Favorites of 2025: Books

It's time for my annual survey of favorite books that were first read in the previous 12 months. They are listed below by category in the order in which they were read:

Favorite Fiction of 2025

	Emma Donoghue: Slammerkin "Slammerkin" is an 18th-century term with a double meaning, both "a loose gown" and "a slovenly [with the additional implication of unchaste] woman." The novel is based on an actual 1764 trial of a maid and seamstress accused of murdering her mistress, and is like a version of William Hogarth's The Harlot's Progress from the perspective of its doomed heroine Moll Hackabout. A scholar of literature by women as well as lesbian culture, Emma Donoghue writes with all the fierce energy of her 14-year-old protagonist's yearnings, and brings both 18th-century London and her flawed heroine to vivid, visceral life. She shows us that Mary Saunders is not only a victim; she has agency and makes choices, even if many of them are unwise, or bring harm to herself or others. Be forewarned: Mary's world, and her fate, are hard and grim. For more, please see "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know: Three historical novels."
	Margaret Oliphant: The Rector and The Doctor's Family Margaret Oliphant, one of the most prolific Victorian writers, published 98 novels before her death in 1897 at age 69. Oliphant's writing supported two brothers, two nieces, a nephew, and her two adult sons, all of whom lived off her earnings from publication, and all of whom predeceased her. So perhaps it's no surprise that the contrast between capable women and weak, ineffectual, vacillating, indolent, selfish, or just plain helpless men is a recurring theme in Oliphant's fiction. As Nettie Underwood says in The Doctor's Family, "a woman is, of course, twenty times the use a man is, in most things." The Rector and The Doctor's Family brings together two works in Oliphant's Chronicles of Carlingford series. Morley Proctor, the title character of the 35-page The Rector, has only recently taken up his post as the new Rector of Carlingford. He is suddenly called to the deathbed of one of his parishioners, who begs for some spiritual ease in her final moments. But Proctor, a socially awkward bachelor scholar who has taken his new post primarily to provide for his widowed mother, has no idea how to provide it. In The Doctor's Family, Edward Rider is a young doctor struggling to establish a medical practice in Carlingford. His precarious situation is made catastrophically worse by the arrival in town of his brother Fred, an alcoholic and a gambler, who is quickly followed by his wife, children, and his wife's pretty younger sister Nettie. The doctor, smitten with Nettie, is given pause by the prospect of Fred and his family hanging on as his dependents for the rest of their lives, and of Fred's deservedly poor reputation besmirching his own. The stories brought together in The Rector and The Doctor's Family span nearly the full range of tone that Oliphant commands in the Chronicles of Carlingford, from the appalling horror of death to the familiar comedy of acute social discomfiture. For more, please see "Twenty times the use a man is": Two Chronicles of Carlingford
	Sarah Waters: Fingersmith "Finger-smith" is 19th-century slang for pickpocket or petty thief, but it has the broader connotation of someone adept with their fingers, which can also be interpreted sexually (as Waters, whose first novel also had a Victorian slang title with a sexual meaning, Tipping the Velvet (1998), surely intended). Drawing on novels by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Fingersmith is told from the points of view of two 17-year-old orphans. Sue Trinker has been raised in Mrs. Sucksby's Lant Street lodging-house in London's gritty Southwark and trained in thievery. Maud Lilly is an heiress who lives on the country estate of her rich uncle, a connoisseur of pornography who gets an erotic charge out of having Maud read rare volumes from his collection aloud to him and his friends. Sue joins a plot conceived by a thief nicknamed "Gentleman": she will seek employment as Maud's lady's maid, and convince her of the sincerity of Gentleman's professions of love. In return, Sue will receive a share of the spoils once Gentleman elopes with Maud, locks her in a madhouse and seizes control of her fortune. Only, who is betraying whom? For more on the novel and the 2005 BBC television adaptation, please see "Fingersmith." Waters' novel was also the basis of Park Chan-wook's 2016 film The Handmaiden.
	Sarah Waters: Affinity Set in late-Victorian London and suffused with an atmosphere of psychic dread, Affinity is reminiscent of Henry James' Turn of the Screw. Margaret Prior is well-to-do, unmarried, and is recovering from devastating emotional losses. In order to find a sense of purpose, she begins regular visits to a women's prison. She finds herself becoming inexorably drawn to one of the inmates, Selina Dawes. Selina is a spiritualist who held séances where she summoned a sometimes playful, sometimes malevolent spirit called Peter Quick. She has been imprisoned because at one of her séances a woman died under mysterious circumstances. Although initially doubting of Selina's supernatural powers, Margaret soon experiences otherwise inexplicable occurrences. Could Selina really be a medium between our world and the spirit world of Peter Quick? Affinity was adapted for ITV by renowned screenwriter Andrew Davies (Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, Wives and Daughters, and Waters' Tipping the Velvet among many others). It's high on my watch list for 2026.

