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Notes -
So for this week's "What Are You Reading" thread, we're coming to the end of the year and I just finished a few books, so I'm going to post my whole 2025:
Books 2025
Same rules as last year. These are the books I finished in the year 2025, meaning I read them, on paper or screen, all the way through. There are some other books I started but haven’t finished, I don’t give myself credit for those.
I aim for 26 books finished every year, so one every other week. Mostly because you hear about figures like Teddy Roosevelt reading a book a week, and I cut that in half for various reasons and try to stick to it. This is a totally arbitrary personal goal, and it is funny to me how IRL it’s almost impossible to discuss with anyone without it turning into a weird personal dick-measuring contest. There’s almost no one I talk about it with who doesn’t reply with some variation of: A) Insecure Excuses along the lines of I WISH I had TIME to read so much, and I wasn’t so BUSY all the time [with things presumably far more important than FHM’s leisurely reading]; B) Books are Dumb along the lines of I only read blog posts summarizing non-fiction self help books; C) Braggadocio, Actually I read THREE HUNDRED SIXTY FIVE BOOKS this year, how did you ONLY read 26.
I don’t get why, to me, it’s only relevant to me personally, because only I can know how I read things. What I skim and what I comprehend every word of. The quality of the stuff I read. How much free time I have. I’m not really interested in comparing with people, but they can’t help themselves IRL, it touches a nerve. Which I guess it does for me to, but only to me, in that this is important to me in some way.
Anyway, recommendations if you want stuff a mottizen might like, or if you’ve read it and want to discuss it, feel free to comment.
I define a “book” by format, a bound codex front to back.
Hollywood Babylon Kenneth Anger — Might have been the most fun I had reading anything this year. It’s a great book in its own right, a gonzo creative writing exercise in half-invented rumor mongering gossip about people you might have heard of vaguely. Read it, afterward you’ll be able to confidently expound these anecdotes at parties, and when someone talks about modern celebrity culture, you can talk about how everything really went downhill after Fatty Arbuckle was fingered for raping a girl to death.
The Odyssey Emily Wilson — A lovely, crisp new translation. I try to read Homer at least once every year. There are a lot of things I got out of this version that I didn’t get out of other versions. Translation is its own art. Wilson’s work is right at the border of what I’d consider a useful translation. Read it if you have read the Odyssey before, but want another angle.
Where Men Win Glory Krakauer — A biography of Pat Tillman. I’ve always liked Krakauer ever since reading Into the Wild years ago, when I gift Tolstoy to anyone I inscribe it “Listen to Pierre.” The book is a real throwback to early GWOT times, how everyone felt right after 9/11, and just how bad the cover up was. The book is a bit of a hagiography, despite Krakauer’s best efforts, trying to portray Tillman as something other than a professionally violent guy who saw an opportunity to do some real violence for a good cause, but it leaks through in journalistic accounts of Tillman sucker punching other teenagers and hiding the assault charges from colleges to avoid the consequences of his actions. Read it if you feel like it, but it bogs down in the second half trying to figure out exactly what happened to Tillman when I don’t really care.
Rivals Jilly Cooper — This is such a fun romp, I read it with my wife. A Jeffrey Archer type 80s business heist forms the scaffolding of the story, but it’s all just window dressing for various characters to bounce off each other in various erotic combinations. It’s a shame bisexuality hadn’t been invented yet, Cooper could have done so much more if you have a few utility players on the team. Read this if you want something funny and light at the beach, she’s a good enough writer that some of the jokes make me laugh out loud.
Alperton Angels Janice Something or Other — A modern epistolary mystery novel told through text messages and notes apps. It starts off pretty good, and seems like it might really work, but ultimately it was one of the worst books I read this year. I read it with a friend, and when we were 3/4 of the way through, I posited a ridiculous twist ending as a bad joke, and that’s exactly what she did! The whole book is ruined in the last ten or twenty pages! Bails on everything that was interesting in the first part. No one can write a good ending to a scary book anymore! Do not read this one, and if you do stop 3/4 of the way through and just remember it that way.
