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My 2025 Reading, Part One: Fiction

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Welcome to my annual reading round-up, in which I share the books I enjoyed, both fiction (in this post) and nonfiction (in the next post). I read these books in 2025, though they were not necessarily published in that year. Sometimes I don’t get around quickly to ones that I want to read because of lengthy hold lists at the public library. Sometimes I’m interested in a book and know that I’m not in the right mood to read it. So, reasons.

(Woman Reading on a Settee by William Worcester Churchill)

According to Goodreads, where I keep track of such things, I read five more books in 2025 than I did in 2024—up to 56 from 51. I was surprised by the increase because it felt like such a sluggish reading year. And 56 is a likely number. Sometimes I forget to log in what I’ve read. (I already had to edit this number because as I was typing, I remembered another book. And in my next post, the one about nonfiction, I have to admit to a horribly embarrassing omission.) This total also doesn’t account for the books I started and (unfortunately) did not finish. I have no trouble putting a book down. Life is too short to keep reading books that don’t interest me, and I have zero desire to post negative reviews.

So here is my 2025 list, roughly in the order in which I read them.

1. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Definitely not published in 2025! This classic really surprised me: that I finished it and that I enjoyed it so much. I first tried reading Middlemarch back in graduate school when I was looking for something that would transport me from my work. Dorothea Brooke intrigued and irritated me, but Casaubon stopped me cold. Many years later I tried again, with the same result. This time I pushed through, encouraged by an online group read, got interested in all (so, so many) sub-plots, and made it to the end.

2. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

This Dutch novel, set in 1961, is a haunting story of the long reach of World War II’s devastation. Delicate and atmospheric, I was riveted by every page. Isabel is a prickly character, but I had to know what happened to her.

3. The Antidote by Karen Russell

I read a lot of historical fiction, but usually not stories that are infused with magic. Russell sets her novel in Nebraska, which is suffering from dust storms and the Great Depression, and adds to the mix a “Prairie Witch” who stores peoples’ secrets. It all somehow works perfectly.

4. The Impossible Thing by Belinda Bauer

A dual-timeline story that explores the collecting, hoarding, and thieving of rare colored birds’ eggs from Yorkshire. Celie Sheppard is such an unforgettable hero that I found myself quickly invested in the multi-layered consequences of this arcane hobby.

5. Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

I was immediately drawn into the life of Dave Win, who as a boy in the 1960s, gets a scholarship to a boarding school, where he starts to learn to navigate the class, race, and sexuality boundaries of British society.

6. Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz

I didn’t know anything about Horowitz’s Susan Ryeland mysteries until I watched the dramatized versions on PBS. I was so happy when I found out Horowitz published another one in 2025 that I made sure to get hold of a copy as soon as possible. The very meta nature of the story, a mystery within a mystery, was delightful start to finish.

7. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

One of my guilty literary admissions is that I’m not a fan of Shakespeare’s work. However, I am intrigued by the man and his times. O’Farrell delivers a piercing imagining of the life of Agnes, the unconventional woman who marries William, a young tutor whose desire to write takes him away from his family for months at a time. It falls to Agnes to mind the household and keep the children safe as the plague moves through the community.

8. James by Percival Everett

I have vague memories of trying to read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when I was young, but I could not muster much interest in the antics of either of the boys. But James had me from the first paragraphs. Everett’s character is flat out fabulous.

9. Life Hacks for a Little Alien by Alice Franklin

Next to Middlemarch, this was the most surprising read of the year for me. I picked it up on a whim from the New Books shelf at the library and was immediately captivated by the little girl who figures out how to get along in a world that doesn’t understand her neurodivergence.

10. A Slowly Dying Cause by Elizabeth George

I was startled to realize that this is Inspector Lynley’s 22nd outing. I haven’t been with George’s long running series since the beginning. I came into it at number 7, Playing for the Ashes, and went back and read them in order until I got caught up again. I continue to find Lynley and Havers fascinating characters, but the ending of this procedural was very unusual.

11. All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall

In New York City, after a climate disaster has brought about ruinous floods, young Nonie and her family take refuge in the American Museum of Natural History. When another storm threatens their safety, they decide to move on to find a better place—and maybe hope for the future. I don’t usually read dystopian novels, but I’m glad I took a chance on this one.

12. Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen

I admired how Jen mashed up memoir and fiction to delve into her mother’s life, first in China, then as an immigrant to the U.S. Agnes (as she’s known in her new country) is constantly challenged by her strong-willed daughter Jen, and the two spend decades trying to figure each other out.

Hope you read a lot of good fiction in 2025, too. Have you read any of the ones on my list?

Next up: my nonfiction list.

Happy New Year!

