2025 Year in Review: Books

Happy New Year! It’s become my tradition the past couple years to write a little recap of all the new-to-me books of the past year. That seems like a fine tradition to uphold, so here I am for my 2025 bookish year in review…better late than never, they say.

(Just as a disclaimer, by-the-by: just because I list a book here doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily appropriate for all age ranges (at least one of the books here, in fact, I’m glad I didn’t read as a teenager), and even if I have positive things to say about a particular book, that doesn’t necessarily mean I approve everything about it.)

1. All Things Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot

Why had I entered this profession? I could have gone in for something easier and gentler—like coalmining or lumberjacking.
~

Maybe it was because I read this coming off of Ben-Hur, which I had to force myself through, but although I always like James Herriot I felt especially pulled in by this one…and for some reason it made me extremely emotional. There are other books this year that made me tear up, but I think this is the only one that made me actually weep…and multiple times, too. I think the way that it’s written is a large part of the reason it struck such an emotional chord with me; there are numerous truly sad stories – both regarding the animals and the people – and it’s written with such an obvious feeling and regard for his fellow suffering creatures that just gets you.

On a lighter note, I found it hilarious that I happened to be up to Chapter 3 when I brought the book with me to the dentist’s waiting room. (I decided to wait to read the chapter until after the appointment, and it was a wise decision.)

2. Poetics by Aristotle

With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.
~

Read for school

I will admit to you freely that I approached this with some trepidation. But it was quite interesting! Aristotle was really talking more about tragedy than the poetics per se (but Noddy tells me that the Poetics is probably just the notes of a student of Aristotle’s, not something he wrote himself, so perhaps that was all the student bothered to write down), and though I don’t agree with everything I think there were a lot of fascinating insights. I think I agree more with Aristotle’s definition of tragedy than with his few comments on comedy; what Aristotle classifies as comedy would nowadays be more accurately described as specifically satire, I believe.

3. The Ball and the Cross by G.K. Chesterton

“Turnbull, we cannot trust the ball to be always a ball; we cannot trust reason to be reasonable. In the end the great terrestrial globe will go quite lop-sided, and only the cross will stand upright.”
~

I’ll admit that Chesterton’s style isn’t usually my thing…but this one really clicked with me; I quite liked it! I liked both the main characters, I loved their dynamic, and I really liked what Chesterton was saying with them…that the staunch atheist has more of a true sense of reality than the lukewarm and indifferent Christian, because at least he thinks that the idea of God is worth caring about. And as I’ve mentioned many times before, I love character-driven stories, so I loved all the time we spent just pottering along with McIan and Turnbull and watching them interact.

All that being said, I didn’t like the ending. It felt rather unfair, to have all the rest of the story be this leisurely character-y type thing, then suddenly bang! we’re in a dystopian novel now. (And I know that suddenly getting all Weird with the endings of his stories is a distinctly Chestertonian thing…but I still don’t like it.)

4. Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus

“I put men first in pity, then found there was none left for me.”
~

I admit, as with Aristotle’s Poetics, I approached this with some trepidation – but once again, I really enjoyed it! It’s all dialogue with practically no action, but I didn’t mind that. Prometheus is an immensely sympathetic protagonist, and it’s fascinating to mull over how one can view him as a type or foreshadowing of Christ. Prometheus is, in essence, punished for his love for humanity – and he aids mankind, knowing that he will be punished for it. C.S. Lewis talks about how you can see pre-Christian cultures trying to dimly grasp at the truth, and I think that’s very true. (And while you could argue that Prometheus’s punishment is just, since he knew he was disobeying the will of the gods, I would disagree; Zeus is not God, and is not in any sense ‘godly’ as we know the term, but is just a tyrant who happens to currently be on top of the heap – as is exemplified with his treatment of poor Io – and is therefore not deserving of any obedience or reverence.)

5. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

“How dreadful the knowledge of the truth can be
When there’s no help in truth.”
~

Read for school

Again, this was quite engaging and interesting. Even though more technically happened than did in Prometheus Bound (quite a lot happened here, in fact) I think I still enjoyed Prometheus Bound more. But it was quite a fascinating read nevertheless, and brings up some very sobering food for thought about trying to run from your fate, and how an error (like killing a random stranger because of road rage? Oedipus my dude, what were you thinking on that one?) can have immense consequences you could never have imagined.

