Books Read in 2025, Part 1

I read. It’s what I do. Or at least what I try to do. It was tricky this year, though. Can’t imagine why.

But I persevered as best I could and I did manage to get through some books. Not as many as I’d like, but at least some. And as I’ve been doing since I started this blog way back when, I kept track of the books I read. It’s interesting to see these at the end of the year, because honestly some of them I don’t remember reading at all while others have stuck with me as if I just finished them yesterday. Not sure how that works, but then I have reached the point where I just don’t question things as much as I used to do. Things happen. That is the nature of things.

In general my target for the year is 50pp/day. Most years I hit that. Some years I exceed it. This year I managed about a third of that. Perhaps next year will be better.


--


We Solve Murders (Richard Osman)

I generally don’t listen to audiobooks unless a) I’m with Kim, who enjoys this sort of thing, and b) we are on a long drive somewhere, and this is what happened last January when we drove from Jersey City back to Wisconsin and listened to this for most of the ride home. Amy Wheeler is a bodyguard – a personal security agent – for one of the premier such agencies in the world, and at the beginning of the novel she is on a private island in South Carolina protecting a feisty novelist named Rosie D’Antonio – a woman of indeterminate age and the absolute self-confidence that comes from fabulous wealth, a joyfully scandalous past, and the recognition and achievement enjoyed by someone who has sold 60 million books – from the wrath of a Russian businessman whose portrayal in one of her novels was not to his liking. Amy’s husband Adam is off somewhere doing financial things, which pretty much sums up his role in the book, but her father-in-law Steve is a retired London cop now living in the sleepy English village of Axley as a widower with a cat named Trouble. When Amy’s boss Jeff runs afoul of “Francois Lubet” – the world’s biggest money smuggler – his clients start to die and the plot kicks into high gear as Amy and Rosie and (eventually) Steve go on the lam to try to solve the murders before Lubet’s hit men can take them out. With Rosie’s influence and money, Amy’s street smarts and muscle, and Steve’s investigative skills they careen from South Carolina to St. Lucia to Ireland to Dubai before all of the various threads of the plot converge around Axley. There is violence aplenty and a fair bit of gunplay but none of it overshadows the larger story and in fact it often gets lost in the dialogue, some of which is deeply funny in an awkward British sort of way. Osman has a great deal of fun introducing characters – Jeff’s former partner Hank (a fussy Dutchman), a dimwitted movie star named Max, the gang down at the pub (especially Tony, who can reliably give you turn-by-turn directions to anywhere within 60 miles or so) and so on – giving them little quirks and qualities of their own, and if most of the tension in the novel evaporates with a bit of humor here and there before you reach the end, who will complain? It’s an entertaining story and it got us through Ohio.

A Man Called Ove (Fredrik Backman)

Every neighborhood has an old man like Ove – the grouch who yells at kids when they walk on his lawn, the rules enforcer, the hermit. His wife Sonja was in many ways his opposite – sociable, vivacious, cheerful – but she died years ago and Ove has just been going through the motions since then, to the point where he’s decided he’d be better off killing himself. But every time he tries, something gets in the way. His new neighbors, Parveneh and Adrian and their children. The cat he somehow ends up rescuing from a snowdrift, much against his better judgment and desires. His neighbor Rune, once as close a friend as two belligerently taciturn Swedish men can be but for long years an enemy and now a man rapidly losing his battle with dementia. A young man who wants to fix a bicycle. A gay man thrown out of his parents’ house. Ove will confront all of them, and in the process slowly and cantankerously come back to life. Backman is a wonderful storyteller, and he lets his characters grow and change without becoming cliches or caricatures – the Ove at the end is still recognizably the Ove at the beginning, though perhaps more the Ove that Sonja saw that day on the train, so long ago.

