Here are the best books I read in 2025. I was fortunate to read a lot of good books last year. Some years of reading are desultory but in 2025 I just kept hitting runs of good books. This list could have been much longer. What follows is the result of some fairly ruthless compression. I haven’t included any books published this year — too soon to tell as they say about the French Revolution.
You can read my list of the best books I read in 2024 here.
Apparently this list is “too long for email”. But you can click the title above and read it in on the Substack website.
The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner
I think this atmospheric novel about life in a remote medieval nunnery told over the course of several generations century might be the best work of historical fiction I’ve ever read. It beautifully captures the simultaneous strangeness and the ordinariness of the past. It’s not conventionally “plotty” but I found it incredibly immersive when I read it at the beginning of this year. If you’re looking for something to read over Christmas this is a good bet.
The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 by Tim Blanning
Tim Blanning is one of my favourite living historians. I also highly recommend his book about the Romantic movement, The Romantic Revolution, and also his biography of Frederick the Great. The Pursuit of Glory is a social and cultural history of “the long eighteenth century”. It’s one of the best history books I’ve read in ages. It’s full of brilliant detail and encompasses everything from peasant life to the Enlightenment to the rise of reading to the upsetting aristocratic sport of “fox tossing”.
Through the Narrow Gate by Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong is famous as a historian of religion. Her memoir of her time as a nun in the 1960s was probably the most straightforwardly compelling book I read last year. I sped through it in on holiday about a day and half. Armstrong became a nun as a strong-willed teenager in 1962, a time when life in a nunnery was still almost medieval in its harshness and its denial of individual will. When after several years Armstrong’s order sent her to study at Oxford she was astonished to find that the drab fifties provincial world she had known as a teenager had faded away and the swinging sixties had begun. Her description of attending tutorials dressed in a wimple and habit while her peers were in miniskirts and long hair is unforgettable.
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
A friend described The Righteous Mind as “Marriott coded” and was incredulous I hadn’t already read it. Haidt’s account of how our moral instincts are not rational but have their roots in evolutionary psychology is brilliant and convincing. This is one of those books that has genuinely changed the way I see the world.
Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf
I loved Maryanne Wolf’s book about the neuroscience of reading. We take reading for granted but it is an enormously complex, unnatural and weird thing for our brains to do. The book is from a few years ago but very prescient about the detrimental effects of the internet on reading and critical thought.
The Evolution of God by Robert Wright
I had a phase of reading books about the origins of religion at the beginning of last year. This was by far the best. Robert Wright explores first how religious intuitions are rooted in human psychology and then how they culturally developed. It’s thrillingly confident and sweeping. Wright begins with hunter gatherer animistic religions then moves on on to look at the way increasingly complex civilisations spurred the rise of modern style moralising monotheistic religions (polytheistic gods were often relatively indifferent to whether or not humans behaved ethically towards one another) in the ancient Near East. I found it gripping.
The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism by Peter Gay
I read a couple of good books about seventeenth/eighteenth century thought last year. Two I especially loved were Paul Hazard’s (preposterously over-written) The Crisis of the European Mind and Basil Willey’s charming and readable introduction to eighteenth century thought, The Eighteenth Century Background. I think Peter Gay’s book on the Enlightenment was the one I enjoyed most. Though slightly old-fashioned (it was published in the sixties) it is probably the most readable book on the Enlightenment I’ve come across. The theme of this first volume is the influence of classical pagan thought. I’m hoping to get round to volume two over Christmas.
The Genetic Book of the Dead by Richard Dawkins
I had a bit of a Richard Dawkins phase this year after reading the charming first volume of his autobiography An Appetite for Wonder (also highly recommended). I read all of Dawkins’s famous books in my teens but hadn’t read his more recent work. It turns out it’s great. This is my favourite of his later books. It’s subtitled “a Darwinian reverie” and is mainly just an opportunity to relate stories of how extraordinary evolution is. Pistol shrimps have an enlarged claw which “they snap with terrific force” creating a shock wave “which stuns or kills prey”. The noise is “among the loudest heard in the sea, comparable to the bellows and squeaks of large whales”.