6. Eldorado by Baroness Orczy

“…you must leave Paris with Hastings on your difficult and dangerous task.”
“And if I refuse?” retorted Armand.
“You would be offering a tainted name and tarnished honor to the woman you pretend to love.”
“And you insist upon my obedience?”
“By the oath which I hold from you.”
“But this is cruel – inhuman!”
“Honour, my good Armand, is often cruel and seldom human. He is a godlike taskmaster, and we who call ourselves men are all of us his slaves.”
~

I definitely liked this one much better than I Will Repay. Sadly, I think I just don’t like Baroness Orczy’s style as much as I used to – she can wax a little too melodramatic for my tastes – but there was still a lot to like about this one. I was never an enormous Sir Percy fan (not that I ever had anything against him), but I was very impressed with him in this one – with his honor and loyalty, of course, but above all with his EXTREME patience and compassion toward someone who (in my opinion) did not deserve it one bit.

Which brings me to what really annoyed me about the book – SPOILERS I was sad that Armand was so, so intensely annoying, childlike, and immature in this. Being in love is no excuse. Yes, being in love makes you do stupid things, but you still have the free will to not, y’know, BREAK YOUR SOLEMN OATHS and BETRAY YOUR CLOSEST FRIENDS and things like that. I also don’t like the fact that they covered up Armand’s misdemeanors from Margeurite. I understand it – and again, I think it speaks very well of Percy that he wanted to hide it from her – but I’ve always hated the trope of people in a close relationship having a huge secret like that that’s just kept hidden forever. I think it would have been the right, manly thing for Armand to openly confess to his sister everything he’d done, and to say, “I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness or trust ever again, but from now on I will do everything in my power to reinstate myself in your good opinion by my future good conduct.” And yes, it’s true Margeurite would probably never be able to look at him the same way or feel the same way about him again, but, hey, that’s what we readers were already put through. END SPOILERS

7. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
~

Read for school

Hamlet is one of those stories where you just sit there at the end and wonder what exactly you just witnessed…and while I am perhaps overly practical-minded, I don’t really like finishing a book and not knowing what I’m supposed to make of it. That being said, of course Hamlet is a great piece of literature, and it’s fascinating to think and talk about. I actually don’t like Hamlet himself much as a character…while I certainly appreciate that he was in a rotten position, I just didn’t find him a very likeable person. Horatio is undoubtedly the MVP. I felt quite a bit for Gertrude, actually, although she certainly made a few Inadvisable Decisions…I actually rather liked Polonius, too. Yes, he was a pompous busybody, but I never felt that he really had malice in him. Plus he was funny.

8. The Misanthrope by Molière

“The honour of gainsaying has so many charms for him, that he very often takes up the cudgels against himself; he combats his own sentiments as soon as he hears them from other folks’ lips.”
~

Read for school

This was so much fun; I absolutely loved it! The dialogue was great…I was laughing outright more than once. (The Richard Wilbur translation was especially fun.) I normally don’t like satires where it seems like the whole point is to poke fun at people – it feels mean-spirited – but this one feels light enough and good-natured enough that I don’t mind it. And it has a decent message, too; Alceste, the misanthrope himself, seems to be just as much an object of satire as his frivolous beloved Celimene, and Philinte and Eliante (the MVPs of this story) manage to find a balance between the blustering rudeness of Alceste and the shallow flattery of Celimene by means of the virtue of prudence.

9. Silence by Shūsaku Endō

Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt.
~

I have mixed thoughts on this one. It was certainly a beautifully written, profoundly thought-out book, and if it had had a different ending, I think I would have liked it a lot. SPOILERS But as it is, it seems to be portrayed as the right decision that Rodrigues apostatized…to be saying that it was the necessary way of overcoming his pride and self-love, and I can’t agree with that. I do absolutely understand the horrendous weight of the decision, knowing that other innocent people were being tortured if he refused…but I simply cannot agree that denying Christ was the correct solution to that. Both for himself and for those poor innocent devout Christians, his apostatizing was a worse evil than their own physical suffering – many of them would probably have told him so if they could. That being said, it’s an absolutely horrible situation no matter what you do or how you look at it, and I certainly don’t think that just passively sitting there while his fellow men were being tortured around him would be the right decision either. If Rodrigues could have found some way to give his life for the people and for the Faith like his friend did, without causing anyone else any more suffering, I think that would have been the best option under the circumstances. END SPOILERS

10. King Lear by William Shakespeare 

“You think I’ll weep?
No, I’ll not weep.
I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or e’re I’ll weep.—O Fool, I shall go mad.”
~

Read for school

This was more to my personal taste than Hamlet was, both because I felt I understood it better and because I felt for the characters more. Lear’s whole trajectory was absolutely heartrending. Yes, he brought his sorrows on himself, but there was such a vulnerability about him – such a desperate longing for love which so utterly saps his judgment – that your heart just bleeds for him. And while there are plenty of despicable characters, there are actually quite a lot of good ones too – of course Cordelia, but Kent and Edgar and Albany and Cornwall’s heroic unnamed servant are all amazing too.