Honorable mention

David Lodge: Changing Places A roman à clef with no need for a clef, David Lodge's Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses takes place in the late 1960s at a very thinly disguised University of Birmingham ("Rummidge") and UC Berkeley ("Euphoric State," situated in the town of "Plotinus"). If you have any familiarity with the Berkeley campus and the Bay Area, you'll instantly identify Howl Plaza (Sproul Plaza, site of many demonstrations), Mather Gate (Sather Gate), Dealer Hall (Wheeler Hall), Cable Avenue (Telegraph Avenue), Pythagoras Drive (Euclid Avenue), Ashland (Oakland), Esseph (San Francisco), Modern Times Bookshop (City Lights Books), etc. etc. Two academics—Rummidge's socially awkward, emotionally repressed, and academically undistinguished English lecturer Philip Swallow, and Euphoric's star literary theorist Morris Zapp—take part in a six-month exchange program, leaving their wives (in Zapp's case, soon to be ex-wife) behind. As you may anticipate, more gets swapped than their campus offices. And as you also may expect, Zapp's arrival galvanizes the inert English Department at Rummidge, while Swallow is transformed by the academic openness, political ferment and sexual freedom that he encounters at Euphoric State. Soon he finds himself jailed after being caught up in the protests over the People's Garden (People's Park), and then having a very uncomfortable conversation with his wife while on the air during a student radio call-in show. The novel is like a Rossinian farce, where confusion reigns for most of the duration, but everyone finds happiness (or at least consolation) in the end. Like a Rossini comedy, it's lively and fun; also like a Rossini comedy, it's pretty clear from the outset where these characters are heading—thus the honorable mention.

Biggest disappointment

Ariel Dorfman: Allegro Ariel Dorfman's Allegro seemed as though it had been written especially for me and those very much like me: lovers of Mozart's operas with a keen interest in late-18th century music and culture. But as Dorfman's over-expository narrative, clunky language, and all-too-fathomable mystery unfolded, I felt instead as though I were reading a prequel to Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. Like Amadeus, Dorfman's Allegro is factitious and anachronistic, and I found myself increasingly dismayed as the novel progressed. The main redeeming feature of the novel comes after its end: a "Playlist Companion to Allegro" of the music that "inspired the author as he wrote and that accompanied the characters as they lived their real and fictional lives" (Author's Note). As I wrote in my full-length review, "any opportunity to explore (or renew acquaintance with) the music of Mozart, Handel, J.S. Bach, J.C. Bach, and Carl Friedrich Abel is recommendable; if only Dorfman's novel were more so."