The Sandman Omnibus Neil Gaiman — From a pile of recommendations for graphic novels that y’all gave me, I pulled this one. I don’t know if it counts as a book, it’s a comic. But if I had bought it in print, it would have been like seven books or something like that. I’ll just count it as one. Really strong work, very interesting, at first it’s a little bit too far into just being comic book slop, but it develops in interesting ways. Reading it around all the Neil Gaiman controversy, it made me think a lot about the way Gaiman projects himself into the work, and a particular kind of man. Gaiman wants to be a master who doesn’t want to be a master, a feminist patriarch who wants to uplift women who want to be his slaves. His behavior with women makes perfect sense reading his work, and it’s hard to see how fans of his expected anything different. Read this one if you want a long fantasy read without too much thinking.
Fewer Rules Better People Lam — It’s barely longer than a pamphlet, but makes a compelling argument for why removing laws and regulations is necessary to produce virtuous outcomes for everyone. Read it so that when you buy copies for all your local councilmen you can explain to them why they should read it.
Ask Not Callahan — A history of women destroyed by the philandering, and other crimes, of the men in the Kennedy clan. I have this bad habit of reading oppositionally: when I read a polemic against someone I make points for the, and when I read a polemic for them I make points against them. In this case, while I was blown away by the detailed research into all the terrible things that had been done, and the ridiculous horniness of JFK and brothers and fathers and children and cousins and nephews (seriously, it’s genetic) I didn’t necessarily buy all the harm they were supposed to have done. Read this if, like Mrs. FiveHour, you love Kennedy dirty laundry, but I’m still in search of a neutral historical group biography of the JFK-RFK-Teddy group; everything is either slander or hagiography and it nearly always focuses on just one brother and mentions the others when I want all three of them to the same detail.
The Story of a New Name Ferrante — Second book in the Neapolitan quartet. Exquisitely written, and worth reading for the art of it, but a whole lot of nothing happens for the most part, it’s a lot of work to get anywhere. Read it if you like the series, I’ll get to the third and fourth this upcoming year.
Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace — My big project for the year. I’m not sure what to say about it. It’s brilliant. It feels like it one hundred percent predicted the modern world in many ways, but it’s also so long and so intricate and so weirdly plotted. Reminds me of and probably inspired Motte-Adjacent writer TLP’s and his hatred for his own reader, DFW is engaged in a meta conflict with his own reader. It’s brilliant but it is almost intentionally bad, disgusting at times for no reason, but the writing is so brilliant, I can’t make up my mind. I love DFW’s short stories, but this took me several tries to read, and in some ways I feel like at its best Infinite Jest is a collection of short stories that are connected into a madcap plot. I’m still processing this one. It appears in the list where I started it, but I finished it much later. Read this if you want to read something brilliant, and don’t mind that the author actively hates the audience, you probably owe it to yourself to read it once, it might be the last really great book ever written.
Moneyland Bullough — A pretty good nonfiction book of anecdotes about different ways that rich people use the tools of international law to hide, launder, secure, and otherwise use money. An ok and pretty informative book, but kind of lacks in a moral argument without fully committing to anticapitalist marxian analysis. If it’s their money, why can’t they use it how they want? Who cares about divorce laws for billionaire trophy wives who get traded up? Read it if you want a quick light read for information, I got it off the free pile at the bookstore.
Journey to the End of Night Celine — What a slog! Why do people like this one? I went in expecting some really interesting cynical WWI book, instead I got a half-assed Henry Miller, a book with no characters who ever felt either realistic or admirable, just an absolute slog of a book that never even hints at an interesting point. Don’t read this one unless you’re determined to finish some stupid list of books, like I was.
The Official Preppy Handbook Birnbach — Oh my God you need to read this. Don’t talk to me about “This is what they took from you” on twitter if you haven’t read this. WHAT A TIME! WHAT A PLACE! WHAT A FEELING! This book captures what it felt like to be a certain kind of person in a certain kind of place at a certain time, and if you’re like me you’ll be deep diving eBay for vintage Lacoste and cashmere for a few weeks afterward. It’s a two day read at most, written as a how-to guide for being perfectly preppy, from cradle to grave. Read this if you love subcultural study and love Americana.
