2024 was a difficult year for me to maintain a blog. Growing children, moving house, health issues and increased work responsibilities made it difficult to find adequate time to read and review.

Nevertheless, I am ploughing on! Perhaps not posting as frequently as I have in the past. And 2025 promises to be as challenging if not more so.

A Recap of 2024

In 2024 I made through all the books on my 2024 Reading List plus much more besides. As well as the items on my list I also read a couple of prepublications novels that were sent my way – the charming Goyhood and the ponderous Sleeping in the Sun. My wife Rebecca tackled another – Conquist by Dirk Strasser.

With my daughter having read her way through Harry Potter (after much elbowing) it was time I finally read it too. At the time of writing I have just started The Half-Blood Prince and have a long post of the entire series in the works.

If I had to pick a favourite book this year it would be the 2022 Booker Prize Winner The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka. I will not be writing a review of it as Rebecca’s take on this blog is already popular.

I started the year with Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy. I wrote a review of the first novel, Regeneration, but struggled to put my thoughts down on the other two straight after reading. I might still try. I found the three novels of the series to be very different to each other. And I was a little surprised the third novel, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize.

Moby Dick was a long difficult read for me but gave me a lot to think about. Particularly about its place in literature and its influence and impact.

The Name of the Rose was another I enjoyed for the most part. And my choice of a novel the reread – Wuthering Heights – proved to be more enjoyable than I expected from my past experience.

Tortilla Flat by my new favourite author John Steinbeck was enjoyable. I found the Booker Prize shortlisted novel, The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee, less enjoyable than I hoped and I had to push my way through it. But it grew on me towards the end. I hope to get reviews written of these two in the new year.

In non-fiction, I enjoyed some large books that I learned a great deal from but were so long and so full of fascinating information I would struggle to know how to review them. I am thinking here mostly about The German Genius by Peter Watson and A History of Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Both are worth reading for the interested.

I did not find On Writing by Stephen King as insightful as I expected. Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo was an emotive short work of narrative non-fiction. Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow was the one non-fiction book I was able to get a review posted for.

There is another book I read this year that deserves mention. I don’t include self-help or professional development books in my reading lists and most years I don’t read any. This year I did – The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. I would definitely recommend it and I have used it to good effect in my work life. I might even make time to write a review.

My 2025 Reading List

Followers and friends will know well by now that I try to cover certain genres each year. Though I am starting to wonder if I should ditch a couple of them in favour of some new ones.

Also, when I selected books by the genres I wanted to cover it did not add up to a large number of pages to read in a year. So, I added more books and inevitably now have a list that may be unrealistic for me to achieve in a year!

First, each year I read a novel series. This year it will be the Maddaddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood – Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and Maddaddam. I have not read a lot of Atwood but she is the author of one of my favourite novels – her Booker Prize winner The Blind Assassin.

My classic fiction for the year will be Eugene Onegin by Pushkin. I am not sure how I will go with it being in the form of a poem and a translated one at that. I’ve been wanting to read it for a while. The impression I get is that, while Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky continue to be very well read, some other classics of Russian literature are being overlooked and Eugene Onegin is considered one of the most important of the others.

Due to my otherwise short list, I am adding another classic this year – Aesop’s Fables. I had read and enjoyed children’s versions as a child. Let’s see how I find the Penguin Classics version.

For my ‘Modern Classic’ I will read a collection of the works of Dorothy Porter. I have no idea what to expect but I hope I will enjoy it.

To this I am also going to add Cannery Row by Steinbeck. As above, I read Tortilla Flat this year and, having crowned Steinbeck as my favourite author, I will continue working through some of his other works.

I have also started reading the works of James Joyce. I read Dubliners last year and will read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I don’t expect to enjoy Joyce but I don’t see that as a reason to deprive myself of the experience.   

‘Contemporary’ literature for me is not very contemporary for most readers. That is because my backlog is so long most of the books on it are now getting quite old. But not so old to be considered modern classics yet. Nor so transient to be skipped for something more enduring. Anyway, this year I will read Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho which is still wrapped in plastic with the R18 label from when I first purchased it.

Every year I ask my wife to choose a book for my list. Frankly if she had her way she would select every book I read. This year she has chosen White Noise by Don DeLillo. I was already working my way through some postmodernists. I had read The Crying of Lot 49 and V by Thomas Pynchon. I had not written reviews of them because I had little idea what to say about them.

Having read those two of Pynchon’s, I am moving up to read his Gravity’s Rainbow next year.

So far, postmodernism is not a genre I am enjoying. And yet, a couple of my favourite novels are usually categorised as postmodern – the previously mentioned The Blind Assassin and my overall favourite novel Catch-22. Perhaps it is a matter of degrees and the novels I like a more softly-postmodern?

Another book from my wife’s collection I plan on reading this year is The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper.

Each year I try to read some ‘Indian’ fiction. By which I mean some fiction set in India or by an Indian writer. This year I am reading The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh. Set in Burma it will be the fifth novel I have read by Ghosh who has become one of my favourite writers.

Finally for fiction, each year I select a book to reread. Either a favourite or something I feel deserves a second chance. This year I will read one of my favourites – George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four.

But alongside Nineteen Eighty Four I will read a couple of non-fiction books. I will read Wifedom by Anna Funder – a bestseller on Orwell’s wife Eileen. Published last year it will be easily the most recent book I will read next year! I will also read Christopher Hitchens’ book on Orwell – Why Orwell Matters.

Having now opened the non-fiction door let me continue. My history book for the year will be Europe’s Tragedy by Peter H Wilson. As above, I read the excellent The German Genius by Peter Watson this year. If I had known the role the Thirty Years War had played in the creation of modern Germany, I might have read Europe’s Tragedy first.

My science book for the year will be The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It is a history/biography of cancer. I also have a coffee-table book on science edited by Adam Hart-Davis that I may try to sneak in.

My philosophy book for the year will be The Crisis of the European Mind by Paul Hazard which is a history of the early Enlightenment.

I also try to add a non-fiction book each year that is not easily categorisable. Next year that book will be The Naked Jape by Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves. Carr is one of my favourite standups. The book is a look at what makes people laugh and why. Should be entertaining.

Finally, to pair with my ‘Indian’ fiction category. I have an ‘Indian’ non-fiction one. This year I will be reading Nine Lives by William Dalrymple. It is a ‘search for the sacred in modern India’. Beyond that I will have to read it to see what it is really about.

There are a few more titles I would like to slip in this year. And who knows if publishers send a couple more my way. But this is already a long list by my standards and I will have to make the effort to maintain the privileged position reading has in my life to achieve it.

I already have reading lists for the next four years figured out – up to the end of 2029. Each as ambitious for me as 2025’s. But I mentioned changing the formula and adding some new genres. I have long neglected science fiction and fantasy in most of my reading. Perhaps it is time to slip them in? Hmmm.