11. The Jeweler’s Shop by Karol Wojtyla (Pope St. John Paul II)

“The Bridegroom is coming down this street and walks every street! How am I to prove to you that you are the bride? One would now have to pierce a layer of your soul, as one pierces the layer of brushwood and soil when looking for a source of water in the green of a wood. You would then hear Him speak: beloved, you do not know how deeply you are Mine, how much you belong to My love and My suffering – because to love means to give life through death; to love means to let gush a spring of the water of life into the depths of the soul, which burns or smolders, and cannot burn out.”
~

Read for school

This was like nothing I’ve ever read before. It’s introspective meditations on love in the format – more or less – of a play. But it’s not really like a play, either…the characters are mostly just monologuing, and there’s almost no action within the story. I really don’t know how to describe it. In any case, it was really fascinating to read – there’s so many profound things in it and so much to chew on. I feel like there’s lots and lots of symbolism and such that I missed on my first read, so I should probably read it again sometime.

12. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A convict’s thoughts are no freer than he is: they come back to the same place, worry over the same thing continually. Will they poke around in my mattress and find my bread ration? Can I get off work if I report sick tonight? Will the captain be put in the hole, or won’t he? How did Tsezar get his hands on his warm vest? Must have greased somebody’s palm in the storeroom, what else?
~

Read for school

This was also fascinating, in a completely different way. It’s set in a Soviet labor camp (inspired by Solzhenitsyn’s own time there) and I was therefore expecting it to be a heartwrenching read…but it actually wasn’t? Of course the conditions they were in were horrible, but the narrative was not at all trying to pull on your heart-strings. Shukhov’s narration is very philosophical and matter-of-fact, and throughout there is a very strong sense of the strength of the human spirit, and how men can get used to the worst conditions and manage to make do and carry on in them.

13. Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

“I do try to say, God’s Will be done, sir,” said the Squire, looking up at Mr. Gibson for the first time, and speaking with more life in his voice; “but it’s harder to be resigned than happy people think.”
~

I think Elizabeth Gaskell excels at characterization…and characterization was pretty much all this book was, so that was serendipitous. It was very long, and not much technically ‘happened,’ but I didn’t mind that…I may have liked it more than North and South, in fact, though N&S was perhaps objectively better. I liked most of the characters – including Cynthia, though heavens, she had her faults – but I went back and forth between liking Mr. Gibson and being annoyed and repulsed by him, and good HEAVENS, was Hyacinth annoying. I really, really felt for Squire Hamley. He was (again) very flawed, and he was always making everything way harder for himself…but I think he really did mean well, and I found him rather endearing in a crusty sort of way.

The funny thing is that I went through the whole book planning on watching the mini-series once I’d finished, but then when I saw some pictures from the mini-series after I was done I was horrified at how far everyone but Molly was from my mental image…and I lost the courage to watch it.

14. Life of Christ by Fulton Sheen

But God warned the Wise Men not to return to Herod,

They returned home another way. – Matthew 2:12

No one who ever meets Christ with a good will returns the same way as he came.
~

I like Fulton Sheen a lot. I’ve mentioned before that I think of Fulton Sheen as being like a sort of compacter and slightly less user-friendly C.S. Lewis, and I stand by that assessment. There’s so much richness in his writing – so much to ponder and digest. On the other hand, I’ll admit that sometimes I can find his style a little dense and a little less engaging than it could be…but that’s probably largely the fault of me and my attention-span.

15. Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this:
“Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.”
I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
~

You know how some books are so introspective, so gently, wistfully melancholic, in such a true way that they just make you ache? This book is like that for me. It’s narrated by an elderly woman looking back at her life, and it feels exactly how you would expect that to feel…there’s a sort of indescribable contented sadness to the narration that colors the whole story. It makes you feel like you’re viewing the characters and situations from a distance – which annoys me in a way, because you never feel like you’re able to really get close to the characters, but I think it fits very well with what the book is trying to do. I’m not really sure yet how I feel about the book personally, but I absolutely think it’s worth reading and probably re-reading.