300 Miller — When the movie came out my Boy Scout troop could recite most of it from memory on a ten mile hike, I decided to finally get back to the original material. Wow, was it different. Where the movie felt very GWOT, about beautiful manly White Greeks fighting shifty turbaned Brown Persians. The comic art style makes the Greeks look vaguely like an anti-negroid attack ad from Harper’s in the 1870s. It was decent, but exactly the same as the movie for the best parts, without the inherent homoerotic ‘miring of Gerard Butler’s abs. Skip it.
American Sniper Kyle — Read it for Memorial Day weekend. A quick, interesting read. I have a notes app draft of an effort post about how the book feels more like an athlete memoir than a war memoir, Kyle feels more like Michael Jordan than he does like Carlos Hathcock. Ultimately to pad the book out they include a lot of his wife’s reminiscences about the period, which I really didn’t care about, and the editions released after his death include a bunch of eulogies about how great he was. It’s a quick read and influential so I’d recommend reading it.
Storm of Steel Junger — This was one of my favorite books I read this year. Excellent, brilliant, lovely, incredible, harrowing. Absolute masterpiece. Junger was a brilliant free spirit, who wound up in the most important places on the Western Front, and wrote about them as they happened. Made me want to read everything by Junger, which I plan to. You need to read this one.
Band of Brothers Ambrose — I have a personal connection to this unit, and I loved the HBO series, so for me this was one I should have read a long time ago, and finally got around to. It was the right moment for WWII historiography, and it’s such an interesting account of such an interesting journey for the Screaming Eagles and Easy Company in particular. There’s a lot of inherent depth to a work that has that much first hand interview to it. Read this one at least once.
Fat City Gardner — Recommended by Alex Perez as a great boxing book, it’s a fictional account of two struggling pro-boxers, one teenage almost-an-up-and-comer and one 30ish never-was. It’s a real nuts-and-bolts boxing book, and a vignette of the low end of life in mid century California. Short, punchy, a really solid book, read this if you like the fight game.
The Fight Mailer — A literary journalistic account of the Rumble in the Jungle fight between Ali and Foreman. I’m fascinated by Ali, a singular figure in world history. When our cousins from Austria visited by Great Aunt back in the 60s, the first thing they wanted to do was travel to Deer Lake to try to catch a glimpse of Ali. The best way I can describe in modern terms is maybe if Shohei Ohtani was also Kanye West, or if Tom Brady was also Bronze Age Pervert, if an athlete whose brilliance cannot be denied was also a controversial political and cultural figure. Mailer’s writing is good, and he had a LOT of access, but the book itself was ultimately mediocre. Read it if you feel like it, it’s short and easy, but it mostly just teased me, and made me want to read Eig’s Ali biography.
Original Sin Tapper — An interior history of the end of the Biden presidency. I read it with my wife to see what all the fuss was about and wrote a review on the motte. Mediocre and boring, an exercise in trying to do a directional autopsy. TLDR the Biden senility crisis was totally unpredictable and no one outside of Biden and his two best friends did anything wrong. Don’t bother reading it, just read my post about it.
All the Light We Cannot See Doerr — A well reviewed WWII book about a blind French girl and a German boy escaping allied bombing at the end of WWII. It started out well, but the ending was totally limp. And, to be honest, I’m not this guy normally, but one of the things I really liked about the book was that it kept the atrocities mostly off-screen, but then at the very end it goes into a very unnecessary explicit gang rape scene of the Red Army and German women. Which was just such a weird change in tone that it bothered me a lot. I thought it was good that he didn’t turn the WWII story into a Holocaust centered story, which too many authors can’t resist, but then to turn around and focus in on anti-German atrocities while avoiding German atrocities sets off my crypto-Nazi alarm bells for a book that isn’t that. Skip this one, not worth the effort.
