2025: Reading in Review

Kicking off the new year with reflections and remarks on my previous year of reading

By Caleb Aguirre

Some quick stats

41 books — 31 fiction and 10 non-fiction (memoirs, true non-fiction books, and a couple works of philosophy).

The shortest book I read was Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri. The longest book I read this year was probably my re-read of The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen.

The author whose books I read the most of was Philip Roth (4, more on that later) with Milan Kundera making a respectable second place finish.

Let’s begin with our first category.

You can’t call that a book

I’d like to start my year in review with reading materials that go beyond books in honor of our endeavor to launch an alternative space for literature and criticism. I cherish the publications that I’ve found to put out reliably high quality, thoughtful, and insightful work. Needless to say they’ve earned their own category among the books and novels I’ve read this year.

I had the distinct (and maybe perverse?) pleasure of reading The Point Magazine’s issue on violence in the Jackson County Detention Center while waiting on jail staff to escort my clients. This can take a long time. The jail—JCDC specifically and incarceration as a concept—is existentially frustrating and violent. My job at the public defender’s office has made me particularly susceptible to René Girard’s arguments against Foucault’s and Maoist militants’ conceptualization of “popular justice” in the 60s.

A sense of justice—and the forms of writing that are best equipped to discuss injustice—is in large part why I am excited to keep reading Equator magazine as we go into 2026. I am amazed by one essay connecting the Italian Renaissance to Abu Ghraib, and I hope that The Mirror can house writing like that in the near future.

A quick shout out to Claudia Polo’s substack, Cocinita Virtual, which has helped continue my Spanish education while I’m back in the US. Reading excerpts of Waqcuant in Spanish todavía es demasiado difícil para mí, but I enjoy the challenge.

The boys try spirituality

There are a few books I read that I’d like to lump together here because they all tackle the “big life questions” and have a fun time while trying to define our responsibilities to others while we’re alive and what happens after death.

Leave Society by Tao Lin is hilarious, all while it feels like Lin is never really trying too hard. That isn’t to say that his autobiographical main character, Li, isn’t doing absolutely everything he can to solve his chronic pain and the tensions of living at home with his parents. There’s a great part of the novel when Li retells a Daoist story from the Zhuangzi: upon seeing some fish in a river, the philosopher remarked to his friend that the fish looked happy. “You’re not a fish, so how do you know they’re happy?” his friend asked. “You’re not me,” Zhuangzi replied, “so how do you know I don’t?” This all makes sense once you start to think a little too much about reincarnation and begin to remember that you were once a manatee in a past-life regression.
Morning Star and The Wolves of Eternity, both by Karl Ove Knausgaard, are two novels that ask you, dear secular reader, to suspend your disbelief. This is a task most good novels ask the reader to do, but I often strain to relinquish control when novels are particularly fantastical. At no point in these novels did I feel myself hesitate going along with Knausgaard’s plots, even when people in Norway, for no reason at all, suddenly stop dying. This is partly because his language has the tendency to hypnotize, and the cast of characters in the books were endlessly entertaining.

To read on the train from Vienna to Prague

An elegant copy of Kairos I forced my friend Gracie to buy

A niche interest of mine this year was learning about the history and reading the political writings from the former Soviet states during the Cold War era. I never learned about the Cold War in high school and, like most Americans, my geographical (much less historical) understanding of everything east of Germany is hazy at best. Traveling to Prague and Vienna, seeing the “yoke of history,” if you will, still visible in urban life, reinstilled my belief that our human memory can be preserved.

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck is the book that started this obsession of mine. The novel is filled with cultural references and names particular to East Germany before the fall of the Wall. Somehow not knowing these references added to my absorption into its environment and took nothing away from the doomed relationship the plot centers around. And the form: is it a spy novel? a romance? a confession? You decide. Recommended to me by my friend, Maria, I hope to keep passing along this divine reading experience to you all.
The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel is where my political curiosity took me after Erpenbeck. Havel also came to me from a friend’s recommendation (thank you, Lauren). Havel has the unique gift as a political thinker to craft metaphors that clearly illustrate a profound moral sensibility. Part of my attachment to Havel is due to the fact that I envy his political position, where his country was tasked with reforming socialism while we’re preparing for a further devolution of capitalism past neoliberalism.
The Anthropologists by Aysegul Savas best responds to the “train” part of the category out of the other books. It is a very digestible novel, in the best sense of the word, and ideal for travel. The characters can feel a little hollow, and the author makes a deliberate choice to remove a lot of physical identifiers. However, this can also be liberating–as the reader, I began to attach myself and those in my life onto these characters because Savas leaves you that room to play around with.

If I’m recommending you this book it means I trust you

Two pages from Another Way of Telling

These books aren’t for everyone. They’re composed of distinct tones and are imperfect as whole works. But because they are exactly what they want to be, and are quite unapologetic for being what they are, they are bound to not sit well with some readers (hell, you can put the following category inside this one, too).