My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises (Fredrik Backman)

The first book I read by Backman, Anxious People, was funny in a rueful and humane way. A Man Called Ove was melancholy. This book is heartbreaking, though also humane and, in the end, perhaps even redemptive. Elsa is seven – almost eight – and bullied in the way that precociously intelligent children often are. She lives in a house cut into apartments with her driven mother, her kind but annoying stepfather, and a raft of oddball neighbors – the grumpy taxi driver Alf, busybody Britt-Marie, the drunk woman, the mother and the boy with the syndrome, the Monster, and so on. She sees her well-meaning but ineffectual dad every other weekend. Her grandmother, a loudly eccentric woman who lives upstairs, is her only real friend and they share a fantasy world of seven kingdoms, a world full of stories. When her grandmother dies of cancer early in the book (not a spoiler since it’s the main engine driving the plot) she leaves Elsa a series of letters to be delivered to each of the neighbors, and from there the book widens out into a story of human connections, history, and the power of both grief and fairy tales. Those neighbors are not a random collection of people, after all. This is a book full of characters, each of whom is more than Elsa suspects they are at the beginning, and you get to know them and care for them as Elsa does.

Britt-Marie Was Here (Fredrik Backman)

This is the point in the year where my brain rotted and I more or less stopped reading. It took me more than a month to finish this relatively short novel, a situation that was mostly about the flood tide of events in the US during that time, and only partially about the book. On the one hand, the book is well written and certainly of a piece with Backman’s other books. The main character, in fact, is a holdover from My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises. On the other hand, what Backman has done here is essentially take the most irritating character from that book and given her a redemption arc of sorts. Britt-Marie is a passive-aggressive busybody with rigid, almost compulsive habits, self-effacing to the point of erasure, and absolutely sure of her own ways to the point where other people strike her as either inferior or dimwitted. She is stuck in a loveless marriage with Kent in the previous book, but when she walks out on him at the end (not much of a spoiler, really) she is left at something of a loose end. Largely to get rid of her insistent enquiries, the unemployment office sends her to a remote town called Borg to run the recreation center there, except that Borg is one of those vanishing small towns where nothing survives. Britt-Marie spends the first half of the novel cleaning the center, pushing the townspeople away in ways both unconscious and self-aware, and slowly getting roped into becoming the town’s soccer coach. She also more or less adopts a rat. The second half of the novel is about the soccer team – the kids on it and their stories, the impact the team can have on a town, and the impact it has on Britt-Marie. It’s melancholy as you would expect from Backman, and Britt-Marie does get some redemption in the end even if the book’s ending is rather ambiguous. I was glad for Britt-Marie, but I’m not sorry to see the back of her.

Sicily, It’s Not Quite Tuscany (Shamus Sillah)

Not every place in Italy is living la dolce vita, and if there is a place in Italy where that is less likely to happen than anywhere else in the country it’s probably Sicily. Poor, suspicious, burdened by crime and corruption, hot, and always on the verge of some natural disaster or another, the more I learn about the place the more I understand why my great-grandparents left. But for Shamus Sillah and his (usually) patient wife Gill, it is an opportunity. Shamus is adrift after his graduate degree in classical history, and Gill has found a teaching job at a school in Catania, so they set out from Australia to spend a year in what clearly isn’t Tuscany. Sillah describes the difficulties of living there, from the dodgy neighborhood they move to after leaving their disastrous first apartment to the months-long eruption of Mt. Etna that coats everything in grit, but he also notes the good things as well - his neighbors, the markets, the shoestring travel he does across the island, and most especially the food. In the end he does grow to love the place, though you get the impression he also enjoyed going back home to Australia.

Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality (Jacob Tomsky)

If you’ve ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at your favorite hotel - the kind that has bellhops and doormen - the short answer is that you really don’t want to know. The long answer is here. Jacob Tomsky got his start in the hotel industry almost accidentally, as a parking valet at a brand new upscale hotel in New Orleans back in the 1990s and moved quickly up the ladder to cleaning services manager (briefly) and then to the front desk before taking a few months off to bum around Europe and then move to New York City, where he tried and failed to do something else. He ended up at another hotel there, and these are his stories. The guests, both good and bad and what determines the difference. The managers, likewise. The staff. The lifestyle. And yes, the never-ending hustles. If there is any overriding lesson for guests it is to tip well and often. Tomsky is an engaging writer with a vivid eye for a story, and the book flies by. But if you’re expecting growth, you will be disappointed.