On The Marble Cliffs Junger — Junger’s Animal Farm, his allegory mythology of the rise of Hitler. Junger was always a right winger, but Junger hated Hitler, Ernst Jr was killed by Nazis for involvement in a plot to overthrow Hitler, and Junger himself was only spared because Hitler was a fan. I’m not sure I really got it, I keep meaning to take some time to go back and read interpretations of it to see if I can really get into Junger’s feelings and values within the work. Probably read it if you are a fan of Junger, but not otherwise.
JFK Jr An Oral Biography — I never really knew who JFK Jr. was, only knew him from references from others. This book was a fascinating dive into a very interesting person. How would you move through life if everyone wanted to make love to you? Everyone. The female speakers in the book that don’t want him are so up-her-own-ass about being just frineds that you can tell that not sleeping with him is a weird kind of active choice. The beautiful man that everyone wants, the son of a martyred president who in turn was famous for fucking starlets. Literally everyone wanted him. Women wanted him, men wanted to hang out with him to play the MAC system off his scraps. It’s fascinating. Among other anecdotes: JFK Jr. once had an intervention for a friend, and invited his cousin RFK Jr. to come to share stories from RFK Jr’s own addiction struggles, RFK Jr. proceeded to share stories so harrowing that JFK Jr.’s friend decided that he himself didn’t have a problem at all because he was nowhere near RFK’s. Read it if you like the Kennedys, like Mrs. FHM.
Coup d’Etat Luttwak — Luttwak’s original provocative how-to book on taking a government by Coup D’Etat. Not as good as I expected it to be, I liked all the Luttwak I’ve read, but when I finally tracked this one down, it kinda fell flat. It’s interesting, but all felt kind of obvious, like one of those self-defense manuals that say things like “don’t walk home alone.” Maybe if you want to read it, try to find the original, I had the updated reissue with modern interpolations which kinda ruined the flow. Gets a don’t bother from me.
The Sun Also Rises Hemingway — Maybe the best book I read this year. Hemingway is probably my favorite author of all time, the greatest to ever do it, numero uno, the best combination for my money of being a readable masculine author who is also a brilliant and important literary mind. The book itself is all about conflicting visions of masculinity, the big question is who is the cuck? The idiots who read Hemingway and see a simple view of masculinity have never read this book or understood it. Read it.
To Have and to Have Not Hemingway — And of course, as soon as I get on a kick of wanting to read Hemingway because I love him, I run into a terrible one, the worst of Hemingway. Commercial, racist, derivative, flat, unrealistic. A mediocre noir about a Key-West smuggler and his fat wife. I’ve got plenty of stomach for period-appropriate racism, but this one was a step too far for me, the main character seems to be willing to betray chinks just because they’re chinks, and Cubans just because they are Cubans, there’s no moral logic to justify his actions except his racism. I get an unlikeable protagonist but this guy is so annoying and bullshit-tough-guy-hard-times that I actively root against him and for the rich guys forcing him out of Key West and the Cuban revolutionary gangsters shooting at him. Skip it unless you’re a Hemingway completionism.
Ride the Tiger Evola — My first introduction to Evola’s thought. I’m fascinated by his self description at his trial after the war, when asked if he was a Fascist he replied “No, I’m a Super-Fascist.” His doctrine of internal resistance without external action is interesting, but ultimately it might be too esoteric for me to actually understand what’s going on. If we have any Evola-heads on here, feel free to DM me and explain it to me. I’d recommend it, but I don’t know that it’s for everyone anyway.
Cry Havoc Mann — A memoir supposedly written in an African prison by a British mercenary leader. A series of stories about overthrowing corrupt African regimes, written seemingly by a character from Cooper’s Rivals, an upper class Englishman of the Old-School, in a regimental tie and full of the old times. The last gasp of the colonialist. Read it because it’s fascinating, but don’t take anything he says too seriously.
