The Books I Read in 2025
This year’s selection of books is heavily influenced by my travels and interactions this past year. I now live in Melbourne, Victoria, having emigrated here from London, UK in March. I did nonetheless travel a lot. In this review, you will find books inspired by my move and desire to learn more about my new home, its history and its place in the world. You will find books gifted by close friends back home, which remind me of that wonderful and complicated place. And you will find books that I discovered in airports, after uploading a photo of an airport bookshelf to ChatGPT with a list of books I’ve enjoyed in the past.
Thanks in part to my emigration, some important lifestyle shifts, consumption habits and the amount of time I’ve spent in the liminal spaces of planes, I did get through more this year than in recent years. It feels like the beginning of a reading renaissance. I will strive for it to continue in 2026.
Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe
Finished: April 2025
As a new arrival in Australia, Pascoe offered me some wonderful insights and myth-busting revelations which have helped me to understand a little about the extremely-long-lived Aboriginal cultures which preceded Europeans and continue to exist alongside the culture which dominates the common vision of Australia today. Pascoe explains this in detail, sometimes passionately but never condescendingly, aware that many readers have had a poor education on pre-colonial Australian society. Highly recommended, read with an open and curious mind.
Wicked by Gregory Maguire
Finished: May 2025
Having read it many many years ago, I thought I’d remember more. However I think because I’ve seen and listened to the musical so many times, and seen and listened to the first film so many times, I forgot how different Wicked the novel is from its eventual stage and film adaptation. I don’t think it’s as weird as its reputation suggests, but it is a bit odd and strangely written in parts. I see what Maguire is trying to do in terms of explaining The Witch, but it feels a little rushed and unbelievable at times. Nonetheless, good fun and quite gripping.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
Finished: June 2025
What I thought would be a gripping sci-fi romp full of conspiracies and dystopias was a lot more light-hearted. More akin to a historical fiction romance, it was a lot of fun, and still packed a decent sci-fi punch.
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
Finished: Aug 2025
Excellent send-up of British class, society, and culture in what feels like a silly short story idea which went way too far. Fforde’s mostly-subtle jabs at the arbitrary rules, idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies are so much fun, very satisfying to read and actually has a very compelling narrative even aside from the humour. I immediately fell in love with this page-turner!
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Finished: Aug 2025
This journal-format novel is a fascinating mystery which slowly unfolds with each chapter. A very satisfying read if you do it in a handful of sittings, since it’s easier to follow the mysteries and their conclusions. It’s in general quite an easy read, and especially fun for those of us who enjoy lo-fi world-building in fantastical, almost absurd settings. I think there’s a message - or a moral? - too, to do with the nature of relationships with an unequal power dynamic. Not sure about that one. I couldn’t put this one down, though!
Katabasis by R. F. Kuang
Finished: Sep 2025
If you’re at all interested in classical philosophy, logic and mythologies from around the world, I highly recommend this fun fantasy novel. Kuang playfully merges various myths about hell, the underworld, death and rebirth and effectively takes them all at face value. What if Orpheus and Dante were both real living people from history and both had indeed visited hell? And what if the people of the 20th century still went from time to time? What if magic were a mundane field of study, and had practical applications in modern life but was quickly being sidelined by rapidly advancing digital technology?
A lot of fun, with a lovely allegorical moral to go along with it and a slightly-too-tropey but still enjoyable love story.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
Finished: Nov 2025
This was a beautiful, poetic, morally complex tome which is a meditation on the concept of memory and an argument for context. War is hell, but put yourself in the shoes of your enemy - know their past and learn their pressures - and you may understand their behaviour better. It could be a tragedy, but to me it feels more like a celebration of forgetting or moving on, despite the tragic events. Flanagan really takes you in and insists that you understand but not excuse anybody, and feel relief when they themselves find a road to a better future, even if it pains them to do so.
Beautiful!
Red Side Story
Finished: Dec 2025 (strictly speaking it was first thing 1st Jan 2026, but only a few pages left!)
Fforde’s follow-up to Shades of Grey was published 12 years after the first in the series and it does sort of show. I loved Shades of Grey, but something about the sequel felt a little Flanderized. The protagonist & narrator - Eddie - does a lot more over-telegraphing of what he’s up to and thinking, and some of the excellent world-building that Fforde did in the first one is undermined a little by too much exposition throughout the novel. I suppose given the gap between publishing dates, that’s understandable, but it does kind of take you out of the story. And the satirical references get a little on-the-nose at times, too, almost like he’s really trying to hammer home the point.
Nonetheless, I did find the plot compelling and the conclusion quite satisfying. The story gets quite a lot more serious and although I suspect Fforde came up with a lot of the ideas for twists and backstory very long after the first book, they were pretty interesting, novel, and well-thought-through. I just wish the jokes and references had been a little more subtle, like the first one. I look forward to the third in the trilogy, coming in 2028.