I Continue To Be a Book Drunkard

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A new year has arrived, meaning it is time for me to look back on what books struck my fancy in 2025. I will provide some recommendations for anyone interested. But first, some personal statistics:

• I read 42 books totaling 16,731 pages last year, according to the Goodreads app I used to keep track. The longest was Ron Chernow’s biography, Mark Twain, which weighed in at 1,196 pages. Actually, though I have the physical book, a 70th birthday present from my Beautiful Mystery Companion, I finished it on my Kindle Paperwhite, which was another birthday present. (I am treated well in these parts.) Before departing for Bavaria in late September, I loaded Mark Twain and several other tomes onto the Kindle. It is ideal for reading while traveling, especially when the book is heavy enough to break a toe if dropped. With rare exceptions, I still buy the print version to stick on the shelf. As a tchotchke on one of our bookshelves proclaims: I am simply a book drunkard. (Attributed to L.M. Montgomery, author of the Anne of Green Gables.

The shortest book completed in 2025 was What the Chicken Knows, by Sy Montgomery. It’s a mere 91 pages in length but proved invaluable to two newbies at caring for chickens. We have had four Cinnamon Queen laying hens since April. They provide eggs and enjoyment in equal measure daily. That is no eggageration.

Sorry. I have a weakness for egg puns.

Here is a sampling of the books that stood out from last year:

Non-fiction

• The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, by Rick Atkinson (880 pages.) This is the second volume of a planned trilogy about the American Revolution. Atkinson is a superb historian and writer, a recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes. The final volume is scheduled for publication later this year to coincide with the 250^th anniversary of the revolution. (Also on my to-do list in 2026 is watching the Ken Burns PBS documentary on the same topic.)

• Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (332 pages). The title sums up the book’s contents. It was depressing to read. Biden’s hubris in insisting on running for re-election, with ample assistance from his enablers, has left our country in the hands of a despotic grifter. This account is well-reported by Tapper, a CNN veteran, and Thompson, the national political correspondent for Axios and also a CNN contributor. Reading it was bitter medicine, but necessary, at least for me.

• Disposable: America’s Contempt for the Underclass, by Sarah Jones (287 pages). In this second Gilded Age, when oligarchs rule and income inequality increases exponentially, Jones, a senior writer for New York magazine, delved into the lives of folks disproportionately affected by the pandemic — especially the essential workers and people with disabilities. Jones concludes by calling for a future where no one is disposable again.
• Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas (609 pages). This is another book gifted to me in print that I downloaded on the Kindle. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian, a member of a prominent family, and a brilliant man who truly lived his faith. He insisted that Christians stand up for the Jews as the Nazis systematically sought to exterminate them. It cost Bonhoeffer his life when he became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. This is an extraordinary biography of an extraordinarily brave man.

Fiction

• The Black Wolf, by Louise Penny (375 pages). I cannot get enough of Penny’s murder mysteries, set in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where my mother’s family emigrated from. The key figure is Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec. Her debut novel was published in 2005. The Black Wolf is the 20^th in the series, all of which I have read. Gamache and his team must stop a domestic terrorist attack being undertaken by members of the government conspiring with key figures in the American government who are determined to take over Canada and expropriate its considerable natural resources.

Sound familiar? As Penny notes: I wrote this book over the course of 2024, and turned in the final draft to my publisher in September 2024. Imagine my surprise in January 2025 when I started spotting headlines that could have been ripped from the book…

Oh, Canada!

• Narrow the Road, by James Wade (334 pages). East Texas native James Wade, a former reporter for the Lufkin Daily News (after my time there), set his fourth novel in 1930s East Texas. It is a coming-of-age account of a young man trying to keep the family’s cotton farm afloat during the Depression. His father has taken off, and his mother is gravely ill. Wade knows how to tell a compelling story. He has been honored for his work by the Western Writers of America. I predict a bright literary future for this young man.
• The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, by Ron Currie Jr. (368 pages). Babs Dionne is the crime matriarch in the small town of Waterville, Maine, an actual town where the author lives. Babs is a French-Canadian controlling the drug trade into “Little Canada,” populated by emigrants from Quebec. (Hence, my interest since these people talk like the folks I grew up with in Allenstown, N.H., a town also dominated by French-Canadians at the time.) This is quite the crime saga with a singular main character — Babs Dionne.
• The Overstory, by Richard Powers (502 pages). I “discovered” Richard Powers in 2025, to my considerable delight. The Overstory, published in 2018, won the Pulitzer Prize and justifiably so. Powers’ evocative description of the natural world and our place in it kept me up late flipping pages. Before the year was out, I had devoured four of his novels. The Overstory’s plot travels from New York before the Civil War to the 20^th-century timber wars in the Pacific Northwest. It is a beautiful, transcendent novel.

If you are interested in what else hit my shelves last year, go to goodreads.com and search for me by name. Here’s to a book-filled 2026!

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