Portnoy’s Complaint Roth — The first person account of a Jewish man to his therapist, describing his struggles with his sexual mania over his first thirty years. Oedipal doesn’t even begin to cover it. At times it seems uniquely Jewish, at times it uses the Jewish experience to universalize to the male experience, but when I identify with Portnoy it makes me nauseous. It makes me want to read more Roth. Also a good example of a book where it was widely recommended, but the anecdotes that people pull out of the story are all from the first 30 pages, so the idea you would get from the reviews of what the book is about is wrong, it’s not about a teenager it’s about a 35 year old man. Absolutely read this one, and DM me to discuss what you think of it.
Soul on Ice Cleaver — The letters and essays of a Black Panther in prison in the 60s. I picked it up because I’d seen it cited so often by Darryl Cooper, and everyone else on the alt-right internet citing Cooper or learning it from him, about Cleaver writing about rape and isn’t that terrible that leftists loved this guy. I quickly found that those quotes were taken pretty far out of context, as is typical for any gotcha meme like that, and there’s a much more interesting conversation to be had about what is going on in Cleaver’s writing, and Cleaver is kind of interesting in his own right. I’m thinking of diving into the leftists of the time a bit. Read it if you’re interested in an “of its time” period piece.
The Naked and the Dead Mailer — My least favorite book I read this year, a semi-autobiographical fictional account of an island hopping WWII Pacific battle. This book was terrible. It somehow managed to be boring despite being a short book about WWII jungle warfare, it managed to be testosterone sapping in its maudlin vignettes of miserable American lives left behind despite being a war novel, despite following only a half-strength platoon of men the characters still managed to be repetitive and unnecessarily boring, despite its pretensions of grim realism it uses too many confusing literary narrative innovations to have any immediacy. Skip this one unless you want to read it to commiserate with me about how terrible it was.
Glorious Exploits Lennon — A fun Classical Historical novel, set in Syracuse after the failure of the Athenian invasion, two buddies set out to put on a prisoner-cast production of Euripides Medea to preserve the art in case Athens is destroyed and the work lost forever. It reminds me a lot of the vintage Chris Moore novels I loved in middle school, showing we can still do that kind of thing if we want to, even if I’ve been disappointed by Moore himself lately. Mostly funny, written in a modern Irish vernacular rather than trying to do the stately or pseudo-accurate Greek idiom thing, some moments that will make you feel or think. Does a really good job of writing about prisoners of war without caring about who was right or wrong in the war itself. Read it, it’s a fun little book and won’t cost you anything in time or effort.
Comment below with what you're reading this week, what you read this year, or any thoughts on any of these books. Feel free to DM me or get my TG if you want to discuss any of these in more depth than makes sense on a forum post.
Serious reading! Found your take on Junger interesting (fyi, his son was sent to a penal battalion for making anti-Nazi remarks, and killed in Italy either by partisans or the SS). After the war, his anti-authoritarian writings become less allegorical and more straightforward, I think in part because he wished he could have taught his son better in the arts of subterfuge. I read Marble Cliffs after Forest Passage and Eumeswil, so perhaps it was easier for me to read his later works back into it - though the first time I read it I was too blown away by the prose to see anything but beauty. Likewise, my DMs are always open for questions/thoughts re: Junger, and my invitation to that reading group discord server continues to stand.
On Infinite Jest - I'm not sure it's that Wallace hates the reader, and more that he is desperate over the difficulty of genuine connection and communication in ironized postmodernity. He sees his role as somewhere between as JOI (literally, Himself) trying to communicate to Hal, and an AA sponsor trying to demonstrate to a Newcomer why the steps and slogans and meetings and so on are so meaningful. As such, he tries all kinds of crazy stuff to get the reader to really hear him; I think even the difficulty of the book is an attempt to get you sucked in and caring about it in a way that you wouldn't for a traditional narrative.
Highlights of my reading this year:
I just downloaded Forest Passage so maybe it will reveal more. I find Junger fascinating.
I'm definitely going to bug you about DFW more, I want to know this interpretation of things! I'm also kinda stuck on the masturbation of it all, is the entertainment just porn?
