2025 Reading (Part 1)

What I've read, what I've liked, what I would recommend

At the end of 2023 I was, as many of us are, fed up with how much time I was wasting on social media. As a New Year’s resolution I resolved to close my Twitter account, delete all social media apps from my phone, and replace scrolling and getting angry at the world’s worst people online with reading books. It worked. Not the quitting Twitter or social media part; I’m back on Twitter, though I don’t spend anything like as much time on it as I used to (thanks to Elon Musk for making it even worse than it was already). But the reading part was a success. I read a lot more in 2024 than I had since I didn’t have anything better to do than sit around reading all day. If anything, I’m reading more in 2025 than in 2024. I’ve not got any posts lined up and I figure I need to post something. So I thought I’d write about the books I’ve read this year.

First, a confession: I’m a humanities academic, but I’m really bad at reading books that have anything to do with my research, or non-fiction in general. I far prefer fiction. (I am the mythical man who prefers fiction to non-fiction). I’ve been on research leave since January, and I started out with grand plans to read one “work” book a week. It’s now June and I’ve only managed 11. They are:

1. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes

2. Jeffrey Friedman, Power without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy

3. Michael Hannon and Elise Woodard, Political Epistemology

4. Jonathan Ichikawa, Epistemic Courage

5. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

6. Randal Marlin, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion

7. Fabien Medvecky and Joan Leach, An Ethics of Science Communication

8. Tristan J. Rodgers, Conservatism: Past and Present

9. Blake Roeber, Political Humility: The Limits of Knowledge in Our Partisan Political Climate

10. Jacob Russell and Dennis Patterson, The Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism

11. Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, Why It’s OK to Mind Your Own Business

What matters is not how much you read but what you gain from that reading. Or so I tell myself. I enjoyed some of these books so much I wrote about them on here. Ellul offers an insightful analysis of propaganda in modern democratic societies, on which we can view propaganda as a set of techniques for social control (I found this analysis so insightful that I wrote about it again). Friedman develops a provocative critique of technocracy that is, as some like to say, “directionally correct” (as in: he has a point but he goes way too far). Ichikawa has some interesting things to say about the connection between scepticism and conservatism, though I don’t agree with his claim that a sceptic must be some sort of Burkean conservative. Roeber has an argument for a kind of scepticism about political knowledge that I myself defend, though I like my argument better. Russell and Patterson make a lot of good points about the pathologies of the expert class, but have surprisingly little to say about the ways in which certain members of that class leverage public distrust of experts to their own advantage. Finally, I liked Tosi and Warmke’s book because I enjoy the quiet life and I’m very open to someone who wants to provide a philosophical justification for my existing preferences.

I also enjoyed some of the books I didn’t write about. Hannon and Woodward’s overview of political epistemology is about as fun as a relatively accessible and comprehsive overview of a field of academic research can be (you can buy it here). Rodgers’ book on conservatism helped me figure out my own relationship with certain strands in conservative thought to which I am sympathetic (it is also an attempt, albeit in my view quite unsuccessful, to provide a degree of philosophical support for contemporary right wing populism). Lippmann is full of insights, many of which seem under-appreciated in my own field of research, political epistemology (I draw on some of them in my pieces on Ellul and Friedman). You may notice I haven’t mentioned two of the books. I leave the reader to draw the obvious implicature.