16. He Leadeth Me by Fr. Walter Ciszek

We go along, taking for granted that tomorrow will be very much like today, comfortable in the world we have created for ourselves, secure in the established order we have learned to live with, however imperfect it may be, and give little thought to God at all. Somehow, then, God must contrive to break through those routines of ours and remind us once again, like Israel, that we are ultimately dependent only upon Him…that His we are and that we must look to Him and turn to Him in everything. Then it is, perhaps, that He must allow our whole world to be turned upside down in order to remind us it is not our permanent abode or final destiny, to bring us to our senses and restore our sense of values, to turn our thoughts once more to Him—even if at first our thoughts are questioning and full of reproaches.
~

This is the true and very moving story of Fr. Ciszek’s time in the Soviet labor camps in Siberia. It isn’t so much a biography as a sort of spiritual diary – a chronicle of his spiritual life during this time. His insights are somehow immensely relatable while also arising from situations that we will almost certainly (God willing) never go through, and coming from a man who I can pretty confidently say is much holier than I am. The main insight I got from this was that every moment of every day can be offered as an act of trust to God – that everything that happens to us, whether good or bad, can be accepted tranquilly and peacefully, since it’s all in God’s Hands, and offered back to Him as an act of our trust in Him. (Which isn’t really a new insight, but it can be very helpful to have things presented in a new or different way sometimes.)

17. Leave It to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse

“This,” said Psmith, “is becoming more and more gratifying every moment. It seems to me that you and I were made for each other. I am your best friend’s best friend and we both have a taste for stealing other people’s jewelry. I cannot see how you can very well resist the conclusion that we are twin-souls.”
~

There were pros and cons to this book. On the one hand, it features Lord Emsworth, Freddie Threepwood, and the Efficient Baxter, and it is written by P.G. Wodehouse, all of which can only make it delightful. On the other hand, it features Psmith, who, to put it bluntly, I dislike. He seems just the sort of self-important arrogant sort who would usually get ridiculed in the Wodehouse universe, and I did not find him charming or endearing at all. I was most disappointed in Eve for liking him; she seemed like a perfectly reasonable, likeable sort in every other respect and she deserved far better than him. Their romance felt neither cute nor natural to me. So while I enjoyed reading this, I doubt I’ll be reading any more of the Psmith books.

18. A Father Who Keeps His Promises: God’s Covenant Love in Scripture by Scott Hahn

As the Messiah, Jesus Christ is priest, prophet and king. He is the new Adam. He is the seed of Abraham. He is the new Moses. He is the Son of David. He is the Son of God. He is the Lamb of God. Jesus had to be all these things and more in order to fulfill all of the promises made by His Father. And He did.
~

I had to read parts of this for school, and I found it so interesting that I decided to read the rest of it on my own time. While I’ve certainly known and appreciated the connections between the Old and New Testaments for as long as I can remember, it’s only recently that I’ve really started to understand how to look at the Bible as one cohesive whole…I’ve begun seeing in a fresh way how it’s not just that there are connections between the Old and the New, they’re the same story, and the New completes the Old. There’s lots of really fascinating insights about that in this book, and I think it’s on the whole very well-written and well-researched. One thing I would complain about is that – while I don’t mind the book being written in an informal style – chapter headings and whatnot occasionally verge into facetiousness, which I didn’t go for.

19. On the Shortness of Life by Seneca

It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. … The life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.
~

Read for school

On the one hand, the man has a good point – why do we waste our time on frivolous pursuits when we’re just going to die and all that time and effort will be utterly wasted? Seneca has a very engaging writing style, and this was very easy to read. On the other hand, rather ironically, he took about ten times longer to say what he had to say than he needed to. He could have summed up his point in a few sentences.

