2025 Bookpost
- The Infidel and the Professor by Dennis Rasmussen
- If We Burn by Vincent Bevins: Thought this was good overall, particularly the concluding chapters where the interviewees reflect on their tactics. Bevins does have a pretty clear agenda / bias against the 'new left' which I have mixed feelings about. Definitely worth engaging with though.
- South And West by Joan Didion
- Stoner by John Williams.
- Hav by Jan Morris: Best book I read this year; see my review here. Probably my favorite read of the year.
- The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster: An old childhood favorite. It still holds up, but is definitely a book for kids.
- The Prick by Mazin Saleem: I really enjoy the literary essays on Mazin Saleem's Substack (e.g. this one on Borges, this one on Le Guin), so I gave his debut novel a whirl. It's very clever & well-crafted, though I don't know if I liked it.
- The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson: See my review here.
- The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Open Socrates by Agnes Callard: Despite Callard's valiant efforts my life continues to elapse 15 minutes at a time, only rarely subjected to anything resembling Socratic inquiry.
- The Dark Eidolon and Other Stories by Clark Ashton Smith: of the Howard/Lovecraft/Smith trio I have the most fondness for Smith, even though I'll grant that Lovecraft is rightly the most popular. Some really great stories in here. I especially like how Smith portrays his scheming, power-mad wizards.
- The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze: Really good.
- The Mercurian: Three Tales of Eric John Stark by Leigh Brackett: Was pleasantly surprised by these. For pulp adventure stories, they're tightly-crafted & very imaginative. I also think it's cool that Stark is positioned as a sort of loosely anti-colonial rebel -- a favorable contrast to Burroughs.
- Polar Horrors (short story collection): Hit & miss. The most memorable story seems to be a vehicle for the author's sublimated desire to fuck a polar bear.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allen Poe: What did he mean by this??
- Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and The New Class Struggle by Jodi Dean: I loosely agree with the thesis that capital is evolving into something something like feudalism (i.e. endless circulation of rent rather than investment of profit). Most of the book is unsatisfying though -- feels like a juiced-up blog post.
- The Thirteenth Immortal by Robert Silverberg: I read this one because it features a post-apocalyptic inhabited Antarctica. Not terrible, but forgettable.
- The Language Animal by Charles Taylor
- Fossil Capital by Andreas Malm: There's a reason why Malm has been asked to blurb every vaguely left-wing book on climate change in the last decade. Also a good worldbuilding book insofar as it deals with the question of why the industrial revolution happened -- the key takeaway being that the existence of technology & energy sources is secondary to the presence of an economic system that compels capitalists to invest in expanding the means of production. Interesting to imagine counterfactual scenarios with highly developed hydropower.
- The Lord of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Pym by Mat Johnson: A very funny satire/subversion of Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym. Dragged a little bit during the last third but overall very good. The sections expounding on the mysteries in Poe's novel are insightful.
- Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov: I think it's really sweet that John Shade snuck all those references into his poem just to make his weird friend feel seen & accepted.
- Ghosts of Cannae by Robert O'Connell: Quick read, definitely pop-history so taken with grains of salt -- interesting descriptions of logistics, tactics, and the (incredibly gruesome) mechanics of a battle where 40 or 50 thousand Romans were slaughtered.
- Beowulf, translated by Maria Dahvana Headley: Possibly a case where an attempt at subversion backfires by not measuring up to the richness of the thing being subverted.
- A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James De Mille: I wanted to like this one (dinosaurs! in Antarctica! metatextual commentary!) but it was a slog. The imagined Antarctic society was neither believable nor particularly interesting as satire (unlike Erewhon, which also isn't believable but manages to be clever).
- The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem: Second read, remains one of my all-time favorites.
- The Ways of Paradise by Peter Cornell: A book that purports to be the footnotes to a 'lost' manuscript. Touches on many topics that I'm interested in: labyrinths, French surrealists, psychoanalysis, Rosicrucianism & alchemy, Walter Benjamin, Gnosticism, etc. Highly recommended.
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot by A.E. Waite: I grabbed the new edition put out by Repeater books & found the preface by someone named "Sereptie" to be surprisingly insightful, with implications re: TTRPGs & random generation. To an extent, the book did more to enhance my appreciation for Pamela Coleman Smith's art than to deepen my understanding of the Tarot.
- The Coral Merchant and Other Stories by Joseph Roth
- Skating to Antarctica by Jenny Diski: Probably more interesting if you have any context for who Jenny Diski was, which I did not. Harrowing but well-written.
- The Future of Revolution by Jasper Bernes: Sort of the inverse of If We Burn from the start of the year; whereas Bevins pretty clearly comes out against "prefigurative politics", Bernes is part of an ultraleft milieu for whom "transitional stages" between capitalism & communism are anathema; the revolution is the production of communism or nothing at all. I used to be really into communization theory but I've cooled on it somewhat. Still, this one was remarkably lucid & readable.
- Mystery Cults in the Ancient World by Hugh Bowden: Bowden is a principled, responsible scholar. He does a good job of presenting what little we know about ancient mystery religion, which really isn't much. Unfortunately, I read it with the hope of fueling my imagination rather than learning per se, so a book my someone more willing to indulge in speculation would have been more suitable.
- Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene: Extremely funny.