2025 Reads and Recommendations

Books of the Year that Was

It’s the end of another year in which I read a few books—some by eye, some by ear; most by choice, some by request. As with each year’s list (see 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015, for reference), these are not necessarily books released in 2025 (though several are), but books that I encountered this year. Short reviews follow for a few (with links to longer reviews that I’ve published if available), clustered around some broad categories.

As usual, I’ve listed “also-reads” this year in their respective categories—these books aren’t necessarily “second class”, I just can’t review ’em all. As a reminder, you can also find me on goodreads.com for more regular updates, as well as brief reviews of all these titles.

This year’s list—the first in a long time without any academic obligations—is characterized by curiosity, whimsy, and rest, pursuing what interests me without apology or justification.

Fiction and Poetry

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (2024)
A tender portrayal of love and despair, and what we lose and gain by seeking a better life for ourselves and others. Akbar brings his poet’s sensibility to weave a thing of beauty from a story of immigration and assimilation, addiction and recovery, and the simplicities of friendship and domestic life.

James by Percival Everett (2024)
Often, I’m skeptical of the year’s “it” novel, and wait a few months or a year to see if it still holds a place in the discourse. This one is absolutely deserving of the hype. 100 of 100. No notes. No crumbs. Everett manages to subvert all the tropes of Southern life and “slavery nostalgia” while simultaneously holding a tender place for Huckleberry Finn (the character, if not fully the novel).

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay (2019)
Rachel had really been blessed by Gay’s Inciting Joy last year, so when he came to do a reading and Q&A at a church near our house in March, I went to meet him. I couldn’t help but pick up some of his work after hearing it read. This one is earnest and wonky, by turns funny, sad, and intriguing. Great contemporary poetry and observations.

The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain (1894)
It’s commonplace to try to assign Twain either to the ash heap of the unenlightened or to give him a prophet’s status as the “good Southerner” who saw through racism. Pudd’nhead Wilson threads the needle and gives fodder to both camps. This is a wry and insightful story on how race is a social construct, written from within the belly of the beast in late 19th century America. Still quite tropey at points, but Twain saw through so much that so many took for granted, and he makes us laugh at it (and spins a fun detective story to boot). I picked it up this year because an English-professor friend said he added it to his curriculum as a puckish way to force conservative students to rethink the “canon” and to force liberal students to rethink Twain.

Also-reads in this category:

• He Held Radical Light by Christian Wiman (2018)

• The Mighty Red by Louise Edrich (2024)

• Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro (2024)

• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020)

• The Iliad by Homer (ca. 8th century B.C.)

• The Odyssey by Homer (ca. 8th century B.C.)

• North Woods by Daniel Mason (2023)

• The Book of More Delights by Ross Gay (2023)

• Inciting Joy by Ross Gay (2022)

• Desert Notes / River Notes by Barry Lopez (1976, 1979)

• 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquéz (1967)

• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)

Christian Theology and Practice

The Anti-Greed Gospel by Malcolm Foley (2025)
A must-read for contemporary American Christians. From my review: “Foley [connects] the dots between our theological shortcomings and their economic consequences. He builds from this a powerful call to remember the biblical obligation to love our neighbors through our economic lives. What he offers is not a policy solution (though the implications of his argument certainly point to some), but an exorcism of sorts—the message of Jesus is clear, and we need to repent of our idolatry and believe the gospel. The burning question, he says, is not whether American Christians know what to do, but whether we are willing to be a people who live out the gospel we say we believe (163).”

The Crucified God by Jürgen Moltmann (1973)
When Moltmann passed away at 98 last summer, I realized his work was a big lacuna in my theological education within the Reformed tradition. Considered by many his magnum opus, The Crucified God presents much to digest, and is not just a work questioning divine impassibility or advocating patripassianism (as I’d been warned). He forces questions about theology “on the ground” vs. merely abstract truths, and following Barth, focuses our attention on Christ as the lens through which we must make sense of all of theology. Nuanced and urgent, it was worth the slow, meditative read I was able to give without assignment deadlines.

Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson (2024)
Robinson gets a lot of praise for her fiction (which I love and have read all of), but I’ve always found her essays and nonfiction to be lively and curious and clear-headed as well. This book presents a long discourse rather than a collection of essays, offering a measured literary analysis of the biblical text, with some truly profound insight into how it highlights the character of God and the nature of man (largely in comparison/contrast with other ancient Near Eastern legendaria).

Also-reads in this category:

• Sabbath as Resistance by Walter Brueggemann (2014)

• Spiritual Direction by Henri J.M. Nouwen with Michael Christensen and Amanda Laird (2006).

• Jesus and the Powers by N.T. Wright and Michael Bird (2024)

History / Biography

Native Nations by Kathleen Duval (2024)
Another book that I wouldn’t have been aware of without the the always-wonderful interviews on The Road to Now podcast (Bob & Ben have made me read so many books over the years!). Duvall provides active and original history at its finest here, revising the standard declinist narrative about the indigenous peoples of North America, and re-situating the American story in a much more tenuous light. The subtitle (“A Millennium in North America”) highlights the long view she takes, and her engagement with primary texts and the archaeological record is profound.

Country Capitalism by Bartow J. Elmore (2023)
Another Road to Now read…Elmore explores the history of five corporations with roots in the American South (Coca Cola, Walmart, FedEx, Delta, and Bank of America) to highlight the unique logistical challenges and lax regulatory environment of the region that led to the cultivation of the highly mobile, highly privatized, highly volume-dependent, highly leveraged economy we think of as just broadly “American” today.

