Shakespeare’s ideal human is a mix of both: this theme comes up again and again and again.
76. Ice, by Anna Kavan
A sci-fi classic which I never read. It’s eerie and scary. Ice is covering the world and civilization has broken down. A man goes on a quest to find a girl with silver-white hair, he tracks her to a remote cottage, a ruined city, a walled fortress, she’s always just out of reach. Depressing. Beautiful writing.
77. The Rape Of Lucrece , by William Shakespeare
This poem is so long, and the lead-up to the main event is so prolonged, I found myself thinking at one point, “Tarquin, just rape her already so we can move along with the story.”
Happy new year.
2025 tally
23 fiction
5 poetry
43 non-fiction
14 essay collections
5 plays
31 books by women
47 books by men
20 rereads
(I count by books, not author. If the same author appears multiple times, I count the author each time)
Countries represented: Ireland, England, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Portugal, Russia, Croatia, Austria, Scotland, Germany, Spain, Hungary, France.
Previously
2024 books read
2023 books read
2022 books read
2021 books read
2020 books read
2019 books read
2018 books read
2017 books read
2016 books read
2015 books read
2014 books read
2013 books read
2012 books read
2011 books read
2010 books read
2009 books read
2008 books read
2007 books read
2006 books read
2005 books read
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
, on the first Elvis Sun tracks:
