It’s my annual list of the some of the best books I read this year. I call it “Books I’m Not Recommending” because I’m personally resistant to recommendations. But I can tell you what I consider to be the best books I read.
Poetry
The largest single category of my 2025 books is, as it has been for several years, poetry. I read a considerable number of really fine poetry collections, and my reviews end up at Tweetspeak Poetry. If I had to pick one, it would likely be an older one – Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice.
Three books about poetry that I enjoyed are Dante’s Divine Comedy by Joseph Luzzi; An Axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Palpant; and Ambiguity & Belonging: Essays on Place, Education, & Poetry by Benjamin Myers.
Fiction
I OD’d on Wendell Berry year, reading three of his numbers (not to mention his Mad Farmer Poems). Without question, I enjoyed Remembering, The Memory of Old Jack, and Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story. Berry is still writing, and I’m hopeful I haven’t seen the last of the Port William novels.
Foster by Claire Keegan is a short novel that packs a powerful wallop; her 2021 novel Small Things Like These is also rather amazing. And the (longish) short story Abscond by Abraham Verghese is a wonder. I also read an older short novel, A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr, that was published in 1980 but speaks to us today.
Art and Architecture
Art continued to be an interest, and three books I would not only say were among the best I read overall but I also wouldn’t hesitate to recommend. Van Gogh’s Ear by Bernadette Murphy explains how the author researched and tracked down the real story of his ear (and his art). Christopher Gorham’s Matisse at War is meticulously researched and focuses on Henri Matisse and what he and his family did during World War II. And Russ Ramsey followed his wonderful Rembrandt Is in the Wind with the equally good Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart.
I’m not a major (or even minor) reader of books about architecture, but one I read this year that was excellent was Forgotten Churches by Luke Sherlock. (It probably helped that I had visited some of the ones cited in the book.)
Civil War
Last December, my historical novel Brookhaven was published by T.S. Poetry Press. The research that went into it – nine pages of bibliography – was extensive. But publishing a historical novel doesn’t mean the research stops. Two books about the Civil War I read this year and I really liked were Glorious Courage: John Pelham in the Civil War by Sarah Kay Bierle and Fred Grant at Vicksburg by Albert Nofi. (I reread Brookhaven, too, and I highly recommend it.)
Mystery
Willliam Kent Krueger’s mysteries have been around for many years, and I’d read his more literary novels. I finally read Iron Lake, the first in the Cork O’Connor mysteries, and then the second, Boundary Waters. I’ve bought the third and can’t wait to read it. (There are some 20 or so in the series.)
I also liked London Blue, the latest in the Lord and Lady Hetheridge mysteries, and Tides of Death by Luke Davis, the first in the DI Gareth Benedict series. I also reached the current end of the Pete Brasset mysteries featuring DI James Munro (Ruse), and the current end of the Hillary Greene mysteries by Faith Martin (No. 21, entitled Murder on the Train). And I enjoyed Suffer the Dead by Rhys Dylan, the fourth of 21 in the DCI Evan Warlow mysteries.
And that’s the list for 2025.
Top photograph by Olena Bohovyk via Unsplash. Used with permission.
Some Wednesday Readings
At the Savoy Chapel – Spitalfields Life.
“Oh I could raise the darken’d veil,” poem by Nathaniel Hawthorne – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.
Dropped without Joy – Alexander Fayne on the poet R.S. Thomas.
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