The books I read in 2025

It wasn't my intent, but quite a few of these turned out to be about work, labour, and power. In every sense of the word, folks were on the hustle, either head-on as in The Hammer, Offshore, and The Soul of a New Machine, or more obliquely, as in Niko Stratis's The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman or Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto.

• Ancillary Mercy, by Ann Leckie
• Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie
• Audition, by Katie Kitamura
• Crook Manifesto, by Colson Whitehead
• The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, by Niko Stratis
• Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, by Dorian Lynskey
• Fellow Travelers, by Thomas Mallon
• The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor, by Hamilton Nolan
• The Library: A Fragile History, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen
• Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, by Brooke Harrington
• Pick a Colour, by Souvankham Thammavongsa
• Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, By Laura Spinney
• The Quakers: A Very Short Introduction, by Pink Dandelion
• The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder
• The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, by Trevor Owens
• Way Down Deep in the Belly of the Beast: A Memoir of the Seventies, by Douglas Fetherling
• When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion, by Julie Satow
• Will There Ever Be Another You, by Patricia Lockwood

Notes

• In Way Down Deep..., Douglas Fetherling calls Toronto of the 1970s “the world’s most cosmopolitan and least sophisticated city” and unfortunately it still feels witheringly accurate today.
• The Hammer and Offshore make for a bracing, though somewhat depressing, pairing. The decline of unionized labour and the rise of the (latest) plutocrat class are obviously linked in the abstract, but both of these books zoom in to the human-level dynamics — how people actually organize their workplaces now (or fail to), and how wealth managers actually conceal the tidal flows of capital that slosh around the globe from one tax haven to the next. They’re also both satisfyingly lean, cutting to the chase to make their arguments and not outstaying their welcome.
• Brooke Harrington also makes a point about “New Colonialism” in Offshore that seems obvious once she points it out: it’s not a coincidence that so many of these tiny island tax havens around the world are former British colonies. While the UK’s formal colonial structure crumbled or withdrew from these far-flung holdings, many imperial institutions seamlessly continued their function of covertly channeling the world’s wealth, largely still to the benefit of London, but now in service of the City instead of the Crown.
• The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman is a powerful mix of memoir and criticism, but the essay that’s really stuck with me is the one about Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.” Positioned mid-point in the book, it describes a moment of extreme emotional darkness that becomes the turning point toward something better, encapsulated by Bruce’s snarl into the mirror: “wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face.” I’d never really heard the depth of anguish packed into that line, or its corresponding potential for transformational change. Having read this book, I'll never hear that song the same way again (complimentary).