Another year has come to an end, and with it, another year of reading. Like every year, I list the ten best books I read in 2025 below and the reasons why I enjoyed them so much.
This year, I read a mix of novels, history and some science books that I found fascinating. One of the goals I mentioned in last year’s list was to read more fiction. I feel like I did that, but I still wish I’d read more.
That’s a goal of mine going into 2026, and although I read some Hemingway, which is on this list, I would like to read more of his books and explore some more interesting authors I’ve not had the time to check out yet.
Yet, that’s not until next year, and I hope you enjoy the list below and that it gives you ideas of what to read going forward.
Table of Contents
A Farewell to Arms
- Hemingway’s masterpiece is not only one of the best novels we have about World War I but is also a tender, haunting love story
- Ernest Hemingway drew from his own war experiences when he crafted this remarkable story of an American ambulance driver serving on the Italian front and his love for a beautiful English nurse
- The novel, Hemingway’s first best seller, is marked by vivid depictions of the horrors of the battlefield—but also by the heartrending vicissitudes of a passionate affair of the heart between his protagonists, Frederic and Catherine, leading up to a tragic ending that is all the more powerful for its famously understated expression
One of Ernest Hemingway’s finest novels, A Farewell to Arms is based on his experiences in the First World War and follows an American soldier as he fights for Italy.
I was hooked from the beginning, and that Hemingway fought in this war gives his story more credence.
It’s a rollercoaster of emotions as you follow the main character around war-torn Europe as he fights for Italy and then tries to dodge the authorities after going on the run.
As with most Hemingway books, it’s a direct account, and the ending is one of the grimmest I’ve encountered. So much so that I had to sit in silence for a few minutes afterwards to contemplate what I’d read.
But that doesn’t detract from the greatness of this novel, and it’s one you have to read if you enjoy Hemingway’s work.
Vineland
- A group of Americans in Northern California in 1984 are struggling with the consequences of their lives in the sixties, still run by the passions of those times — sexual and political — which have refused to die
- Among them is Zoyd Wheeler who is preparing for his annual act of televised insanity (for which he receives a government stipend) when an unwelcome face appears from out of his past
- An old nemesis, federal prosecutor Brock Vond, storms into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed strike force
- Soon Zoyd and his daughter, Prairie, go into hiding while Vond begins a relationship with Zoyd’s ex-wife and uses Prairie as a pawn against the mother she never knew she had
- Part daytime drama, part political thriller, Vineland is a strange evocation of a twentieth-century America headed for a less than harmonic future
Thomas Pynchon is one of my favourite authors, and although I didn’t read his latest book, which he released towards the end of the year, I did read Vineland.
The timing was fortuitous because a film, One Battle After Another, was released a few months after I started reading it. So, that gave me extra motivation to read this book before it came out.
As with every Pynchon novel I’ve read, with the exception of The Crying of Lot 49, it’s a hard book to follow at times. The plot goes in all directions, and it’s hard to keep up. I had to read the Wikipedia plot a few times to get an idea of what was happening.
Still, it’s a great book and a typical Pynchon adventure through the wacky world he creates. I recommend reading the novel and then watching the film, as this will help you understand both in more detail.
Personality and Power
Personality and Power is a fascinating history book by one of the best historians around, Ian Kershaw. It looks at some of the powerbrokers since the Second World War who have shaped Europe.
While it’s one of the most interesting books about dictators, it also looks at democratic figures such as Churchill and Thatcher, too.
It’s this contrast that makes the book a fascinating read. You get to see the differences between how dictators affect their country and those who adhere to democratic norms.
If you’re looking for a primer on some of the most notable figures in the history of postwar Europe, it’s one of the best books to start with.
The Blackwater Lightship
- From the author of The Master and Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín weaves together the lives of three generations of estranged women as they reunite to witness and mourn the death of a brother, a son, and a grandson
- It is Ireland in the early 1990s
- Helen, her mother, Lily, and her grandmother, Dora, have come together to tend to Helen’s brother, Declan, who is dying of AIDS
- With Declan’s two friends, the six of them are forced to plumb the shoals of their own histories and to come to terms with each other
- Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Blackwater Lightship is a deeply resonant story about three generations of an estranged family reuniting to mourn an untimely death
I’ve been aware of Colm Toibin for a while, but I’ve never got around to reading one of his books. Until this year, that is.
The Blackwater Lightship is a great novel and one I wasn’t expecting much from when I picked it up. The story follows a family in Ireland who are divided and dealing with the grief of one of them slowly dying.
It’s a masterful book, and it’s fascinating how Toibin weaves a story around the embittered family as circumstances bring them back together and old wounds open up.
I don’t know much about Toibin’s other work, but I feel like this is a good book to start with, and one you won’t regret reading.
The Great Transformation
- In this classic work of economic history and social theory, Karl Polanyi analyzes the economic and social changes brought about by the “great transformation” of the Industrial Revolution
- His analysis explains not only the deficiencies of the self-regulating market, but the potentially dire social consequences of untempered market capitalism
- New introductory material reveals the renewed importance of Polanyi’s seminal analysis in an era of globalization and free trade
The Great Transformation is a book I wasn’t aware of until I saw it mentioned in a Guardian article a few years ago. I’d heard of the author, Karl Polanyi, but I didn’t know much about him or his work.
This book is considered to be his finest work and details how economic conditions in Europe in the 1920s led to the rise of Fascism that plagued the continent from the 1930s to the 1940s.