Mating by Norman Rush. Rush is a master of the one-liner, of making you start a quotation notebook because he has so many bangers. For example: “I have a vulgar marxist reaction to the rich, which is part of me. Not that I am a marxist of any kind. I would have made a wonderful marxist if I’d been born into it, probably, which is the only way it could have stuck. Too bad for marxism.” And the punch of this inner dialogue is only heightened in the context of the often absurd, and relatable, situations the main character finds herself in.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera continues my ongoing romance with Kundera from last year (this book is also an honorable mention in the previous category). It’s also a book so well named that I don’t need to tell you what it’s about. To Kundera and his former state Czechoslovakia, the physical and emotional acts of laughter and forgetting are subjects to be taken seriously. There is perhaps no author better equipped to write about how these acts are embodied in and integral to our political and cultural bodies.
Another Way of Telling by John Berger, with photos from Jean Mohr, is the first “book” I’ve read of its kind. Berger does his theorizing and Mohr does his photographing—the result is a stunning combination of theory and praxis. I found this book to be a rare example of a compelling work that tells you exactly what it’s doing as it’s doing it. The voice of John Berger in his writing—his trademarked sparse style—is so sturdy it could serve as the foundation to build whole communities atop of.

My year of Roth and relaxation

Let me just address the accusations all at once: The Human Stain, Portnoy’s Complaint, When She Was Good, and Operation Shylock (read in that order) is indeed evidence of a growing addiction. I need to seek licensed medical help. Frankly, it’s embarrassing, and I put this category near the bottom of the review for a reason.

In all seriousness, I believe Roth is a genius and the greatest satirist I’ve ever read. I think his novels are evidence that comedy is an essential form to see and criticize our (lack of) humanity. My favorite of the bunch is The Human Stain, and Roth’s piece in the New Yorker–published after the release of the novel–not only proves his prescience, but the very real absurdity of the choices we humans have to make. As I’m writing this, I’m about to finish Operation Shylock. I can’t form any thoughts about it yet because I am too dumbstruck. This is a good feeling to have.

To read with commies over a cortado

I told my students this was George Orwell

Before moving to Spain I read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia–an excellent memoir that is a true product of its era, but one I can’t include in this list because I read it in 2024. Orwell served as my English navigator-in-spirit for a while during my first few months on the Iberian peninsula. By pure chance, when I was visiting Barcelona with my partner, we were resting in some sequestered square after miles of walking when we noticed the square’s name, Plaza de George Orwell. Today it is touristy and a bit cheugy; sadly, a sign of the times.

Familiar Stranger by Stuart Hall is quite an odd memoir. Hall, the Caribbean cultural historian and marxist, was known for perpetually editing his manuscripts. The editor of the memoir noted in his preface that Hall was still demanding changes to the memoir, even when old age prevented him from writing the memoir himself. He died before he could see the final product, but I think the result is a shiny and dynamic mix of familial and societal history, a form that is informed by his personal history just as much as his politics.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm is a shoe-in for this category. It’s also a rare example of an explicitly didactic or polemical book that had me nodding up and down with very few moments of hesitation. Malm’s clear and direct voice is best suited to argue for an urgent response to a climate crisis perpetuated by capitalism.
When the Clock Broke by John Ganz, like many nonfiction books, demonstrates that reality can be weirder than fiction. The cast of characters–mainly political actors and pundits of the late 20th century conservative fringe (though Ganz would argue about just how fringe they were)–can’t be called absurd caricatures, because they embody the logical and moral destination of this type of conservative project. Also, Ganz’s Substack is a must read if you want to watch Ross Douthat get torn apart.

Absolute, indisputable classics

When and if I do start earning first-edition and rare book money, these are the titles I’ll be searching for. I dream of owning these novels with odd or beautiful covers, whose spines should be treated delicately. As of today, their spines are broken from reading, but they still serve as the pillars of my personal library.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky blew my mind. I picked up this book because Knausgaard summarized it somewhere as a novel every twenty-something year-old about to make a consequential life choice should read—because the novel’s main character is a twenty-something year-old who makes the most extreme of life choices. Brothers Karamazov is the next book on my reading list because I miss Dostoevsky’s dialogue and his bleak Moscow. Three cheers for Dostoevsky.
Hiroshima by John Hersey terrified me. I now live in Kansas City, where effigies of Harry S. Truman (local “hero”) adorn street names and museums. Because of Hersey, every time I see Truman’s name I curse quietly under my breath. Even if you don’t care for books that detail the horrors of what man is capable of, pick up a book of Hersey’s for his incredible grasp on the English language. A Single Pebble by Hersey will do just fine.
The Years by Annie Ernaux is the best memoir I’ve ever read because it does more than what a traditional memoir tries to do. Ernaux is most keenly interested in how her personal history should be negotiated concurrently with her country’s history. Her admission that mid-twentieth century France is just as important to her life story as her personal sovereignty is. If you want French culture, politics, and romance, this is for you.

Honorable mentions I feel bad about not categorizing

The Expendable Man by Dorothy Hughes
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O’Toole
Every Day is For the Thief by Teju Cole
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (and The Collected Essays of James Baldwin)
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James
On Certainty by Wittgenstein
White Noise by Don Delillo
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
No Man is an Island by Thomas Merton and Merton’s essays on nonviolence

The works I feel less bad about not categorizing

The Crusades of Cesar Chavez
America, América by Greg Grandin
Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog
Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick
Immortality by Milan Kundera

Caleb Aguirre is a founding editor of The Mirror. He lives in Kansas City.