20. Reflections on the Psalms by C.S. Lewis

It seems to me appropriate, almost inevitable, that when that great Imagination which in the beginning, for Its own delight and for the delight of men and angels and (in their proper mode) of beasts, had invented and formed the whole world of Nature, submitted to express Itself in human speech, that speech should sometimes be poetry. For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.
~

Sad to say, this is one of the very few works of C.S. Lewis I’ve read which disappointed me. He seemed much too willing to dismiss the human authors of the Psalms – to imply that what they were saying was not divine, was sinful even, but we had to comb through their words and pick the divine out of it. That’s how it seemed to me, anyway. He was mostly saying this in regard to the ‘vengeance Psalms,’ and while I quite agree that we should not be taking away from these Psalms the idea that we should ask God to pour vengeance on anyone who’s ever hurt or slighted us, I don’t think there’s necessarily reason to think that the human authors of the Psalms are actually saying that. As Lewis himself points out, the Psalms are poetry, and they therefore make use of poetic language, poetic hyperbole, &c. They use concrete images to make their point, and the main ‘point’ which is present in the ‘vengeance Psalms’ is that God will right injustice and punish evil – which is a perfectly legitimate thing to desire. Of course God could take a human being’s sinful attitude and bring good out of it, and for all I know maybe that was the case here; I just don’t think it’s fair to assume that these authors must necessarily have been sinful, prideful people (or any more so than the rest of us, anyway).

(There were plenty of very good insights in the book too, of course, but this is what made the biggest impression on me, as you can probably tell.)

21. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien

For if joyful is the fountain that rises in the sun, its springs are in the wells of sorrow unfathomable at the foundations of the Earth.
~

I have to admit…reading this cemented my suspicion that I am not in fact a Tolkien nerd. I like The Lord of the Rings very much, but…I must shamefacedly confess that I found this pretty hard to get through. Beren and Luthien were cool, though. And I found the story of whats-her-name marrying the depressed creep in the woods interesting. And Finrod Felagund was pretty amazing! In fact, many of the stories and characters in it were very interesting; the work as a whole just didn’t grip me. (And to be fair, I know that Tolkien never meant to publish The Silmarillion as it is – it’s sort of a compilation of his various unpublished mythologies of Middle-earth. So maybe if he’d polished it up and gotten it into more of a novel format, I would have liked it better.)

Oh, but what on earth was up with Turin’s story?? What was the point of all that, beyond “don’t be Turin whatever you do”??

22. The Pearl by John Steinbeck

And Juana, sitting by the fire hole, watched him with questioning eyes, and when he had buried his pearl she asked, “Who do you fear?”
Kino searched for a true answer, and at last he said, “Everyone.” And he could feel a shell of hardness drawing over him.
~

Read for school

This is one of those books that I can wholeheartedly say was quite well-done and well-written…and that I have no intention of ever reading again. It’s what you might call a downer. Its sole purpose is to be a downer. And that’s all well and good, but I don’t feel like I need to sit through it more than once.

23. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
~

I finished this in September, and I’m still not sure what I think of it. It’s one of those books, again, where I finished it and said, “well, okay then…but what was the point, exactly?” and I still don’t feel like I’ve been able to answer that question. I didn’t exactly like any of the characters – though George Wilson was the one I felt sorriest for – and I don’t think it’s a case where one person is clearly ‘in the right.’ SPOILERS Obviously Tom was a total jerk, Daisy was thoughtlessly and carelessly selfish, and Gatsby – in my opinion – didn’t really love Daisy, but only the idea of her that he had created in his mind. It was unfair and cruel of him to try to force Daisy to say she had never loved Tom, for instance, and the reason he was doing it was that he was trying to bend her to the image of her in his head…which, of course, didn’t work out well. END SPOILERS That’s probably part of the point, though. I would like to hear other people’s thoughts about this book, because I feel like I’m missing something. I know some interpret it as being nihilistic, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.

24. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
~

Read for school

I am not at all a horror person, so I’d likely never have read this if I didn’t have to. I didn’t actually find it very scary, though; it was more just frustrating. Here’s the thing: Frankenstein himself – not his monster – is one of the most idiotic people who ever walked upon the page. I felt quite bad for his monster; if Frankenstein hadn’t been an idiot and abandoned the creature he created as soon as he made it (seriously, how irresponsible can you possibly get?? Apart from what he owed to his creation, he had absolutely no idea what it was going to do if he just left it alone. For all he knew it could go out and murder the whole city the moment his back was turned), the monster wouldn’t have become embittered and everything could maybe have turned out better. Obviously the fact still remains that Frankenstein’s trying to create his own life was an act of utter pride and trying to essentially ‘by-pass’ God, and was therefore inherently wrong…but God can always bring good out of evil, and I think if Frankenstein had still repented of his errors but then also not been a total moron, things could have been okay.

I also couldn’t help but notice that it wasn’t always that well-written…but Mary Shelley was only nineteen at the time, so we can cut her some slack.