What was fascinating about Polanyi’s work was that he went back as far as the 18th century to indicate how economic conditions in that period set the stage for what was to come. I was intrigued by this, and although I didn’t fully understand it, it was fascinating to see how Polanyi dives so far back to explain what happened.
It’s not an easy book to read, as it’s dense with information and economic history. But if this stuff interests you and you want to understand how these dictators came to power, it’s a must-read.
The Last Days of the Ottoman Empire
- ‘A tour de force of accessible scholarship’ The Guardian’Impressive
- It is a complicated story that still reverberates, and Gingeras narrates it with lucid authority’ New StatesmanThe Ottoman Empire had been one of the major facts in European history since the Middle Ages
- Stretching from the Adriatic to the Indian Ocean, the Empire was both a great political entity and a religious one, with the Sultan ruling over the Holy Sites and, as Caliph, the successor to Mohammed
- Yet the Empire’s fateful decision to support Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914 doomed it to disaster, breaking it up into a series of European colonies and what emerged as an independent Saudi Arabia
- Ryan Gingeras’s superb new book explains how these epochal events came about and shows how much we still live in the shadow of decisions taken so long ago
As a student of history, one of the empires I know little about is the Ottoman Empire. I bought The Last Days of the Ottoman Empire to rectify this and learn more about what caused this once mighty empire to collapse.
The book was fabulous, and although not very long, it did an excellent job of explaining how the empire came to collapse after the First World War.
The collapse of the empire was a profound moment that still has an impact today in Gaza, Greece, Turkey and many more places. What surprised me was how far the empire’s reach extended. It seems there were very few places it didn’t touch.
In 2026, I want to read more about the empire in the early days, but this book was a brilliant read and one that helped explain some of the modern-day tribulations we see in the world.
On The Calculation of Volume
- Utterly riveting, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) is the grand opening of her speculative fiction septology, winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize (Scandinavia’s most important literary award) for being “a masterpiece of its time
- ” A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZELONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURETara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly
- We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons
- She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world
- (As she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November
On the Calculation of Volume was one of the first books I read in 2025, and one I enjoyed reading.
The story is great and follows a woman who keeps waking up and experiencing the same day on repeat. Every day she awakes and goes through the motions, and you keep reading and wondering when it’s going to stop.
Only it doesn’t, and she decides to take more and more extreme measures to try and snap out of the loop. The book does drag on a little towards the end, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
There are more books scheduled to come out, and I’m interested to see how the story develops and what happens next.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
- Alec Leamas, a tired, worn out British spymaster, has retired
- His boss, however, believes he has one last job in him and sends him to East Germany to spread false information about a powerful East German intelligence officer
- Can Agent Leamas end his career of espionage and finally come in from the cold, or will the opportunity to take revenge on old enemies prove irresistible? Penguin Readers is a series of the best new fiction, essential non-fiction and popular classics written for learners of English as a foreign language
- Beautifully illustrated and carefully adapted, the series introduces language learners around the world to the bestselling authors and most compelling content from Penguin Random House
- The eight levels of Penguin Readers follow the Common European Framework and include language activities that help readers to develop key skills
I’ve always wanted to read John le Carre, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was the first book of his I read while I was on holiday with my girlfriend.
The book surprised me. I wasn’t expecting it to be so interesting and gripping. This is probably because I’ve never read spy fiction before, but it kept me hooked for the whole flight to Barcelona. I think I had 50 pages left by the time the flight landed, I enjoyed it that much!
The story follows Cold War intrigue, as a disgraced spy undertakes one last assignment in East Germany. But gets caught in a web of intrigue and danger.
I loved the book, and one of my goals for 2026 is to read more of Le Carre’s work.
Fire Weather
- PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION • FINALIST FOR THE PEN/GALBRAITH AWARD FOR NONFICTION • A stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind from the award-winning, best-selling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce • Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-FictionA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, TIME, NPR, Slate, and Smithsonian“Grips like a philosophical thriller, warns like a beacon, and shocks to the core
- ” —Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland“Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page
- ” —David Wallace-Wells, #1 bestselling author of The Uninhabitable EarthIn May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire
- The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon
- Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world
Out of all the books on the list, Fire Weather was the one that shocked me the most, and not in a good way.
The book tells the story of the Fort McMurray fire, which I’d never heard of, and how it destroyed this mining town in the north of Canada.
I was shocked, I hadn’t heard about this fire, and the way it’s described in this book is terrifying and gripping. It’s a book that epitomises what’s going on with climate change and how the warming planet is making weather events more extreme.
The book is a warning about what might be headed our way if we’re not careful. It’s an essential, if scary, read.
The Old Man and the Sea
- Hemingway’s novel tells the story of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman, who suffers through a grueling struggle with a giant marlin far out at sea
- Although he loses the fish to sharks on his return, Santiago’s courage, resilience, and quiet dignity show the great strength of the human spirit against relentless odds in his journey
The last of my books on this list is The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, and perhaps my favourite book of the year.
It’s a short book but a brilliant one. It describes the battle between an old man and a giant fish he tries to capture at sea.
The prose is typical Hemingway, brief and to the point, but it doesn’t detract from the story. As it’s only a short book, you can read this in an afternoon and enjoy such a brilliant book that tells the struggle between man and nature.
This is the best book to get an introduction to Hemingway, and the easiest one to read to get an idea of his style and ideas. I can’t recommend it enough and can’t believe it took me so long to read.