Top Fiction

Tolstoy — Anna Karenina

Self Recommending. You know you should read it, and in fact, you should. I’ve heard the book described as a soap opera and I tend to agree. An absolute page turner. My favorite passages were those of Levin with the muzhiks mowing grass. I found them unbelievably moving — somewhere in there I felt some this-is-life type feeling. Harold Bloom says about Tolstoy:

Reading him incessantly, you don't so much begin to see what he sees, you start to realize how arbitrary your own seeing tends to be. Your world is much less abundant than his, since he somehow manages to suggest that what he sees is at once more natural and yet more strange.

Mircea Cărtărescu — Solenoid

This book creates a world so vivid and alive you are consumed by it. In real life Cartarescu’s career was jump started when he read his poem The Fall in an important poetry club in Bucharest. This book rewrites this real life scene of the author — instead of being accepted into literary circles he is cast out into the cold and thus the main character, Cartaresu’s shadow, is born into the book.

The book drags in the middle but even when the plot is taking a break there is literary/lyrical beauty on nearly every page. It also manages to close in a most unexpected and excellent way, wrapping in all these major discursions into one beautiful finale. The themes and symbols of the book are repeated to the point where they are simply unmissable (being a poor reader, this doesn’t bother me) which may annoy some reader. Some noteworthy themes: the randomness/contingency of life and experience, Zhuangzi’s butterfly (lots of mites and bugs etc), art as escape from life and escapism in general (first quote), meaning of life, Dylan Thomas’s Do not go gentle into that good night (almost a rejection of death). And now some instructive quotes:

“I felt so free that I could almost fly, because breath is nothing more than the beating of our wings through the godly azure of life.”

"Art has no meaning if it's not an escape. If it's not born of a prisoner's despair."

“A prisoner on death row could have his cell lined with bookshelves, all wonderful books, but what he actually needs is an escape plan.”

"The old man seemed delirious, but I knew better than anyone that delirium is not the detritus of reality but a part of reality itself, sometimes the most precious part."

"The milk of her body entered the child's, where, like a Eucharist, it became body and blood, spinal fluid and endorphins, through a magic and mystery the mind cannot comprehend."

"We are an impossible formation of the aleatory, endless world; we are the coin landing on an edge so thin that it cuts itself in half a billion times per second."

Helen DeWitt — The Last Samurai

I read this and I read Your Name Here this year. This is by some margin the stronger book. Often on the lists of the best books of the century so far — self recommending.

Anne Berest — The Postcard

Based mostly on a true story, a thoughtful and gentle book about French Jewish life before during and after the Holocaust. Powerful and moving book. A book that would be difficult to read without your eyes becoming moist, at points.

Books that help understand today:

Philip Roth — American Pastoral

“The indigenous American berserk” is how Roth refers to America famously in this book. Explores the societal destruction of Vietnam and post-Vietnam era America. Reading this book it’s hard not to have modern times come rushing unbidden into your head with a resounding rhyme.

Alfred Döblin — Berlin Alexanderplatz

This novel takes place in Weimar Republic Germany, interwar Germany and follows Mr. Franz Biberkopf who is just getting out of prison at the beginning of the novel for having beat his ex-girlfriend to death. He is determined to go straight but quickly falls into his old ways. The plot is winding and exciting throughout and the writing is sublime. It’s written as a montage with the main novel interspersed with sounds of the city, news on the radio, long Biblical verses (beautiful) and other stuff.

Top Recommendations Nonfiction

René Girard — I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

The theory of mimesis is simply worth writing about. I don’t have enough background on this to say anything interesting other than this is, to me, simply an interesting study of victimhood and the power of the Bible. (His claim about the Bible is that it’s the first narrative that takes the side of the victim throughout, unlike the known Greek or Roman mythology).

Bruce Ackerman — The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy

A few takeaways for me from this book: the balance of power between the branches (particularly executive and judicial) is at an unstable equilibrium and is want to shift and change, the advent of political parties immediately caused issues in our system (we were basically off to an immediate bad start), and the voting system was/is a mess. This was a very interesting book I need to reread/reskim. It also in a weird way provided me optimism in a way — an it’s-been-bad-before-and-turned-out-okay type optimism.

Kakuzō Okakura — The Book of Tea

Short gorgeous book thick with aphorisms nominally about Teaism in Japan and it’s roots in Buddhism, but it’s about so much more. It’s about beauty and meaning in life, excellent chapters on flower arranging and the tea room. Some interesting lines:

“Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.”

“Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.”

“Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.”

Robert K. Massie — Peter the Great: His Life and World

One of the great Russian biographies — self-recommending. Like reading a novel that happens to teach you about history. I’m starting off 2026 with his Catherine The Great: Portrait of a Woman.

Jonny Steinberg — Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage

An excellent book on many levels. Personal, emotional and deep without losing the high level view. Well balanced between the deep dives in the character and well sourced (the most important new source was the letters between Winnie & Nelson during Nelson’s long imprisonment). One is left with a huge impression of the characters of both Winnie & Nelson, both extremely important charismatic people. At the time Winnie’s legacy was mostly gone (the trial, the football club, the embrace of violence, the radicalism) but with time her view/side has become more popular and Nelson’s star has faded. Interesting last chapter, worth reading even perhaps in isolation. Excellent book.

Overall

In summary of this years reading I would just say that it has been too random and unguided. In some ways I feel this is the optimal way to go (keeps me reading), in other ways I know that I’m missing out on some deeper understanding of time periods when it takes a year to read another book from this period. Books stay vivid in my mind for a fairly short while (on the order of a small number of months) then with few exceptions they go from characters and plotlines in my mine to a compressed summary of my overall thoughts on the book. With prompting, of course, it comes back but I still feel that better clustering will help set ideas deeper into my head. So this would be the first most important thing I will be trying to do looking forward into 2026.

Next year I will focus more on reading at least 1 book a month from the Western Canon (as specified in the back of Harold Bloom’s excellent The Western Canon). Starting with Mythology by Edith Hamilton then going straight into The Iliad and The Odyssey and hopefully starting the bible soon thereafter. These are simply necessities that I shall no longer put off. For the last two years I’ve been practicing my reading and now I’m ready to do the real work (at least a little bit).

Overall, it’s been a good year of reading and I’m looking forward to another great reading year in 2026.