25. 1984 by George Orwell

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
~

Read for school

To be perfectly honest, if I didn’t have to read it for school I don’t think I would ever have read 1984 either. Dystopian fiction is also not my Thing. This was highly engrossing, of course, and made a lot of good points about power and control and all that. I think I have a much less cynical outlook on human nature than Orwell does, though. I don’t think it would be possible for humanity’s potential for good to be so utterly crushed as he portrays. For a real-life example, look at Nazi death camps. Even in the most horrific and degrading conditions you still found people who chose to rise above their circumstances – like St. Maxmilian Kolbe, who deliberately chose to take the place of a man sentenced to death.

26. Crossing the Threshold of Hope by Pope St. John Paul II

For Christians, the world is God’s creation, redeemed by Christ. It is in the world that man meets God. Therefore he does not need to attain such an absolute detachment in order to find himself in the mystery of his deepest self. For Christianity, it does not make sense to speak of the world as a “radical” evil, since at the  beginning of the world we find God the Creator who loves His creation, a God who “gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life” (Jn 3:16).
~

Apparently a reporter had sent Pope St. John Paul questions for an interview, and while the interview fell through, he still wanted to answer the questions…and that’s how this book came to be. I liked the book a lot, and thought there was a lot of very good and profound insights. However, some of Pope St. John Paul’s answers are what I might call ‘philosopher’s answers’…they were very interesting and made good points, but didn’t quite answer the question, in my opinion. (I mean no disrespect to either Pope St. John Paul II or to philosophers by saying this, by the way, nor am I saying that philosophers are incapable of answering questions. I’m just saying that I am more practically minded, and I therefore prefer very practical and direct answers to things.)

27. Random Harvest by James Tilton

“There’s only one thing more important… and that is, after you’ve done what you set out to do, to feel that it’s been worth doing.”
~

I’d wanted to watch the movie of this for awhile, having seen it highly recommended on Miss March’s blog, so when Noddy and I found a beautiful old copy of the book at our library book sale we decided to pick it up. The ending was perfection (and I do wish that I hadn’t had it given away for me; if you do decide to read it, make sure to 1) read all the way to the end and 2) don’t have anything spoiled for yourself). I’m not sure how much I liked the rest of it, though. I thought more of the story would be about our main character slowly recovering his memory – that it would be sort of like a mystery story, where they keep slowly finding more and more clues until they finally piece the whole story together at the end. Instead, he just suddenly recovered all his memories with a bang. It felt a little anti-climactic. And more importantly than that, I felt that there was a sort of bitterness, or cynicism, almost, to the story throughout. SPOILERS And I was very dissatisfied with Charles’ completely dismissive attitude toward Mrs. Ranier’s claims after he recovered his memory – it lowered him in my estimation quite a bit. END SPOILERS

28. How Much Land Does a Man Need?, The Two Old Men, God Sees the Truth But Waits, and What Men Live By by Leo Tolstoy

“God does not wish men to live apart and that is why He does not reveal to each man what he needs for himself alone. On the contrary, He wishes men to live in peace and harmony with each other and for this reason He has revealed to each and every one of them what all men need, as well as themselves.”
~

Read for school

I quite like Tolstoy’s style in short stories – it’s very direct, very simple, perhaps a little overly direct with the moral, but still so well-done. I didn’t like How Much Land Does a Man Need? as much, just because it was Pretty Doggone Dark, but I liked all the others quite a bit.

29. The Adventures of Sally by P.G. Wodehouse

“Oh, you would be all right if you had one thing,” said Sally.
Fillmore passed his qualities in swift review before his mental eye. Brains? Dash? Spaciousness? Initiative? All present and correct. He wondered where Sally imagined the hiatus to exist.
“One thing?” he said. “What’s that?”
“A nurse.”
~

I read this at Emi‘s recommendation, and quite enjoyed it! It had been too long since I read any Wodehouse, and that’s a fact. This is one of his earlier-ish books, and is more serious and less exclusively frothy than his style would later become. I was caught off guard by a few very hard-hitting insights about human nature, and the story actually made me tear up a few times – poor Sally went through so much. It was a little discombobulating, for such things to be happening in a Wodehouse story.

Whew, that was a lot! I do hope you’re not bored stiff at this point (my apologies if you are). I hope to get the movies segment of my 2025 year in review up before the end of the week, so you have even more blabbing from me to look forward to.

Have you read any of these books? Any thoughts on them? What are your new books of 2025?