The books I enjoyed most this year, 2025.

War & Peace.

War & Peace, Tolstoy. Damn this was superb. Like The Golden Bowl last year, it gets a category of its own. I was lost to the world for a few days as I read this, other than the messages I sent to a friend who was reading it at the same time. Tolstoy’s greatness is made out of his clarity: he gives you everything you need. There is nothing hidden, implied, or “unreliable”. He shows you everything that history is made of. This is the greatest, grandest way of telling a story—the vivid, cinematic, expansive realism of which so few writers are really capable. Tolstoy is so clear, so precise, so plain that he can tell you any story he wants—even one of the largest stories of all. Some people tell me they don’t have time to read War & Peace, which is complete nonsense. It’s just the same as reading four or five “regular size” novels, something they are sure to achieve. If you really cannot face the monument, Tolstoy’s short fiction is excellent, especially Polikúshka. (I also read Master & Man, Confession, and various of the stories.) But really, there is very little to match the immersive experience of War & Peace. It has been said many times that one does not read this book, one lives it. When I was seventeen, I lived with Anna Karenina (book of books) and this year I had a similar experience with War & Peace. O! Pierre! O! Natasha! When Peggy Noonan read this novel, she wrote about what William F. Buckley Jr. said when he finally read Moby Dick in middle age—to think I might have died without reading it! Quite right. If you might die without reading Tolstoy, then stop making excuses and do what you know you ought to do, even if it is the short fiction only... So many scenes live with me now—the bear, the old count dying, the ball, Pierre at the train station, Natasha packing the cart in the fire, poor little Nikolai confused and innocent at war. They are all so real to me. O, this is history—this is life!

Non-Fiction 2025

Open Socrates, Agnes Callard, a genuinely exciting book of philosophy that made me take much more seriously the role of conversation in my life—not something I neglected, exactly, but something which ...