Favorite Nonfiction of 2025

	Charles King: Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel's Messiah In 1741 Handel was facing a crisis. In the winter season he had witnessed the failure of his Italian opera, Deidamia, which received only three performances before being ignominiously pulled from the stage. The disaster of Deidamia brought Handel's career as an opera composer to an end. At this low point, two serendipitous events provided Handel with an opportunity to rescue his fortunes. He received an invitation to put on a concert series in Dublin for the 1741–42 season, and he was sent a new libretto by his cantankerous collaborator Charles Jennens. Jennens had previously provided the word books for the English-language oratorios Saul (1739) and L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (The Active Man, the Pensive Man, and the Moderate Man, 1740). His new libretto consisted of excerpts from the King James Bible and Apocrypha about the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. Jennens wrote to his friend Edward Holdsworth on 10 July 1741 about the new work, "I hope he will lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition will excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other Subject. The Subject is Messiah." The story of Messiah's composition in just three weeks; the near-cancellation of its first performances due to an edict from Jonathan Swift (yes, that Jonathan Swift); and the scandal of the notorious adulteress Susannah Cibber, who, while trying to escape from her abusive husband, wound up in Dublin and sang in Messiah's Holy Week première, are vividly retold in Charles King's Every Valley. For more, please see "Every Valley: Handel's Messiah."
	Susan Ford: What Jane Austen's Characters Read (and Why) In What Jane Austen's Characters Read (and Why), Persuasions editor Susan Allen Ford examines the reading preferences of Austen's characters as a key to understanding them more deeply. In my post series devoted to her book I looked at each of Austen's canonical novels to see what Ford's perspective could tell us about her heroines. Of course, the Gothic novels that obsess Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, and the Romantic poets passionately read by Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, are obvious inspirations of their imaginative lives. But I was surprised to learn of the significance of conduct books, including the derided Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women, to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice; the play Lover's Vows, which was thought indecent, to demure Fanny Price in Mansfield Park; Madame de Genlis' Adelaide and Theodore, a novel about moral education, to the title character in Emma; and the poems of Byron and Scott, as well as Matthew Prior's Henry and Emma, in sustaining Anne Elliot's steadfast love over the eight long years of estrangement from Captain Wentworth in Persuasion. For more, please see "So rapturous a delight" (Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey), "I am not a great reader" (Pride and Prejudice), "To be a renter, a chuser of books!" (Mansfield Park), "Meaning to read more" (Emma), and "I will not allow books to prove anything" (Persuasion).
	Ashley Kahn: Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece The Miles Davis sextet's Kind of Blue regularly tops listener's and critic's polls of the greatest jazz albums of all time. Ashley Kahn's book is a deep dive into the recording sessions, held on March 2 and April 22, 1959, and the long and continuing afterlife of the album. Kahn shows that three key legends about Kind of Blue—that the album comprises only first takes, that none of the musicians had seen any of the music before, and that Davis composed all the music—are false. He also notes the many errors that plagued the production of the album: the first side was mastered at the wrong speed, John Coltrane's volume level is changed mid-solo on one track, and on the cover the musicians were mis-credited and the track listing frequently mis-ordered. But despite the false legends, credit controversies and production errors, the album that Davis and his brilliant collaborators produced together remains one of the greatest achievements in jazz. For more, please see "Kind of Blue: The Making of a Jazz Masterpiece."

