2025 Books

Reflections on my 2025 reading:

Looking back at the books I finished in 2025, the two standouts were The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, both by Kazuo Ishiguro. Both of them deal with tragic, broken people who refuse to see themselves that way. The first is about an elderly butler who has dedicated his life to supporting a grand old English estate, led by an aristocrat who has signed up to the appeasement of the Nazis. Only at the end of his lonely life does he question what it cost him to support such a project with all of his abilities. The second is about a group of students whose sole purpose in life is donating their vital organs to serve humanity. They do not resist their fate - they understand and accept it. In both works, Ishiguro treats all of his characters, no matter what they are going through, with dignity. Neither book tells you how to think about the characters or plot - they are simply facts, and we, the reader, can freely judge or interpret. On their own, each would be my favourite book of the year - I think Remains has a slight advantage, but Never Let Me Go has changed the way I view my students… I can’t help but now think of all of them as rather tragic.

I spent a lot of time, mentally, in the 1970s and 80s this year, in Britain, the US, and China. I was born in 1989, and have always felt a faint hint of living memory in this period. They are not ‘history’ to me the way earlier eras are, nor are they ‘memory’ like the 1990s - they are somewhere in between. My mother lived in London for much of the 1970s, and I have my own connections to England - so this year I read two books by Dominic Sandbrook that cover, in great detail, that decade: State of Emergency (1970-1974) and Seasons in Sun (1974-1979). The 1970s were a rough decade for England. Losing their empire in the 1960s hadn’t made much of an impression on the lives of most Britons; rising standards of living, cultural exports such as James Bond and The Beatles, and a World Cup victory had helped the medicine go down. But in the 1970s, the British economy fell into free fall, only to be saved by an IMF bailout; power cuts meant that the economy ran on a ‘three day week’; people lived in constant fear of IRA bombings; angry young people called for ‘Anarchy in the UK’; and strikes became so widespread that, by the 1979 ‘winter of discontent’, people could not even bury their dead due to labour strikes.
Over the course of about sixteen hundred pages, Sandbrook explores all of these claims, and comes to a conclusion that squares with mom’s lived experiences - yes, all these things happened, but it wasn’t really that bad. Most people got on with their lives more or less the same. People get very upset about the current state of US politics - and I can sympathisize with why, but we shouldn’t reduce our whole lives to politics. Sandbrook’s books explore education reform, environmental concerns, feminism, art, film, literature, and music to paint a more complete picture of the 1970s, one that I believe would be more recognisable to people who lived through it than the simple narrative of decline.

After finishing the Robert Caro biographies of Lyndon Johnson last year, I found myself hungry for something similar, so I found two biographies of subsequent US Presidents: Richard Nixon: The Life by John Farrell, and Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot. These were, to my reading, high quality historical accounts; I already knew that I was not a supporter of either of their political platforms, so I didn’t want hagiography or apologia - but nor did I want a verbal salvo. I wanted biographies that would explain who these figures were as human beings, and that is what I found.
Honestly, the images of Richard Nixon working at his parents grocery store, scared to be seen by his classmates wearing an apron, coping with the death of a younger brother, attending Whittier College instead of Harvard due to money problems, moved me. Richard Nixon was a terribly insecure man, who, along with LBJ, tore this country apart through lies and manipulation. I knew that going into the book and my mind was not changed on that front. But I am, by vocation, a history teacher; I am more interested in stories than statutes, and the Nixon story is undeniably fascinating, how a man of such raw intelligence, empathy, and understanding could be so miserable, and what that means for our country. 
Reagan’s due for a reassessment - it is a little too good for one side to have him as a hero, and the other as a villain, when really I am not sure how consequential he actually was. A lot of the monetarist policies that the left loathe him for were begun by the Federal Reserve during the Carter administration, and were instituted in practically all rich economies - even in France, under the Socialist President Francois Mitterand. Yes, he was too old in his second term and not really up for the strenuous work of being president, and this facilitated scandals such as Iran-Contra - but after Biden and Trump it is hard to get worked up about that. I did not finish the book by ‘liking’ Reagan - I don’t really like any politicians and that was not the point. He certainly did not end the Cold War or defeat the Soviet Union - they did that to themselves. What I gained was an understanding of a worldview: how a child of an Irish Catholic family, the son of an alcoholic shoe salesman, one with admitted very little education or academic hinterland, could dominate anything he put his mind to, from college sports, to Hollywood movies, and finally US politics. He is a much more interesting person than I had realised - no less flawed, but much more human, and, while I am not one of them, I get why he has his admirers.