On Reading (and not yet finishing) Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age By Debby Applegate

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Back in the summer of 2024, I started reading Debby Applegate’s biography of Polly Adler, the (in)famous Manhattan madam of the 1920s. It was an obvious choice for me: a story about a little-known woman—today, not back then—written by a woman who turned what she learned in graduate school into a Pulitzer Prize winning writing career. Applegate won that award for her first book, The Most Famous Man in America, a biography of the nineteenth-century minister Henry Ward Beecher.

(That book also serves as the sample proposal in the extraordinarily useful Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction—and Get It Published by Susan Rabiner (Applegate’s literary agent) and Alfred Fortunato. My copy is dog-eared now. It is the resource I turn to when I need to write a book proposal. Now I am reading Tilar Mazzeo’s How to Write a Bestseller: An Insider’s Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction for General Audiences, which may prove to be equally valuable.)

Madam is Applegate’s second book. (I admire an author who takes their time to conduct quality research.) I knew going in that it would be good. My interest in Madam extended beyond character to setting. Right now I want to read as much as I can about New York City in the 1920s to get background information for my current book-in-progress about Jane Grant, co-founder of The New Yorker.

Polly Adler was born around 1900; Jane in 1891. When Polly arrived in New York City from Russia in 1913, Jane had already been there (from Kansas) for five years. Both changed their first names to make a break with their pasts. The two young women struggled to gain a foothold in the city so they could live the life of their dreams. Each got what she wanted, mostly, in some way.

It is not unreasonable to think their paths may have crossed in New York in the 1920s, though trying to imagine that encounter makes my head spin. Polly opened her first brothel at the beginning of that decade that was known for its roar. By 1924, as Applegate writes, “her house had become an after-hours clubhouse for the adventurous Broadway bohemians who gathered at the Algonquin Hotel for lunch.” Jane Grant was a member of the legendary Round Table that met at the Algonquin. As was her husband, the talented editor Harold Ross. Their home was another “after-hours clubhouse” for the Round Tablers, though the entertainment they provided did not include Polly’s specialty.

(I have come to think of Jane as the anti-Polly.)

With some trepidation, I looked for Harold Ross’s name in the index of Madam and found it. (Jane’s is not there.) I could hardly bring myself to read what was on the corresponding page—would he turn out to be a rat or a super rat? But according to Applegate, Ross was “one of the few who failed to fall for Polly’s charms.” The lone time friends dragged him to her brothel, he carried along a stack of manuscripts, which he read “while the fun eddied around him.” This left me with a lot to think about.

I read about a quarter of Madam before I set it aside. It had nothing to do with the quality of the biography, which is as excellent as I anticipated, but rather because I started to consider it an ideal model for my book on Jane Grant. Too ideal. I am still very much at the beginning of my project, and I started to worry that I would imitate Applegate’s style. I do not want to cross the line between modeling and imitating. I need space, considerable space right now, to identify that boundary, to develop my own style and voice based on how I think Jane’s story needs to be told.

This is not the way I typically respond to the secondary (or published) sources I read for my book research. Every so often, though, I encounter a book—whether during leisure reading or work reading—I admire so much that I am overwhelmed by a sense of futility. (Also known, perhaps, as imposter syndrome.) As in, why should I continue to do what I do when someone has already published the perfect gem of a book. (Rebecca Donner’s All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, about Mildred Harnack, was the last book to strike me like that.)

The feeling eventually passes, and, of course, I go on to do what I do, because what I write ends up different than what anyone else writes. And maybe it is as good, maybe not. But that is what happens. I write the best book I can.

When I’m ready for my first round of revisions on the (still in progress) rough draft, I might pick up Debby Applegate’s book again. Or maybe I will wait for the second round. But I know I will finish reading that biography. I need to find out what happened to Polly Adler. And I need to pay close attention to how Applegate makes me care.

Up next: more on this year of Jane Grant.

My 2024 Reading, Part Two: Nonfiction

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This year’s list of my favorite nonfiction contains two more books than last year. (I gave seven nonfiction books five stars on Good Reads in 2024 and five in 2023.) But like last year, I am also including a bonus section of books that I liked.

Biographies dominated these seven favorites of 2024. (Unlike last year, I read very few memoirs in 2024.) Most of the biographies were about women, though one, a family biography, features both men and women. Another, which also was not a biography (or at least a traditional biography), centers on a man but has a couple of strong female secondary characters. Its author is the only man to appear on this list of seven. Make of this what you will. (Mostly that there are a lot of women’s stories out there to explore and lots of women writers to do so.) Here are the books, roughly in the order in which I read them.

1. Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming by Ava Chin. I remember being totally drawn into this book at the beginning of 2024, as I was getting ready to make my first trip to New York City. It is wonderfully written, with a delicate balance of history and family stories. Chin has produced an emotional yet not overly sentimental family biography.