Honorable mention

Errol Morris: The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality) This book is a coffee-table book of philosophy: beautifully produced, copiously illustrated, and heavily annotated in the margins (the best place for a note to be). The title comes from an incident in Morris's career as a graduate student at Princeton: his Ph.D. advisor, the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, once threw a full, "massive" cut-glass ashtray at Morris during an argument in Kuhn's office. The book is Morris's delayed (and for Kuhn, posthumous) response, an attack on the basis of Kuhn's influential 1962 work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. That work is a distillation and generalization of Kuhn's earlier book, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. In examining the replacement of the earth-centered Ptolemaic universe by the Copernican heliocentric system, Kuhn identified features that did not fit the typical picture of steady, incremental scientific progress through observation and experiment. Instead, Kuhn posited that scientific observations were carried out within a conceptual framework Kuhn called a "paradigm," which not only determined how scientists interpreted their data, but what questions could be asked. Such periods of "normal science" can last for centuries, even as anomalies—observations not well accounted for under the reigning paradigm—accumulate. The Ptolemaic system lasted for over a thousand years, growing ever more complex as astronomical observations became more precise. [1] Kuhn thought that during scientific revolutions, a "paradigm shift" occurs, in which one conceptual framework is replaced by another. Paradigm shifts are rarely instantaneous, as they would be if science were a dispassionate seeking after incontrovertible truths. Instead, the scientific consensus has to change, which sometimes requires the fiercely committed advocates of the older paradigm to die before the new paradigm is generally accepted. And sometimes social, political or religious forces slow a paradigm shift. Copernicus published his treatise on the heliocentric universe in 1543; ninety years later, in 1633, Galileo was forced by the Roman Inquisition to recant his defense of heliocentrism published in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. It wasn't until a further half-century after Galileo's trial that the idea that the Earth revolved around the sun attained widespread acceptance. For Morris, Kuhn's picture of science as deeply embedded in consensus mental frameworks—that is, his view of the scientific system as a culture—denies objective reality. And he contests Kuhn's claim that new paradigms are "incommensurable" with the paradigms that they have replaced, pointing out that Einstein's relativity equations are reduced to Newtonian mechanics at human spatial and temporal scales. If Einstein's theory contains Newton's, they can't be incommensurable. But they are—from the perspective of Newtonian physics. Newtonian mass is a fixed and inherent property of an object; Einsteinian mass varies with an object's velocity, which is different for observers in different frames of reference. So in Einsteinian physics mass can have different values at the same instant for observers in different relative motion with respect to an object (thus "relativity"). In Newtonian physics, gravity is an inherent property of an object with mass; in Einsteinian physics, gravity is the result of the distortion of space-time caused by an object with mass. So in the two systems the concepts of mass and gravity are radically different (or, as we might say, incommensurable), even if on a human scale their effects look the same. I haven't yet finished The Ashtray. It's a dense book with notes on virtually every page, and will take some more time to work through. It does seem to me, though, at the halfway point, that Morris is particularly focussed on some issues in the philosophy of language, and has not yet engaged with some of Kuhn's central ideas about the nature of science and scientific change. More to come, probably, as I continue reading. Many thanks to the friend who gave me this book, and to the friend who helped me understand more concretely some of the difficulties I was encountering with it.

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1. A more recent example of normal science in operation: Einstein's equations of general relativity predicted that the universe was expanding, a prediction confirmed by the observations of William Hubble. In the late 1980s the general assumption among cosmologists was that gravitational attraction between all the bodies in the universe was slowing its expansion. Eventually gravity would bring the expansion to a halt, and then reverse it. Ultimately the contracting universe would end in a Big Crunch, in which all matter collapsed together into a singularity. Another Big Bang could then occur, creating a new universe, and this cycle might repeat infinitely.
   
   Astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter had the key insight that the redshift of the light from a certain type of supernova that reached a consistent peak brightness could be used to determine the rate of the universe's expansion. But when he was ready to make his observations, Perlmutter could not find an observatory with large, advanced telescopes that was willing to allow him to book time. Supernovae are relatively rare and random phenomena, and Perlmutter's proposed method was untested. So the gatekeepers of highly desirable telescope time simply gave priority to other, less fundamental projects that they assumed had a greater likelihood of success.
   
   When, over about a decade of scrounging scattered nights of telescope time, Perlmutter was finally able to gather enough data for a statistically significant sample, his calculations produced a shocking result: the universe's rate of expansion was increasing with time, not constant or slowing. The first implication of this result is that there will be no Big Crunch; the universe will simply continue to expand infinitely. The second implication is that either there is another previously unknown constituent of the universe beyond matter and radiation, or that Einstein's equations do not apply on the scale of the universe and need to be modified. For this work Perlmutter (and two members of another team that reached the same conclusion at the same time) received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.
   
   One theory is that the accelerating expansion is caused by "dark energy," a form of energy that produces a repulsive force. If so, dark energy must make up two-thirds of the total mass-energy of the universe, and ordinary observable matter—all the interstellar dust, asteroids, comets, moons, planets, stars, black holes, galaxies, etc.—only 5%. The remaining 27% of the universe is largely made up of "dark matter," which is not directly observable and exerts a countervailing attractive force to the repulsive force of dark energy. All this sounds a bit like the convoluted epicycles needed to make the Ptolemaic model of the universe correspond with observation; we may be in need of yet another cosmological paradigm shift.