Mark Twain by Ron Chernow (2025)
Since I read some Twain this year, I figured I should take up this new biography as well. This work is as minutely detailed as you’d expect from Chernow. Twain is truly an epochal figure in American culture (transcending even his lofty literary accomplishments), and yet also a tragi-comic figure prone to epic flights of fancy and petty grievances. His economic delusions of grandeur and repeated failures and flirtations with bankruptcy did more to shape his literary output than most realize, as did his many family griefs.

Becoming the Pastor’s Wife by Beth Allison Barr (2025)
Good history (through a largely Baptist lens) of the ways women’s paths to ministry in theologically conservative churches and organizations have narrowed in the era of complementarianism (1980s to present). Barr builds on her previous work on gender essentialism (i.e. biblical “manhood” or “womanhood”) in evangelical spaces to highlight the ways women’s service to the church and kingdom has been circumscribed and limited to unpaid, background roles, while still being heavily depended upon for the church to function.

Cultural Observation / Memoir

Upstream by Mary Oliver (2016)
Oliver is an essential American poet, often derided in her time as simply a “nature poet” or facile writer, her reputation as an artist of the first caliber seems secure now. This late-life collection of essays is as aglow with glory and simplicity a her poems, describing her life as a quiet observer of the world around her and her poetic process (such as it was).

We Tell Ourselves Stories by Alissa Wilkinson (2025)
Wilkinson, a New York Times film critic (and at Vox before that), has long been one of my go-to movie reviewers. Here, she turns her critic’s eye upstream to the “Hollywoodization” of Americ through the lens of essayist, journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and memoirist, Joan Didion. While not a biography, per se, Wilkinson provides an excellent, integrated look at Joan Didion’s life and work vis-a-vis the pathologies of modern American life. She shows us how much we all think of our experiences as following some sort of traceable story arc, and how disorienting life can be when it inevitably doesn’t.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968)
Following Wilkinson’s book, I remedied my general non-reading of Didion. Slouching Toward Bethlehem was a favorite. It feels fresh and evergreen even as it is a distinct slice of the ‘60s. Didion offers herself as narrator of the confusion inherent in the post-war American project. In her 30s, she calls the bluff of a country that promised so much, and delivered so little in the way of true flourishing.

Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World by Barry Lopez (2022)
Somehow, I’ve been reading books all these years, and never encountered Barry Lopez. After conversations about his work over meals at a retreat at Laity Lodge this fall, I knew I had to dive in. This book, published shortly after his death, is remarkable for its unblinking, yet open-handed, approach to every topic (climate change, political reversals, horrific childhood abuse, divorce, and cancer and dying). It lives up to its title in every essay. And this quote will probably live with me forever: “As always when I return, I have found again the ground that propels me past the great temptation of our time, to put one’s faith in despair.”

Also-reads in this category:

• About This Life by Barry Lopez (1998)

• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (2007)

• My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman (2013)

• In Suspect Terrain by John McPhee (1983)

• The White Album by Joan Didion (1979)

• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005)

Philosophy and Sociology

Sanctifying Suburbia by Brian Miller (2025)
From my review: “Miller’s book raises and attempts to answer some vital questions of who is shaping whom. Did evangelicals create the suburban American dream, or has suburbia twisted the gospel into its image with grave consequences for the church and the country as a whole? Maybe it is both. Miller offers a powerful examination of the intersection between beliefs and places (183), reminding us that social location matters more to our biblical interpretation than most evangelicals are comfortable with examining, and that we leave these stones unturned at our peril.”

The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951, 1958)
Another reading that I can blame on the Road to Now, after their interview with the director of a documentary on Arendt. Reading this in an America wrestling again with aspiring authoritarians is bracing. Her insight is valuable precisely because she doesn’t locate the rise and proliferation of Naziism in something inherent to German culture (a la Shirer), but something deeper and more universal. Thematically, she shows how legal maneuvers are key to the onset and maintenance of totalitarian regimes, in other words, if anyone in your country can be deemed “illegal” and have their human rights (esp. due process) stripped from them, there are no guardrails keeping the government from eventually deeming you “illegal” at some point when you become inconvenient for them. In contrast, “unalienable rights” are not conferred by any state or jurisdiction and thus cannot be removed by one either. You cannot be “alienated” from your humanity by any truly just law.

The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt (1958)
This is truly a work of philosophy, with ponderous definitions and discourses on the nature of man as an active agent in the world, as worker (or maker), laborer, and creative actor. Fundamentally, Arendt questions the vita contemplativa as the foundation of philosophy in favor of the vita activa. “Events, not ideas, make history,” she writes, suggesting that all true theories of human life have to account for the endless “spark” of human action, narrating the realities of lived experience more so than abstract ideals.

Also-reads in this category:

• The Starfish and the Spider by Rod Beckstrom (2006)

• Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde (1984)

• Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green (2025)

Re-Reads

“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once…. We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.” – C.S. Lewis, “On Stories”

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry (2000)
I’ve gone through this one probably five times now, but never with a book group. I was invited by my pastor to lead a summer discussion group through it this year. Reading in community with others who’ve long loved Berry’s work and some who were brand new to it was a joyful experience. It brought out so much reminiscence of family and rural culture, and the nature of spiritual journey that each of us must at some point to wrestle with God to be able to love Him and love our neighbors: “You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out—perhaps a little at a time.”

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (1940)
This raw tale of persecution and personal failures (in light of ex opere operato) still goes deep and cuts hard against both the impious pomposity of comfortable religion and the rootlessness of naturalistic modernity. At heart, it is a story of love for God and neighbor that is as inescapable as it is impossible to live up to fully.

The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien (1955)
It might be a rite of passage to read the Lord of the Rings aloud with your family. We completed the trilogy this year, and I’m reminded again how enduring and relevant it is (and how much richer the books are than the films—fight me). The sense of hope in the dark exuding from the final book sticks with me much more at this point in life than it did when I was younger. Sam’s question “Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?” resonates still.