The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien
I’d shamefully never read Edna O’Brien before. I loved this first instalment of Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy which follows Caithleen Brady from rural Ireland to a strict religious school and then to the shabby boarding houses and bright lights of Dublin. It’s powerfully evocative of a time and a place. You could fly through it in a day or two, I think. Another one to read over Christmas.
John Donne: Life Mind and Art by John Carey
The older I get the more I appreciate the poetry of John Donne. I’d browsed bits of John Carey’s classic study of Donne years ago but I don’t think I’d read it properly cover to cover before. It’s great. Donne is a notoriously knotty and difficult poet so we’re lucky to have a writer as lucid as Carey to explain him to us. Carey is also good at making the religious struggles of the sixteenth century (which can seem a bit abstract and pointless from the perspective of the present) seem like they matter. “The first thing to remember about Donne is that he was a Catholic; the second, that he betrayed his Faith...”
The Great Cat Massacre by Robert Darnton
I read a couple of Robert Darnton’s books last year. In trying to recommend one I find myself hard pressed to choose between his book about the intellectual and cultural origins of the French Revolution, The Revolutionary Temper and this book about eighteenth century French culture, The Great Cat Massacre. I think The Great Cat Massacre just pips it. It’s a classic of history writing but great fun and highly accessible. Darnton’s theme is the weirdness of the past. Each chapter tackles a different phenomenon: the eighteenth century love of burning live cats to death or the Rousseau craze that hit France causing respectable men and women to weep and howl with emotion as they read his (to modern eyes rather dreary) novel, La nouvelle Heloise.
Warriers and Worriors by Joyce Beneson
A few people have recommended this book to me, it’s an account of the psychological differences between men and women based on evolutionary psychology. Beneson’s rough thesis is that women are “worriers” programmed by their genes to fret over resources and men are “warriors” programmed for aggression and team work. It’s always hard to know how far to believe evolutionary psychology (critics of the discipline always say it inevitably descends into ‘Just So Stories’) and I wasn’t convinced by everything in this. Still: very interesting.
Lectures on Russian Literature by Vladimir Nabokov
As well as writing novels, Nabokov spent a great deal of time teaching literature at American universities. His Lectures on Russian Literature are wonderful. I loved reading them. The lectures collected here cover Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gorky. Nabokov has an engagingly straightforward approach. He doesn’t bother much with themes or context or symbols, rather he just guides you through the books in question from start to finish pointing out the bits he loves most as you go. The two best lectures in here are the ones on Anna Karenina and Chekhov’s story ‘The Lady With the Little Dog’.
The Discarded Image by CS Lewis
This short book was an unexpected gem. CS Lewis sets out to describe the medieval “model” of the world. What universe did men and women in the middle ages think they lived in? The result is unexpectedly enchanting. As one of the twentieth century’s greatest scholars of the middle ages Lewis had a deep feeling for this world:
To look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest—trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The ‘space’ of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. … [A medieval person] is like a man being conducted through an immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless sea.
The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James
I read a couple of Henry James novels over the Summer. The first of them, The Wings of the Dove is obviously a masterpiece but it feels too much hard work (I had to exile myself to a park bench without my phone to get through it) to put on a best books of the year list. I technically read The Spoils of Poynton as an undergraduate, but rereading it this year it’s clear I wasn’t paying attention at all. A novel that starts out satirically over a family’s fight over who gets the magnificent possessions of their country house becomes something very touching and sensitive and sad. It’s a beautiful book. I think if you haven’t tried Henry James before this could be a good place to start.
I too am becoming a fervent fan of Donne. I read Death Be Not Proud at a relative's funeral, and while practising speaking it aloud I found myself finding more and more in it - and it will certainly be on the list for my own funeral list. Along with Ozymandias and Septimus's bit in Arcadia - as I'm going through my own Stoppard mourning period:
"We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for corkscrew?"
Thoroughly endorse 'The corner that held them'. Read recently on your recommendation.
I was sceptical a narrative about C14th convent life would grip me but it was a pleasant surprise that it did.
As you've said it really captures the strangeness of the past and the very different perception of time passing. Its also beautifully written.
Amongst many, a favourite section was the character who visits a leper colony and becomes involved in a choral recital. You get a sense of how special those kind of moments would have been vs. the modern world where we're so constantly bombarded with audio-visual stimuli we take a lot of things for granted.