hogglestock

I will probably finish at least one more book in the next 11 days, but given how bad I have been about posting anything here I am going to write this post while the iron is hot.

A rather slow reading year for sure. At 27 books read, that’s one more than my abysmal total of 26 in 2024. I have to go back to the 1990s to find a year with such low numbers. I don’t necessarily want to try for trip digits again. The four years I managed to crack 100 (110, 110, 104, and 122) were notable for not really enjoying the reads as much as I should have. But there is a lot of distance between 27 and 122. I think 2026 is to go back to my goal in 2004 which was to read at least 52 books in a year.

But enough about numbers. What were my top five titles for 2025? (You can look here for all the books I read in 2025.) Not surprisingly most of what I read and most of what I liked could all be considered vintage reading. But anyone who knows me knows I am stuck in the past.

The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore was probably the book I loved most this year. Back in 2005 I didn’t really get on too well with Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne but I gave him another chance in 2022 with The Great Victorian Collection which was quirky to say the least and ended up enjoying it quite a bit. So it was a delightful surprise when I settled into The Doctor’s Wife. Published in 1976 it focuses on an Irish woman who goes to visit a friend in France only to turn everything in her life on it’s ear. I loved every damn minute of it. I love a story where the protagonist busts through expectations in search of happiness. Easily my favorite kind of book. It also has me rethinking my earlier experience with Judith Hearne and am planning a reread to see what I may have missed the first time.

Many of you will recognize Geoffrey Household because of the NYRB Classics edition of Rogue Male. That was certainly my introduction to his work. From my experience so far, Household’s work consists primarily of vintage British spy thrillers. Of course they weren’t vintage when he wrote them, but they are delightfully old fashioned. A Rough Shoot, published in 1951, requires a bit of a leap at the beginning when everyday guy Roger Taine accidentally kills a guy hiding in a hedgerow and then another leap when the action moves from evading his crime to the center of a plot to bring fascism to the UK. Fast paced and short. I could read a million of these. (Incidentally, this was turned into a film written by Eric Ambler, a writer I love and have waxed rhapsodic about on myriad occasions.)

This past year a new bookstore has opened just three blocks from my new place in Minneapolis. Half cafe/half books, the stock is a little Gen Z for my tastes, but I did stumble across this McNally Editions copy of Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott. I knew nothing about it and ended up enjoying it immensely. Published in 1929, this book has it all, open marriage, divorce, abortion, casual sex, and all sorts. Quite a bit more tragic than The Doctor’s Wife, it still fits my sweet-spot for people finding agency in their own lives.

If you like Mapp and Lucia, you will like Paying Guests. Published in 1929 it may in fact have been the result of Benson coasting of the success of the Lucia series. But for fans this is a good thing. Instead of Major Benjy, there is Colonel Chase obsessed with his pedometer. Instead of a hanging committee refusing Lucia and Georgie’s little daubs there is a self-mounted solo exhibition that goes from failure to triumph. Throw in Christian Science, rubbers of bridge, and a lot of gossip and you get the picture. One caveat, unless you love bridge, there is an entire chapter you can skip.

Finally, something published this century! Mark Haber’s Saint Sebastian’s Abyss published in 2022 focuses on an art historian who has made his life’s work studying and writing about a single painting who is on his way from New York to Berlin to visit his ailing once best friend and colleague who also made his career studying and writing about the same painting. Stylistically, the writing has some charming quirks that could have easily caused me to set the book aside. In recent years I have almost entirely eschewed such creativity for more straightforward prose. I’m a literalist at heart but it felt good to read something that demanded ambiguity and suspension of disbelief. There is also a lot of repetition in the text that feels almost poetic and reinforces the singular nature of the careers of these two scholars obsessed with what I’m assuming is a fictional work of Dutch Renaissance art by Count Hugo Beckenbauer. It is only 130 pages but it is the kind of book you want to discuss with others who have read it.