That’s the non-fiction. I managed to read a lot more fiction. In case it’s of interest to anyone, here’s the list:

1. Pat Barker, Regeneration

2. Heinrich Böll, The Silent Angel

3. Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half-Past Nine

4. Heinrich Böll, And Where Were You, Adam?

5. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

6. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

7. Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel

8. Graeme Macrae Burnet, His Bloody Project

9. William Golding, The Lord of the Flies

10. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

11. Andrey Kurkov, Silver Bone

12. Nella Larsen, Quicksand/Passing

13. Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (not the best, but surprisingly insightful)

14. Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (re-read)

15. Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

16. William McIlvanney, Laidlaw

17. William McIlvanney, The Papers of Tony Veitch

18. Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, Billy Budd, a few others

19. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo

20. Nan Shephard, The Quarry Wood

21. Elizabeth Strout, Tell Me Everything

22. Olga Togarczuk, Flights

23. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (I wrote about this in connection with Ellul)

I’m not a particularly discriminating reader. I tend to find at least some value in everything I read (I make two exceptions: Portnoy’s Complaint and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Perhaps I’ll explain why in a later post). But I can’t say I loved all of these. I found Lord of the Flies remarkably dull, though I appreciate what Golding was trying to say about public schools and the peculiarly English brand of cruelty they instill. I like Elizabeth Strout—Olive Kitteridge is a fantastic book—but her Lucy Barton series (of which this is a part) is increasingly verging into elaborate self-parody. Finally—and some may view this as sacrilege—I learned that Melville can often be quite dull (Bartleby is brilliant though).

My favourites were Barker, Böll, the Brontës and Shephard. Barker’s Regeneration is the (largely fictional) story of Siegfried Sassoon’s stay at a psychiatric institution for shell-shocked officers during WW1. Böll was a revelation. I started with The Silent Angel, which wasn’t published in his lifetime (frankly, you can see why). But Billiards at Half-Past Nine and And Where Were You, Adam? are something else entirely. Billiards is set after WW2 (apart from some messing with timelines), And Where Were You, Adam? is set right at the end. They are about the impossibility of reconciling oneself to what Germany had done (Billiards) and the senselessness of what it did (Adam). It would be trite to describe either of them, or Regeneration, as “anti-war” books. They take the fact that war—any war, but particularly the war waged by the Nazis—is a moral outrage and ask how one can live in the face of moral outrage. The answer is somewhere between “you can’t” (take the grandmother in Billiards who colludes in the pretence that the loss of much of her family drove her insane) and “with enormous difficulty” (her son, whose response is to live a life devoid of any spontaneity, or Sassoon in Regeneration).

Shephard’s The Quarry Wood is often compared with Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song. The comparison is, in some ways, apt. Both are stories of young women in the northeast of Scotland, caught between their family obligations and their developing senses of self. While I don’t recommend reading fiction to learn about the present (there are better reasons), you can’t read something like Quarry Wood without thinking of the refrain, popular in some quarters, that the solution to the problems of modernity—atomisation, social isolation, a lost sense of meaning and purpose—is to return to an imagined pre-modernity, where you did not choose a set of social roles but had those roles thrust upon you by accident of birth. To be sure, Martha Ironside (the protagonist) doesn’t struggle with a lack of purpose. Her problem is that she lacks the freedom to decide on that purpose—or anything else—for herself. She yearns for the life of the mind; what she gets is the chance to look after assorted relatives, some of whom at least have the decency to express some gratitude for it. Whatever the problems of modernity, I suspect that most would choose them over the total lack of freedom that Martha faces, or indeed that the vast majority of people who have ever lived have faced.

I will credit the reader with knowing enough about Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights not to need a brief summary. I had always resisted reading the Brontës out of a vague suspicion of English literature (emphasis on the English) that I can’t exactly justify. The suspicion is something like this: the classic English novel is too mannered, too conventional, too neat and tidy. It may criticise social conventions, but it will do so in a restrained way, skewering while still somehow upholding what it is nominally attacking (yes, I’m trying to describe Austen). It may be very clever. It may, like Middlemarch, even approach genius. But it will always be missing something—the madness of many Russian novels (I don’t just mean Dostoyevsky), the fine sense of the absurd present in many great works of European literature, the humour of a Flann O’Brien. I wouldn’t entirely exempt Jane Eyre from these charges; it is, above all else, a deeply moralistic book, if also a very strange one. But Wuthering Heights is something else entirely. I thought it was wonderful.