2. The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel. I was a bit late to this book mostly because it is not the kind of thing I usually read. But I was convinced by the title and the cover design to pick it up from the library and never regretted the decision. Finkel briskly tells the wild story of Stéphane Bréitwieser, who stole about $2 billion worth of art from various European museums. Then there is the revelation of what happened to some of the pieces. Yikes.

3. The Dress Diary: Secrets From a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe by Kate Strasdin. Using surviving clothing fragments belonging to Anne Sykes, Strasdin skillfully recreates the world of this nineteenth-century Englishwoman. The author’s expertise as a fashion historian and museum curator really shines through in this creative history.

4. The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime by Sara Fitzgerald. Emily Hale has appeared as a minor character in previous books about the poet Eliot, but Fitzgerald flips the relationship, investigating it from Hale’s perspective. (This does not end well for Eliot’s reputation as a human being.) Hale emerges as a fully formed character with a fascinating life.

5. Portrait of a Woman:Art, Rivalry, and Revolution in the Life of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard by Bridget Quinn. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard was a well-known and well-regarded painter in France during the 1700s, at least up until the French Revolution. Quinn makes good use of the scant information available on the artist’s life to restore her to her proper place in the historical record. And Quinn’s breezy writing style makes this biography a delight to read.

6. The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker by Amy Reading. The long-time fiction editor of The New Yorker magazine, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, receives a well-deserved biography that focuses on White’s ability to recognize talented writers and get their work published in the magazine. It is a fascinating portrait of an important literary life.

7. Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily Van Duyne. Ted Hughes (like T.S. Eliot above) does not come off well in Van Duyne’s trenchant probing of not just Plath’s life, but how others have written about that life. Van Duyne makes a convincing—and haunting—case for Hughes as the ultimate in unreliable narrators. Reclamation, indeed.

Of the two bonus books from my 2024 reading, one is very much in line with most of the favorites listed above. Drew Gilpin Faust’s memoir, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury is an engaging account of the prominent historian’s involvement with the various social and political movements of the 1960s.

The other, Leave While the Party’s Good: The Life and Legacy of Baseball Executive Harry Dalton by Lee Kluck, is a book that anyone who knows me would not believe that I ever picked up. I am not a sports person. I don’t watch games or watch movies or shows about sports. (Well, okay, I did like Bend It Like Beckham and Bull Durham, and I have watched Field of Dreams. But otherwise, no.) (And actually, growing up at 2912, baseball was ubiquitous during the spring and summer. I knew spring had arrived when my mom set up her ironing board in front of the television in the family room so she could watch the Cubs while she ironed. I still know a lot about baseball.)

Lee Kluck was, many years ago, a student of mine, and I followed his writing journey with great interest. He has produced a nicely researched and crisply written biography of an important figure in major league baseball. The University of Nebraska Press, known for its sports series, published his book. So, yay for Lee and for Harry Dalton. If you or anyone you know is into sports biographies, do not miss this one.

That is a wrap on my favorites of 2024. Up next: some thoughts on a very good book I started reading in 2024 but have yet to finish.

May all the books you read in 2025 be good ones.

My 2024 Reading, Part One: Fiction

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Welcome to my annual reading round-up, in which I share my favorite books, both fiction (in this post) and nonfiction (in the next post). I prefer to stay away from the term “best” because of how subjective that is. These are the books I enjoyed in 2024, though a few may have been published earlier. Sometimes I don’t get around quickly to ones I want to read because of lengthy hold lists at the public library. Sometimes I’m interested in a book and know I’m not in the right mood to read it. So, reasons.

According to Goodreads, where I keep track of such things, I read five more books in 2024 than I did in 2023—from 46 to 51. (Yet for some reason it seems like I did not read much. I’m not sure why—it may have to do with the time I have been spending on my new book project.)

Of the novels I read in 2024, I marked five with five stars. Because there are so few, I find it impossible to rank them. Instead, these are listed in roughly the chronological order I read them. (Not surprisingly, they are all historical.)

1. The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan. Set in World War II Malaya, this riveting historical drama depicts the heartbreaking choices people make during an enemy occupation. Cecily Alcantara, a devoted wife and mother, finds herself in increasingly impossible situations.

2. The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright. Nell McDaragh, granddaughter of a famous Irish poet, and her mother Carmel, the poet’s daughter, both struggle with his legacy. Sensitive and beautifully written.

3. The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff. This novel is utterly and admirably void of any romancing of the early years of the English colonization of North America. Propelled by a pervasive sense of dread and entranced by the brutal beauty of the story, I could not stop reading.

4. The Road from Belhaven by Margot Livesey. Character and setting are pitch perfect in this historical drama set in rural Scotland during the nineteenth century. A young woman can see some glimpses of the future but has to figure out what to make of the information.

5. Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor. Just before the beginning of World War II, a young woman living on a small Welsh island is unexpectedly confronted with the opportunity to change the anticipated course of her future. Delicate and lovely.

Additional recommendations (very close to five stars):

Two of my favorite mystery writers published new additions to their long-running series. Jacqueline Winspear drew her excellent Maisie Dobbs series to a close with The Comfort of Ghosts, which provided a satisfying ending. With Pay Dirt, Sara Paretsky delivered another powerful installment of her V.I. Warshawski investigations.

Alice McDermott’s Absolution depicts U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s from the perspective of white American women living there with their husbands. Very thought-provoking.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore is a well-crafted mystery that made me glad I never went away to summer camp.

And the biggest surprise of my 2024 reading was Elizabeth Crook’s The Madstone, which I pulled off the library’s Westerns shelf on a whim and got helplessly drawn into the story.

Up next: My favorite nonfiction books of 2024.

My 2023 Reading, Part Two: Nonfiction (Plus a Bonus)

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The best narrative nonfiction books I read in 2023 comprise an unusually short list. I think there was something about my reading mood last year that affected my reactions to books. “Best” and “favorite” are subjective, anyway, so I’m sticking to that as an explanation.

All of these books deal with the past, and all but one are biographies. The outlier of the group, though, could be described as a collection of mini-biographies. Here they are, roughly in the order of my admiration.

In Master Slave Husband Wife, Ilyon Woo traces the perilous journey from enslavement to freedom of Ellen and William Craft. The Crafts fled Georgia with Ellen disguised as an invalided white man and William posing as her “servant.” Their life in the “free” North was dangerous because of the Fugitive Slave Law, yet the couple became part of the great abolitionist movement in the years prior to the Civil War. It’s an unforgettable story of moral and physical courage.

Catherine McNeur introduces readers to Margaretta and Elizabeth Morris in the dual biography Mischievous Creatures. The historian makes a convincing case that the largely self-taught sisters, one an entomologist, the other a botanist, made significant contributions to scientific knowledge in the decades before the Civil War. Margaretta and Elizabeth are fascinating women, and McNeur expertly weaves in the science without slowing down the story of the women’s accomplishments and the barriers they faced because of their gender.

Leaning heavily on literary analysis and historical context, David Waldstreicher recreates the life of an eighteenth-century Black poet in The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley. Kidnapped and enslaved as a child, Wheatley learned how to read and write while living in Boston and began turning out poetry as a teenager. This is a finely detailed story that took me some time to read, but I thought it was wonderful.

I learned a lot about South Africa from Jonny Steinberg’s dual biography, Winnie and Nelson. Steinberg traces apartheid through the lens of the Mandela marriage, focusing on Nelson’s long imprisonment and Winnie’s increasing political influence. It’s a riveting and important book.

Emma Southon’s lively voice adds an extra layer of enjoyment to A Rome of One’s Own, which reveals the history of the Roman empire through the lives of twenty-one mostly-forgotten women. This serves as a nice reminder that there was more to Rome than gladiators and pontificating politicians.

There were also a couple of other books I liked, both biographies. I appreciated learning more about the Queen of Crime in Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley, and it was interesting to find out about the intrepid twentieth-century journalist Elsie Robinson through Julia Sheeres and Allison Gilbert’s Listen, World!

Now for the bonus: memoirs. Last year, I included them in with the other nonfiction I read, but this time I decided it was more appropriate to give them their own category. While it’s true they are nonfiction, memoirs are very different from the historical, fact-based nonfiction that I usually read.

There are three memoirs I read in 2023 that I keep thinking about.

I’m certainly not the first person to rave about poet Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, but I may be among the last to have never run across her poem “Good Bones.” Its last line was turned into the title of her lyrical story of the unraveling of her marriage and her enduring love for her children.

Love for her children is a strong undercurrent in Life B, author and book critic (known in online circles as The Book Maven) Bethanne Patrick’s clear-eyed account of her decades-long struggle with double depression. She hits and maintains a sweet spot of narrative voice that is neither too bleak nor too Pollyanna-ish. I rooted for her all the way through.

Marsha Jacobson rounds out this trio of devoted mothers. In The Wrong Calamity she describes how she survived an abusive marriage, established herself as a successful businesswoman (even earning a Harvard MBA) and as a role model to her daughters, then suffered a shattering disappointment with her second marriage. Like both Smith and Patrick, Jacobson shows restraint in parceling out the gritty, personal details of these relationships, giving readers just what they need but never tipping into a salacious tell-all.

That’s it for my 2023 reading recap. I’m delighted (and slightly relieved) to report that 2024 is off to a blazing start. I could hardly bear to put down Vanessa Chan’s The Storm We Made and Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren, plus I’m swiftly moving through Mott Street by Ava Chin.

Up next: some pieces that are more or less connected to my new book project.