This might have been about when I read it, but a big thing I got out of Plutarch was how the paired characters (Greek and Roman) were a concentrated historical effort to invent Greco-Roman cultural history, tying every great Roman to a great Greek. Everything you said too, and Plutarch was a genius writer, but the underlying political project was one of the biggest things that stuck with me. Plutarch used his literary and philosophical genius to forward his goals and ideas.
If you had to recommend one novel to start, which would you recommend I begin with?
Forest Passage is the late Junger's most straightforward work (not to say it is straightforward!), and the closest thing to an anarch's manifesto. Hope you will enjoy and always happy to discuss.
So think about the Professional Conversationalist scene at the start, and then the conversation between the Wraith and Gately at the end - JOI is desperate to communicate, but he can't get past Hal's interior walls and really speak to him. The postmodern novelist is in the same predicament, nothing he writes can cross the walls of detachment within himself and the reader. He creates the Entertainment as a way to communicate, but it only produces all-consuming obsession (n.b. we never truly know if the Entertainment is absolute bliss, or if it's simply that withdrawal from it is immeasurably painful). I think the Entertainment is both the capacity of media/Substance consumption to consume human life, and also a sincere attempt from JOI to escape that. And it parallels the novel, in that a great novel like Infinite Jest (the same title) produces this obsessive desire to think about it but is at the same time a sincere attempt at a perhaps impossible human-to-human communication. Both the great novel and the Entertainment grab us by appealing to deep, primal aspects of human psychology (in the Entertainment, the Oedipal mother/baby/death stuff) but the question is if this can only be narcotizing, if the only path a novel opens is passive consumption, or if it can be a path to reaching Hal/you.
Yeah this is definitely a compelling reading. Interestingly, Leo Strauss argues (briefly, in his seminars) that Plutarch is esoterically trying to show the moral superiority of the Greeks over the Romans, or of the Classical era over more recent times - esoterically, because he lived under Rome and didn't want to offend them. I'm not sure I buy that, but will be looking for that on the next read. The element of it I do see is that Plutarch's Greeks are much more individuals, their vices and virtues are those of individuals, whereas most of the great Romans (Caesar being the exception, and Coriolanus/Mark Antony cautionary tales) are shaped more by their relationship to the State and the Mos Maiorum. Where the Romans put their individual greatness first, it tends to go wrong, whereas when the Greeks do it it tends to go better for them. But, by the time of Pyrrhus, that largely makes the Romans into better men than the Greeks, even if it may be less ideal a world from Plutarch's perspective.
I would say Stop All The Clocks is probably the most paradigmatic. It's set in New York, it's got questions about art and AI, it's got the conspiracy angle. It also tones down the annoying tics that other similar novels have (I read three that all did the same bit about iPad tips being set too high, and the cod-Pynchon maximalism of a lot of these books never lands with me). Alternatively, pick up a copy of The End and get a buffet - they are print-only (though I believe pdfs used to be on their website), but you can preorder the next issue in the link from their Instagram bio.
P.S. You may enjoy this cartoon
I don't particularly think Plutarch would have to argue all that esoterically, the superiority of the men of the past over the men of the present was a truism of the ancients.
I saw a twitter post that really confused me recently where someone said something along the lines of "Most of the time history is all about great important movements and forces and institutions but then you run into Julius Caesar and he just changes everything..." And I thought, really, Caesar? The guy who was like the fifth person in a row to try the exact the same thing? By the time we get to Caesar, we can reasonably say that men like Caesar is exactly what the state is producing.
Huh. That's an interesting angle. I was thinking about that earlier today shoveling snow, how reading a novel like that is inherently selfish in some ways, but then I only managed to finish it through a book club, so it was inherently social and connection based for me.
Well, the idea that Greeks are better than Romans might have raised some hackles, and Plutarch did have his political career to think about. But I don't know the exact situation in Greece under the Flavian and Nerva-Antonine dynasties, it could have been that valorizing the Greeks under Hadrian was the classy thing to do. I suspect Strauss was reaching with that one, it was only a casual remark to students.
I tell my populist friends all the time that this is something to meditate on, that these things are long-term processes and we are definitely at the Gracchi stage rather than the Caesar one.
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