Reading highlights, 2025

I discovered that all of the adventures of Tintin were available on archive.org. When i was something like five years old, my granddad bought me explorers on the moon, but i’ve never read any of the others, so i took the opportunity to download them all and give them a read.

The distinct discomfort present in the racism and xenophobia of the first few books has been well documented, and i have nothing to add; these were not Hergé’s finest work. But props to the man for admitting that they had these problems. As he moves towards doing more research on each of the books, the quality increases significantly, and most of them are a joy to read. It’s obvious why Tintin is such a popular character. Maybe it’s cheating to list thirty books as one entry, but this is my list and they are all much the same anyway.

I read this book on a whim and was not expecting to like it so much. I have to criticise the choice of the translators to add the word “hair” to the title which does not appear in the original german name, although not much is lost as the fact the carpets are made of hair is revealed pretty early on. Regardless, the fact you know this slightly disgusting detail from the start rather than having it suddenly revealed within the prose is a slight knock.

The book itself is amazing. I’m not sure why i like it so much, whether it’s the weird premise, the structure, or the fact that i was guessing about the big reveal until the very end. It is told in vignettes, and we as readers get to slowly piece together this hugely imagined world. This is my book of the year.

I like to imagine that Catherynne was browsing a dictionary one day and came across the word “palimpsest”, and immediately started trying to make some kind of a joke or story out of the -cest ending, and that eventually became this book. Like the hair carpet weavers, it’s a weird book, but this time the weirdness is less sci-fi and more magical realism.

There are moments where she gets lost in the prose and the plot takes a back seat, but sometimes i don’t mind that, especially when the prose is so beautiful. A thick layer of depression seeps through the words, and i didn’t fully understand what was going on until the very end. These people are pathetic and hopeful and inspiring at the same time, and that made them both relatable and interesting, which i think is a hard balance to get right.

The first few chapters are a bit slow and i had a couple of false starts, but once i got into it, i read the whole thing in only a couple of days.

I read a few books this year from the little lauded genre of hundred-year-old-self-help. I would not say this was a good book, and continued advances in science and common sense have rendered quite a lot of this particular book’s contents obsolete. That said, i thought it was an absolutely fascinating read, exploring the mind of someone who has taken up the task of moving past the victorian stigma of sex and discussing it objectively and rationally, whilst still in many ways being stuck with a lot of the victorian taboos. It’s a short book, and if you can put up with a bit of indignation, i think it’s worth a look.

All the Tintin appears to have inspired me to check out some more graphic novels. This was one of the best ones, the moving story of a Cambodian family with a little bit too much education to be ideal for the new Khmer Rouge regime. It’s heavily based on the true story of the author’s family’s escape from the country, and it is very, very moving. The art is simple and effective, and so is the language, and despite the presence of some humour throughout, it’s not a light read.

I followed this up with a lot of extra reading about the modern history of Cambodia, which i knew nothing about and is really interesting. I recommend reading both this book and the history of the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea.

This came a bit out of nowhere, because i didn’t realise there was such a fandom around the hunger games; it gets a bit swamped by all the harry potter. But i remember having a positive view of the original trilogy way way back in the day, and unlike when i reread harry potter and found that perhaps some of the depth i’d come to appreciate in literature was missing, reading this one only reinforced that vague view that the hunger games is a good franchise.

I could probably have got more out of this book if i first reread the original trilogy and learnt all the lore, but i felt that with a base understanding of the concept of the hunger games, it wasn’t a necessity. As i read, some of the important characters came back to me, and after reading i browsed the wiki and learnt some other details. I also cried at the end.

When the hunger games originally came out, it was one of those dystopian books that maybe could happen, but seems a little far-fetched. The changes in the world since its publication, and also Suzanne’s choice to spend more time looking at smaller aspects of the politics of the books, meant that the future she imagines feels a lot closer to reality now. And that’s a little bit scary.

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Well those are probably my book highlights for the year. Honourable mentions go to Mahatma Gandhi’s a guide to health, in which we discover that Gandhi opposes vaccination, doesn’t know how childbirth works, and has a very strong belief that mud can cure almost all ailments; Gregory Maguire’s wicked, which is wildly different and in my opinion much more worthwhile than the musical, if janky and verbose in many respects; James Acaster’s guide to quitting social media which was very funny for the first chapter, but didn’t come up with many more jokes for the next two hundred pages; and Barbara Kingsolver’s demon copperhead, a beautiful and horrible retelling of David Copperfield retold through the lens of the rise of opioid addiction in Southern Appalachia. I have absolutely no complaints about that last one, it was an incredible book from start to finish, but i wanted six titles in my list.