Ho Ho Ho: John’s Top Ten Book List 2025

Dear Friends around the World:

Every year, I try to respond to requests to publish my annual Top Ten list early, to allow adequate time for holiday shopping.  Sometimes I fail, but this year I’ve gotten my act together.  I’ve read 47 books so far this year and am once again pushing for 50.  This is the 11^th year in a row that Amy has kept me on track to publish this list – previous years can all be found  here. While wishing you happy reading and happy gifting, here are my highlights from 2025, from #10 to #1.

10.  The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook – Hampton Sides

I fell in love with Hampton Sides when I read Blood and Thunder (2006), his epic take of the founding of the modern American West.   I was therefore thrilled when Amy gifted me his vibrant and conversational telling of Captain James Cook’s fatal last voyage. On July 12th, 1776, just 8 days after the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, Captain James Cook set off on his third trans-oceanic journey.  Already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, he embarked on his ship the HMS Resolution for a journey from Plymouth, England to Cape Town, New Zealand, Tahiti, the Hawaiian Islands and then to Alaska on a fruitless search for a mythical Inside Passage that would connect the Pacific and Atlantic.  As winter approached, the ship sailed back to Hawaii, which the crew had found to be a friendly paradise.  So, it was all the more surprising that Cook, who was several standard deviations out in his respect for local cultures, would make a social faux pas that resulted in his death.  Sides is a talented story teller who makes the reader feel like he’s along for the voyage.  The 2 ½ years of this journey go by all too quickly.

9.  Erasure – Percival Everett

I ended 2024 reading James and began the new year with Erasure and became an instant fan of Everett.  If you’ve heard of or seen the movie American Fiction, you’re aware of the premise – a tenured professor named Thelonius “Monk” Ellison is frustrated because his novels have been critically acclaimed but spend more time in the remainder pile than on any best-seller lists.  His (white) agent tells him there’s a simple problem – Your novels are not ‘black enough’, pointing to the recent runaway best-seller We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, written by a novelist who once visited “some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days”.  An enraged Monk sits down immediately to write a satire, never intending for it to be published. But when the biggest advance of his career, along with a national publicity campaign is offered up, we have the classic literary theme of the temptation to make a deal with the devil. The result is so entertaining that I polished this novel off in three nights.

8.  Three Brothers:  Memories of My Family – Yan Lianke

It’s rare for my top ten list to not include a book from China, and I’m grateful to Yan Lianke’s memoir for keeping the streak alive.  Set in rural Henan Province during the 1960s and 70s, he chronicles the lives of his father and two uncles (First Uncle and Fourth Uncle) through periods of great turbulence and change in China. His tributes to family touch on themes of grief, death, home, fate and the power of family to resiliently hold together through immense hardship. Lianke skillfully weaves in his own story of a boy eager to escape a life of hunger, lack of books, back-breaking work in a cement factory and a stint in the army that became his ticket out and his future as a Beijing-based author. Recounted with love and candor, this is a memoir that’s easy to get lost in.

7.  Days in the Caucuses – Banine

Right around the time of a certain someone re-occupying the Oval Office, my book club decided we needed to focus on works from a distant time and place. Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan in the days before World War I seemed like a good place to begin our escape.  Days in the Caucuses is the first of two memoirs written in her later years by Banine (only one name), a gifted story-teller who immediately transports the reader to a seemingly-luxurious life in the palace of a family made wealthy by the discovery of oil fields on their property. While rich in material comforts, her spiritual life is difficult. Her mother has passed away, her father is always overseas on business, she is being raised by a German governess and everyone around her expects and demands that the only life path available is an arranged marriage to a man she loathes. Thanks to an aunt with a well-stocked library, she journeys in her mind to the glamour and fashion of life in distant cities like Paris. Her memoir gifted us with insight into a life and place we could not have otherwise imagined, full of cursing grandmothers, bickering relatives, Bolshevik revolutions and fortunes lost.

6.  So Big:  A Novel – Edna Ferber

Our book club also dipped back in history to read the novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1925.  Ferber is best-known for having written Giant, which became one of James Dean’s most-loved film roles. Big takes place on the farmland near Chicago that will eventually become suburbs, and what is today a quick drive into the city was back then a long wagon ride made once a week to sell one’s produce. I viewed the “big” in this novel in several ways, starting with the love and adoration between a mother and her son, first witnessed in an opening scene that can make you weep tears of joy. The novel also touches on the size of the mother’s heart, the epic scale of the growing city, and the ambitions of the son to escape to what he considers a better life. At times reminding me of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, this tightly-crafted novel takes us back to an era where so much was changing, but where love was a constant.

