Five Most Notable Books I Read in 2025

 

                                                

                                                                    

There seems to be a general consensus forming that 2025 was a terrible year.

That's one consensus position I’m prepared to agree with.

Many of horrors of 2025 were of a highly public nature. They are too numerous and too well-known to bother reciting here

Some are more personal.

They’ve combined to have a corrosive effect on one activity that has, in the past, offered a sanctuary of the difficulties of the real world: reading books.

I read 83 books this year, along with substantial chunks of a few more. 

That’s up from the 63 I read in 2024. 

But qualitatively, or at least in terms of the quality of reading experience, it wasn’t a great year of reading.

For the first time in several years, I found it difficult to concentrate on nonfiction, particularly of the more theoretical sort.

I tackled A Theory of Semiotics by Umberto Eco this fall, but found I had to take frequent breaks.

My mind shrank from Eco’s highly technical prose. It craved the comfort that can only be provided by fiction, or non-fiction crafted with exceptional narrative and imaginative power (think of Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.)

So, A Theory of Semiotics was frequently interrupted by short but refreshing interludes of science fiction. I stalled out at page 150 several weeks ago, buy have every intention of taking it up again early in the new year.

That’s not to say I didn’t read - and enjoy - some great nonfiction this year. In fact, it figures prominently in my short list of most notable books. 

I also felt myself struggling with the temptations of our current distraction-rich environment.

With a well-nigh infinite array of sources of information and analysis available, and a world apparently intent on going to hell in a hand-basket at something near the speed of light, I often found myself reaching for my battered iPhone 11 mini rather than concentrating on the book in front of me.

I remember with fondness the days of losing myself in a book for hours at a time in the years in and around university, and intermittently in other parts of my life.

But no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to put my phone away and concentrate fully and unequivocally on the book I’m reading.

 

I’ve discovered in the last few days that doomscrolling is particularly incompatible with the convoluted prose of the largely forgotten Victorian novelist George Meredith.

I’ve even found it hard to think seriously about the books I’ve read over the course of the year as a whole and rank them in some kind of order, as I did at the end of 2023 and 2024.

So, I’m doing something less ambitious this year. I’m doing a very short list, only five in total.

I am, however, writing a little bit more about them, and also offering a simple list of other notable titles, inspired by the Substack list posted by Tom Goldsmith in mid December.

As explained in probably excessive detail in previous years, my reading is pretty eccentric. It's driven more by longstanding interests and affinities and the random contingencies of what I find in bookstores and little libraries than trying to keep up with the Zeitgeist.

I did do some reading driven by recent events - I read a parcel of books about fascism and tyranny early in the year. And some reading driven by my need to escape from those events. 

I tilted toward reading more Canadian books in 2025, for reasons I probably don’t have to explore, with some extremely favourable results, and it’s a direction I’ll continue to pursue in 2026.

I don’t really have much truck with formal New Years resolutions. 

But there is one way I’d definitely like to change my behaviour in 2026: reading less about the struggles of the tortured republic to the south.

And, on the other hand, reading more about the past, present, and future of my homeland.

I’ll start my brief list of this year’s most notable books with one by a great Canadian and the country’s philosopher emeritus, Charles Taylor.

Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, by Charles Taylor. (Pictured at the top of the post.)

In my push to increase my Canadian content, I read two books by Charles Taylor this year, the short and incisive book version of his 1990 Massey Lectures, The Malaise of Modernity and his most recent book, Cosmic Connections. 

I haven't finished Cosmic Connections yet, and I almost let that stop me from proclaiming it one of my most enjoyable reads. But then I thought ... wait a minute, I make the rules here.

I'm quite sure this book won't deteriorate dramatically in the second half. Taylor is magisterial; he has absorbed centuries of Western philosophy, but writes with a vigor and lucidity that's hard to find among philosophers.

One warning: this book is in many ways a sequel to Taylor's 2016 work, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity, and it's probably best to read that before tackling Cosmic Connections, if you're so inclined.

In the early book he argues that language doesn't just convey truths about the physical world, but also plays a vital role in constructing the social and cultural world occupied by humans. In Cosmic Connections he explores an instance of that - how poets use language to connect humans to a a broader cosmic order in the post-Enlightenment world.

                                                                

 A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel De Landa.

Another book by a philosopher, but otherwise it doesn't have a lot in common with Cosmic Connections. 

