My Favourite Reads of 2025 [1/? 2026]
Sorry for the long hiatus, life has been busy! I'll probably post at odd times this year, and sometimes in short bursts.
See ~100 photos from January to April here.
In this newsletter I've written about my five favourite reads from last year, and included quotes from each book to give you a sense of the language. If you've read and enjoyed these, or any of the other books I've included at the bottom, I'd love to hear from you!
Open Veins of Latin America — Eduardo Galeano (317 pages)
I loved reading Galeano’s sensitive and careful trek through 500 years of Latin American history. It's surely among the most clear-eyed and comprehensive accounts of the cruelties of colonialism on which our world was built. I'm grateful that through this book I was brought a little closer to the indigenous silver miners in Potosi, so abused by the Spanish Mita system, the cheated rubber tappers in the Amazon basin, and the manual workers at the heart of so many plantations, ports, and railways.
Though I found some of the economic analysis in this book unconvincing, this complaint is greatly outweighed by its creative historical research, and the great beauty of Galeano’s language.
I also recommend Walter Rodney's excellent book "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa," which tracks the same connected struggle across another vast continent.
“Cuba,” he said in his resounding defense plea, “continues to be a producer of raw materials. We export sugar to import candy, we export hides to import shoes, we export iron to import plows.”
The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret; every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.
The WEIRDest People in the World — Joseph Henrich (706 pages)
This book is the best resource I've found for making sense of my own cultural psychology, the evolution of kinship structures, and perhaps even the history of human development. With careful sensitivity and extensive research, Henrich quite compellingly argues that the Roman Catholic Church's prescriptive reorganisation of the family laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution and much of the cultural and psychological diversity in the world today.
...the particular idea of endowing individuals with “rights” and then designing laws based on those rights only makes sense in a world of analytical thinkers who conceive of people as primarily independent agents and look to solve problems by assigning properties, dispositions, and essences to objects and persons. If this approach to law sounds like common sense, you are indeed WEIRD.
Love in Exile — Shon Faye (208 pages)
I'm grateful to Shon Faye for her tender personal account of the way our society, with all its cold individualism, deprives many of love. Her book gave me glimmers of understanding into her experience of being a trans woman in the UK, though despite being so personal, the book remains utterly resonant and accessible to anyone who's had the experience of being frustrated in love. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.
We ache for love, but love eludes us. Out of this crisis comes so much of what it means to be human.
We cannot easily show love to ourselves in a society that has not shown love to us.
Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy (964 pages)
A decade after my first attempt, I've entered a 150-year-strong club of admirers of Tolstoy's lovely novel. I loved it for the beautiful, rhythmic passages, its careful observations, its little repeating motifs, and perhaps most for the deep sympathy and respect Tolstoy builds for its characters, especially the tragic Anna and her awkward, pondering foil Levin.
He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.
The Life and Times of Michael K — J.M. Coetzee (192 pages)
Once again, from the cruel granite of apartheid, Coetzee carves fundamental reflections on the heaviness of living amongst other people, on the blindness of cruelty, and on the futile desire of escaping to build a garden in some untouched bushland, a thousand miles from humans. Michael K was also adapted for the stage, clips of the performance are available here.
He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks behind it, but if anything, as a speck upon the surface of an earth too deeply asleep to notice the scratch of ant feet, the rasp of butterfly teeth, the tumbling of dust
2025 reads: An African History of Africa — Badawi; The Easter Parade — Yates; The Use of Photography — Ernaux; Season of Migration to the North — Salih; The Future of Truth — Herzog; How Europe Underdeveloped Africa — Rodney; Memories That Smell Like Gasoline — Wojnarowicz; Open Veins of Latin America — Galeano; Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country — Erdrich; Vagabonds! — Osunde; Death Is Our Business — Lechner; Heart of Darkness — Conrad; Is a River Alive? — Macfarlane; Malayland — Zaman; The Life and Times of Michael K — Coetzee; Demon Copperhead — Kingsolver; The Miracle of Mindfulness — Hanh; The Bhagavad Gita — Rajagopalachari; The WEIRDest People in the World — Henrich; Capitalist Realism — Fisher; The Emperor — Kapuściński; Travels with Herodotus — Kapuściński; The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — Koenig; Foster — Keegan; Love in Exile — Faye; Anna Karenina — Tolstoy; Weird Fucks — Tillman; Bluets — Nelson; I May Be Wrong — Lindeblad; The Hard Road Out — Park; Everybody — Laing; Small Things Like These — Keegan; City of Thorns — Rawlence.
Cover photo - Bologna, Italy.
