Reading Recap of 2025

2025 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Read fewer books than last year's seventy titles, not sure why I was so busy, but only totaled about forty-four counting a couple DNFs. I only read, don't listen. Eighty percent were by women authors, or names that sounded female, fourteen percent (6) were translations from Norway, Portugal, Mexico, Chile, Italy or France. Over half, 27, were fiction and the rest non-fiction or the outstanding poetry of Diane Seuss. Memoir accounted for eight titles.

The art books were particularly rewarding as I explored the work of Surrealist Painter/Poet Alice Rahon Alice Rahon and Shapeshifter also the stunning book from Wayne Thiebaud called Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art chock full of color works from the many artists he copied.

If a theme was to be gleaned from the novels I read, it is bemoaning the evils of the patriarchy, particularly in marriages of the fifties represented by Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, A Bowl Of Cherries, and Fonseca, and Single Lady from 1931, as well as Heat Wave from the nineties.

The diaries Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I 1978–1986 of Helen Garner were favored reading as was rereading Helen Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road and the Sontag memoir from Sigrid Nunez.

I continue to be impressed by the quality of translated literature available at our local bookstores like Elliott Bay Books and hailing from so many small publishers. And I learn of many of these titles from GR friends. At least in reading, it was a very good year.

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Fonseca by Jessica Frances Kane

Fonseca by Jessica Francis Kane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fonseca is a good and gentle fiction read based on the author Penelope Fitzgerald's visit to Saltillo, Mexico after WWII with her young son seeking a future inheritance. She'd been summoned by the two wealthy Irish women who own a silver mine in the area. Fitzgerald never wrote about it, but it is an involving tale peppered with memorable characters, some actual like Edward Hopper and his artist wife, Jo.

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The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A warm, readable collection of letters from a septuagenarian coming to terms with the indignities of aging and a long-held grief from losing her young son. Inspired me to pick up the pen and write a letter myself. Also, good book recommendations.

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Flesh by David Szaly

Flesh by David Szalay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Browsing the wildly varied reviews on Goodreads.com, I opened this story with some trepidation, but it was a thorough pleasure reading about passive Istfan ("okay") and his misadventures and thinking about alienation, masculinity, and migration.
Winner of the 2025 Booker Prize.



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Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Yiyun Li has written a sad story which begins: "There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged...My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home." As one courageous friend writes to her an hour and a half after a child's death, "you did everything you could to help James find his place in life, but he wanted to leave and one must let go."

In reference to her brilliant son James, she mentions the memoir Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet which captured how James felt about the world and another important book to him, The Reason I Jump: the Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism.

She ponders over the years between the two children's deaths, how James might be accepted by the world as a person "different from most people, maybe even for the world to benefit from his intelligence."

As many challenged her functionality afterwards, Li asks "what else can I do but to go on with the things I can do, to keep my body nourished and active and my mind occupied and sharp?" Marking time in piano playing and practice, knitting, games on her phone, reading, baking, pruning and feeding the roses, weeding "because weeds are part of nature, too, and things in nature merely grow."

I appreciated her comments on reactions from friends and her wish that people had the honesty and courage to say, I'm not capable of handling this difficult situation, or, I'm uncomfortable because I don't know what to say, rather than telling themselves that they are absenting themselves out of respect for the bereaved. The most comforting condolences were those expressing helplessness and the pain of not having the right words, not the clueless mentions of their own losses or how to overcome grief.

A sobering but instructive memoir.

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Heat Wave by Penelope Fitzgerald

Heat Wave by Penelope Lively
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What pleasure it is to be in the hands of a virtuoso writer. The pacing, sentences, descriptions, vocabulary, contribute to a thoughtful story of legitimate characters with a surprising ending. Pauline, a book editor, is spending the long, hot summer editing a novel while her daughter and grandson live next door. She says to her two-year-old grandson: "Oh, books, books...Terrible things, books. Cause nothing but trouble. You keep out of the book business, my lad. Commodity dealing for you. Or heart surgery. Or the construction of oil rigs." Occasionally, they are joined by her writer son-in-law whose philandering reminds Pauline of her own ex-husband. As the book jacket reveals of the ending, "a stunning and unexpected development changes the order of things irrevocably for this family."

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Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Narrator's title is apt as she describes her depression and mental breakdown while a literature professor. My interest was more geared to what she read, books by Toni Morrison, Helen DeWitt, A. S. Byatt and Anne Carson, and interesting exploration of her traumatic response to these, but I struggled to relate to her obsession with reading and suicidal ideation. Indeed, different readers need different things from the same book and reader responses can differ over time, but my bent is bibliophilia.

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