Neither Johnson, Nixon nor Reagan are the most consequential politicians of the postwar era. That superlative belongs to China’s Deng Xiaoping. Deng began his career as a student protester on May 4, 1919, and ended it with the killing of student protesters seventy years later; in the interim, he was either near or at the centre of every major policy or event in China. Ezra Vogel’s biography covers the first sixty-five years of Deng’s life in just thirty pages, and then spends the next eight hundred on his time in power.
When Mao died 1976, he designated Hua Guofeng as his successor. Within two years, Deng pushed Hua aside, and became the leader of China without an official title. His leadership style squares nicely with his motto for China - ‘Hide your strength, bide your time’. Unlike Mao, Deng avoided the spotlight; instead of the Red Guard shouting chants of ‘All Hail the Chairman Mao!’ Deng was often greeted by citizens with a simple ‘Xiaoping Ni hao’. Unlike Khruschev, he didn’t wipe the slate clean after Mao died - he claimed to be Mao’s successor, while at the same time pursuing a radically different programme for the Chinese economy. Despite his subdued attitude, it was under Deng that China pursued a policy of ‘reform and opening’ that has made it rich. And while he could come across as mild mannered, he quickly excised top leaders, such as Hu Yaobang or Zhao Ziyang, who he feared were too tolerant of criticism. To best understand Deng, I believe, is to compare him to Gorbechev, who tried to pursue simultaneous political and economic reform. Deng warned Gorbachev that this would prove disastrous. Thirty-four years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Red China still stands, and while it is Mao’s portrait that hangs in Tiananmen square, it is because Deng killed those who would have torn it down.

I want to end with two works of fiction that helped challenge the way I view and understand history. This year I read the four ‘Nathan Zuckerman’ novels by Philip Roth, and easily the best of these was The Ghost Writer. The centrepiece is a chapter where Zuckerman believes that he has met Anne Frank. It is the 1950s - how can she be here, alive and with him? Over the course of the night, he constructs a scenario where she was separated from her father at Auschwitz - and when Otto Frank was told that his daughter had died of Typhus, he took her diary to America. In this telling, however, Anne recovered, and learned that the rest of her family was murdered. When asked for her name by her liberators, she gave a fake one, in hope of starting a new life with a new identity. She eventually became a student in the US, which is how Zuckerman meets her. And then came the publication of her diary. She was heartbroken, but understood that she was no longer a human being, but rather a symbol, and continued to live in hiding.
What is the meaning of Anne Frank? And what does it mean for the Jewish people if the most famous Jew since Moses were, in fact, still alive? ‘They wept for me,’ [said Anne;] ‘they pitied me; they prayed for me; they begged my forgiveness. I was the incarnation of the millions of unlived years robbed from the murdered Jews. It was too late to be alive now. I was a saint.’

The other is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. Reading this was like reading scripture – it’s a dense mix of stories and legends, and not written in a linear fashion, but rather constructed from various drafts. Although published in 1977, four years after the author’s death, it was started in 1914, and worked on throughout the intervening decades. Christopher Tolkien, the author’s son, sorted through the manuscripts his father had left behind, and edited them together with great care, which gives it the feeling of a religious text moreso than if Tolkien had written it straight. In theory, we are to imagine that Bilbo Baggins, while in retirement at Rivendell, has compiled what we are reading.  It is the story of the creation of Middle Earth by an all powerful and unknowable god (‘Eru Ilúvatar’) and the creation of the elves, men, orcs, dwarves, and so forth. While it is mostly only read by Lord of the Rings superfans, I found it a fascinating exercise in how histories are constructed – the power of myths and stories, and how we read them to understand our own world.

As ever, thanks for reading to the end. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and I hope that we may all read more and better books in a safe and refreshing 2026.