Coming Out Swiss: In Search of Heidi, Chocolate, and My Other Life (Anne Herrman)

Who exactly are the Swiss, and what does it mean to be one of them? This is in some way the animating question behind this book, and one that Anne Herrman circles around for well over 200 pages without quite answering. Herrman is herself Swiss, or nearly so – her parents were born there and emigrated to the US, she speaks Swiss-German (one of the four official languages of Switzerland and one that is almost but not quite intelligible to Germans), she has family there that she visits regularly – but she defies the stereotype of the precisely engineered Swiss culture with this rambling, often rather disjointed look at various Swiss sorts of things. There are chapters on chocolate and the peculiarly specific variant of homesickness that apparently Swiss people are susceptible to. She discusses the Alps and how the English turned them from backdrop to spectacle. There’s a chapter on Dada art and two on various Swiss-descended towns in the US, including one in Wisconsin that I’ve been to several times. Her writing is similarly scattershot – sentences appear seemingly at random, connected but without really leading to anything but the next vaguely connected sentence in a kaleidoscopic sort of way. There are at least two different sections presented as plays, another as a fictional dialogue between the author and a ghost, and a third as a series of unanswered letters to the author of Heidi. It’s an interesting book but a rather incoherent one.

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (Matthew Gabriele & David M. Perry)

Medieval Europe gets a bad rep in the popular imagination. It’s seen as backwards, violent, benighted, and generally – as Renaissance thinkers liked to describe it – the bleak middle period between the glories of classical civilization and the rebirth of those glories in the Renaissance. Nobody is going to get Renaissance on your ass, after all. But what if medieval Europe wasn’t so bad? What if Rome never really fell so much as changed? What if this period – as harsh as it could be at times – was actually a time of travel, of scholarship, of brilliant architecture and colorful people? What if we’ve been underestimating this period all along? This is the basic position of Gabriele and Perry, and in this fairly slender book – more of a picaresque through the medieval period than a full history of it – they highlight buildings, leaders, empires and monks, women and men, Christians and others, to try to get across the simple idea that the medieval period was not the Dark Ages at all. They write well and within the confines of their argument they’re reasonably convincing. It’s a long period covering a vast area and they do well to pull together a coherent story about it.

Taste: My Life Through Food (Stanley Tucci)

Stanley Tucci may have become famous as an actor but his true passion and most of his recent notoriety is centered on food. He grew up in an Italian-American household in the Northeast, not unlike me, except that he went to live in Italy when he was young and explored his culinary heritage that way while my explorations were closer to home and no less happy for it. This is a book about one man’s obsession with food – with making it, eating it, filming it, talking about it, serving it to others, and, at one point, the possibility of losing it altogether. Kim and I listened to part of this book last year as we drove east to Albany but we ran out of credits on Audible and never finished it. This year we finished it on the way home from Canada, so it goes into this year’s pile even though it is an audiobook and technically someone else read it, though I did listen to it. Tucci is a good writer who has amassed a wealth of experiences about food, family, and life in general – he unashamedly drops all sorts of famous names with the gusto of someone who didn’t grow up in that environment but is delighted to have found his way into it – and he tells a good story. There’s not much hard-hitting here – if you’ve watched his two recent series on food in Italy you know he’s basically Anthony Bourdain with all of the rough edges sanded off – but there are a great many warm stories, interesting recipes, and, in the end, a fair bit of dramatics. He’s good company on the road, as well.

The Rivals of Painful Gulch: A Lucky Luke Adventure (Morris [Maurice de Bevere] and René Goscinny)

When our Belgian friends came to visit over the summer they brought with them some graphic novels as gifts, as Belgium is noted for such things and chocolate doesn’t travel well. This is the first one I read. Morris was from Kortrijk, a town I have actually visited with our friends and enjoyed immensely. This story is set in the Old American West, oddly enough, and it is more or less a straight-forward “Hatfield & McCoy” kind of story. Lucky Luke, a cowboy known for being able to shoot faster than his own shadow, and his intelligent horse Jolly Jumper find themselves in the backwater Old West town of Painful Gulch, a place riven by a violent and long-standing feud between the O’Hara and O’Timmins families – over what, nobody can recall – and eventually he finds himself hastily elected mayor. He then vows that he will get this feud resolved, which of course he does. It’s a light-hearted and clever story that neatly straddles the line between homage and parody.