5.  Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again – Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson

Yes, you can accuse me of wanting to once again watch a train wreck in slow motion video, and I admit that I bought this book the day it was released.  Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson provide first-hand reporting on exactly what went wrong for the Democratic Party in the 2024 election.  For anyone looking to understand how the Dems lost, and what could have been differently, this is a must-read.  Not least because these guys write like Woodward and Bernstein used to.  A white-hot political page-turner that had me both enlightened and enraged.   And no, my book club chose to remain stuck in the past and did not join me in this read.  :)

4.  Mecca – Susan Straight

Walter Mosley called this book “A hymn to all who have called the Golden State home”.  It’s a brilliant novel that sucked me in from the opening scene of a day in the life of a motorcycle cop driving in suffocating heat and the blinding glare of the inland desert. Straight delivers memorable and awe-inspiring images of modern California, stretching from the glamorous homes in the Hollywood Hills to the most remote “dog water” towns of the state’s little-visited eastern deserts. Dreaming of this novel every night had me heading for an early bedtime, eager to dive back in. 

3.  The Most – Jessica Anthony

The cover image of this tightly-scripted novel features a 40-ish woman in a one-piece red swimsuit floating in a pool. Red is the right color, as the scene is anything but halcyon.  Kathleen Beckett, once a promising tennis prodigy, is now a housewife, a mother of two, and the wife of an insurance salesman who (like Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt) will always choose the easiest and least interesting path. The entire novel takes place over the course of a single Sunday – one that started with our protagonist skipping out on church, while she sends her husband off with their children, as she thinks back on her life and wondering what might have been. This leads to her singular act of rebellion that is the compelling heart of the novel. Amy and I both tore through this book in a single day.

2.  Gilead – Marilynne Robinson

In contrast, Robinson’s recounting of an elderly priest’s reminiscences on his life was a much slower read, but all the better for it. I’d long been intimidated by Gilead. It won the Pulitzer, shows up on every “Top 100” list (it’s #2 on The Guardian’s 21st-century list), and I worried it would feel like homework. Instead, this slow, meditative novel made me instantly cozy up to its protagonist, a rural preacher named John Ames.  It was as weighty as I had expected, but I was quickly mesmerized by its unique cadence. Reverend Ames has a heart condition that he knows will soon end his life, taking him away from the younger wife (who changed his conviction that he was destined to be a lifelong bachelor) and their 5-year-old son. He writes a series of letters to his young son, capturing small-town life in 1950s Gilead, Iowa.  The novel circles around the themes of grace, forgiveness and the meaning of a good life, using Ame’s theological musings as he revisits his pacifist father, his abolitionist grandfather and the history of violence mixed with idealism in his family. He must also face a long-running feud with the prodigal son of his best friend, who returns to Gilead with his usual overhanging dark shadows. This is a novel I will likely re-read every five years, just as I do with Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, because every page is so dense with meaning and with reminders of why we should seek to live lives of honor.

1.  Small Things Like These – Claire Keegan

Keegan is a genius.  I’ve never encountered a writer who can pack so much into a novella.  Each page is a delight, each moment of reading one that is filled with pathos, empathy, character development, and insights into history, character and moral development.  Coal merchant Bill Furlong is making a delivery to the convent when he stumbles on a woman he was never meant to meet and stories the church would strongly prefer he did not hear.  This discovery forces him to confront the town’s complicity in the now-notorious Magdalene laundries. This is the 4^th book of Keegan’s I’ve read in the last few years, and I must say that everything she writes is too short – I wish I could live in this story and with these characters for much longer.  I cannot recommend a book more highly than this one.  And its compact size makes it the perfect stocking stuffer.

SPECIAL MENTION

The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation: Essays on Nurturing a Passion for Reading -- Inspired by Robert Macfarlane and Curated by Jennie Orchard

Since I was involved with this project since its inception and was one of 24 authors who contributed an essay, I would feel guilty naming it to my Top Ten list. But I still have to call it out as one of my favorites this year and one that I highly recommend for holiday gifting.

Remember the books that shaped your childhood, sparked your imagination, and ignited a lifelong love of reading? In The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation, some of the world’s most beloved authors share their own transformative reading experiences―the books and stories that set them on the path of becoming the readers and writers they are today.

Following the success of its first edition, The Gifts of Reading, this heartwarming collection of essays is a testament to the enduring power of books. By exploring the stories that shaped them, our authors provide a powerful guide to fostering a love of reading in the children and young people in your life.

Contributors include William Boyd, Pico Iyer, Colum McCann, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Nilanjana S. Roy and Madeleine Thien. Please note that all authors agreed that their royalties from the book could be donated to U-GO and Room to Read.