But De Landa's book isn't really just a book of philosophy. It's also a book about history, specifically the years 1000 to 1700. 

De Landa's approach to history is heavily influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, but it's a lot easier to read. 

He adopts their underlying idea that history is better explained as a series of processes closely analogous to those explored in science rather than a series of narratives about the self-conscious actions of human beings.

But de Landa a Mexican philosopher who began his career as a chemist, avoids the dense thickets of philosophical jargon that proliferate in the works of Deleuze and Guattari. 

Instead, he grounds his philosophical history securely in the realm of facts as he traces the development of phenomena such as cities, economies and languages between 1000 and 1700. 

The result is a book full of interesting information as well as counter-intuitive insights: his classification of capitalism as an "anti-market" force is just one example.

                                                             

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities, by Vaclav Smil.

Growth was another fruit of my determination to read more Canadian books in 2025. Its author, Vaclav Smil, was born in what is now the Czech Republic, but is now a "Distinguished Professor Emeritus" in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Winnipeg and an extremely prolific author.

Growth is another instance of a difficult, albeit rewarding, read. It's 513 pages long, and most of those pages bristle with facts, numbers, and scientific citations.

It traces the phenomenon of growth across a wide range of entities, from microorganisms to megacities, as the title states, but also economies, artifacts, societies and empires.

There are some remarkable parallels in how growth occurs across all those realms. For that reason alone, Growth is highly informative read.

It's also a highly relevant one. Smil concludes, on the basis of data and analysis rather than ideology, that the indefinite economic growth presupposed by our current form of capitalism will inevitably collide with the limits of our biosphere. He's agnostic as to whether we will be able to transition to another way of living.

                                                            

                                                                    

Dr. Bloodmoney, by Philip K Dick

Philip K Dick is a touchstone writer for me. Someone whose books I came to relatively young but have continued reading - and rereading - throughout my life. 

I've also explored aspects of his work more than once here on Curren(t) Thinking: including how his book Time Out of Joint exemplifies the "weird town" trope, and how his book Man in the High Castle considers - and fails to consider - how Canada would fare in its alternate history scenario stemming from an Axis victory in World War II.

WIth his uncanny sense of how malleable and manipulable "reality" is and his searing insights into America and its many weaknesses, Dick is widely - and rightly - considered a prophet of our distempered times.

But the darkly prophetic aspect of Dick's work has been well explored by critics and commentators.

What is sometimes missed is his underlying humanity, and his deep compassion for humans trapped in the dystopian worlds he explores.

That was driven home for me in 2025 when I read his 1965 novel Dr. Bloodmoney for the third time (they are pretty quick reads).

Set in northern California in 1988 after a disastrous nuclear war, Dr. Bloodmoney is about a small communities of people trying to survive in a weird, post-apocalyptic world, with varying degrees of success.

There is some darkness, of course, but there's also considerable humour and a underlying positivity about humanity despite our species' obvious capacity for world-destroying folly. 

                                                                

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch is another writer I've been reading all my adult life, but I didn't read her Booker-Prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea, until this year.

Published in 1980, The Sea, The Sea seems a little like a throwback to an even earlier time. 

There are some Gothic elements, but The Sea, The Sea is essentially a straightforward, naturalistic novel about an aging theatre director moving a decaying home on the English seaside and seeking to come to grips with his past, possibly with a view toward writing a memoir.

It goes disastrously wrong, in ways that are variously strange, comedic and tragic.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Sea, The Sea is the way Murdoch uses first-person story telling to explore how an weak, narcissistic but not unintelligent man can keep misunderstanding, lying, equivocating and deceiving himself and others. 

Below is the list of other notable books I read this year. Almost any of them could have made the top five, but if I keep fiddling with this piece, it won't get posted until late February ...

After Virtue, by Alisdair McIntyre

Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott

At the Mountains of Madness, by HP Lovecraft

Dombey and Son, by Charles Dickens

Question 7, by Richard Flanagan 

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the 20th Century, by Timothy D. Snyder

Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, by Mariana Mazzucato

Farthing, by Joanna Walton

Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, by Stanley Cavell

Counterblast, by Marshall McLuhan

James, by Percival Everett 

Ricardo's Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray, by Nat Dyer 

The Changeling, by Victor Lavalle