Regular readers will know that for the last several years I’ve solicited Year in Reading reflections from friends and trusted readers. Here, belatedly, is the last entry in this series. It comes from friend of the blog and reader extraordinaire, Scott Walters. The tardiness is all mine: I’ve been sitting on this, unconscionably, for months. I think you will agree, though, that some things are worth the wait. Scott, whose piece here is his fifth, launched the much-lamented blog seraillon in 2010, and expects to return to it one of these days. He largely follows Primo Levi’s model of “occasional and erratic reading, reading out of curiosity, impulse or vice, and not by profession.” He lives with his partner in San Francisco.

Though I’m becoming increasingly picky about my reading choices, that didn’t stop me in 2025 from mostly following my nose – and allowing for books to choose me rather than the other way around. I made no concrete plans but still managed to read some books that had long been on my list and some marvelous new surprises. Highlights and more below.

Three Big Books

Three fat tomes structured my reading year. First was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924, trans. John E. Woods), the tale of the young Hans Castorp, whose brief visit to a tubercular relative in a sanitarium in the Swiss Alps turns into a long-term stay when he is trapped there after his own diagnosis. To read this book is to go on a long journey, arduous at times and tested by low oxygen, but offering spectacular views, inner alpenglow, and snowy literary heights nothing short of thrilling (okay, okay, enough of that). It is a deeply strange book, which Mann refers to it in his preface as a kind of fairy tale, and also a great one, borrowing freely from other models but prescient regarding both history and literary form. The near linear narrative, obsessed with time, teeters on boring the reader, breaks into a few background chapters, devotes 200 pages to three weeks, takes 500 to speed through the next seven years, then abruptly leap-frogs more years, indulges in dialectical (even trialectical) philosophical conversations, and near the end keeps introducing important characters into this European antechamber on the eve of World War I. An unnamed omniscient narrator occasionally interrupts to use the royal “we” and reference his own anxieties, which readers may share, Mann’s anticipatory novel serving as a kind of measuring stick between its time and our own. [Ed. – Yes, it is a truly great book.]

Little of the Dickens I had read prepared me for Bleak House (1853). This grand conception, capacious and constantly surprising, forming an indignant portrait of a city and country, roars for something to be done about poverty and injustice, pleads for beginning the world anew. Bleak House also seems a kind of spring, irrigating the literature that would follow it, anticipating modernism and some of the later movements of 20^th century literature (the influence on Joyce, for example, is clear). [Ed. – Say more!] Even the often dismissed-as-novelty instance of human combustion, near the exact center of the book, comes across as exploding the hinges. To the right and left are human splatter, the human stain and residue, presented in a gem of literary black comedy. Joining a friend’s book club when I learned that Bleak House was on the menu, I was dismayed to find some who viewed Esther Summerson as merely a saccharine goody two-shoes. Is she not one of the great characters in literature? [Ed. – She is.]

A reader acquaintance in town for an evening mentioned Jon Fosse’s Septology (2019-2021, trans. Damion Searls). I’d read one Fosse work and had no intention of reading more, but Septology had other ideas: from a box of books I spied on the sidewalk the following morning, a pristine copy offered itself up, and I quickly found myself needing to read it each evening. Septology’s three novels form a triptych, the three sections of the central book flanked by two sections in each in the first and third novels. “The Other Name” in the first novel’s title is the same as the first name, Asle, held by both the narrator, a painter, and another Asle, a despondent alcoholic, both living alone near Bergen, one with his paintings and memories and the other with his bottles and memories. One scarcely knows where one Asle ends and the other begins, these doppelgängers, manifestations perhaps of divergent and not-so-divergent paths in the same life. It’s a nifty narrative device: the reader wanders in and about the one and/or two Asles and even more variations on the name, including Ales, the painter’s late wife, and Asleik, his neighbor. Past and present mingle. The discursive repetitions of Asle’s narrative seemed like the looping curlicues in a Cy Twombly painting: thoughts turn back on themselves, run on the same tracks for pages, return like waves, new and familiar. The frequent absence of page and paragraph breaks and the total absence of periods further a narrative relentlessness, as though we’re listening to an extended monologue, even when two people speak. [Ed. – Gotta say, that sounds dismayingly hard!] Ruminations range freely, from quotidian minutiae to explorations of art and faith, from meditations on social responsibility to the virtues and vices of solitude. A Nordic coldness blows through Fosse, but I came away from Septology knowing I’d encountered something new, unforgettable, and, in another iteration of hazy identities, now a part of me.

Playing with History

I was surprised to find so much historical fiction—not a genre I often deliberately seek out—among my standout works from 2025. Here they are, each approaching history in its own inimitable way.

Manuel Mujica-Lainez’s Mysterieuse Buenos Aires (1950, French trans. Catherine Ballestero) uses 42 fictional vignettes, in chronological order, to relate the history of Argentina’s largest city. A well-known translator from Spanish to English once said Mujica-Lainez was the author whose works they most wanted to see in English, and as a fan of Bomarzo (recently republished by New York Review Books for the first time since it appeared in English in 1969), I was thrilled to find another of his works, even if in French. Mujica-Lainez daringly pushes borders by fusing fact and fantasy, relying largely on figures from history’s margins, never passing up the opportunity to make a scene flourish in a dense riot of glorious language. The book opens in 1536 with a Boschian hellscape of famine and guerilla ambushes as the native population greets the Spanish invaders and continues through to 1904. I especially loved the longest tale, an “autobiography” by a tattered edition of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s roman à l’eau de rose, Paul et Virginie, as it gets passed along from Europe to the New World.

Anja Wilner’s 2024 Year in Reading post sent me to Christoph Ransmayr’s The Terrors of Ice and Darkness (1984, trans. John E. Woods), in which fiction and historical documents relating to an ill-fated 1872 Arctic expedition [Ed. – is there any other kind?] merge into an obsessive account of explorers confronting the elements. A parallel narrative follows the story of a young Italian fixated enough on the 1872 effort to book passage on an Arctic research ship in 1981, only to vanish mysteriously once back on Spitzbergen. The unnamed narrator is himself obsessed with the Italian’s disappearance. Various texts propel the narrative – logs, letters, lists, diary excerpts, tales of other expeditions, failures, vanishings – accompanied by black & white images. The overall effect is bewitching, as Ransmayr uses the explorers’ own words to probe their motivations, as shifting as the ice: a try for the pole, discovery of new lands, fame for the homeland, a promised payout. But the terrors of ice and darkness surge forth everywhere. Frostbitten-hands-down the most affecting work I’ve ever read on polar exploration.

A past Year in Reading post by Brad Bigelow led me to Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March (1948), as superb as Brad had promised, standing above most contemporary American novels in its densely researched, inventive treatment of historical material that expands the epistolary form to incorporate everything from mandates by Caesar to clandestine notes passed between conspirators to graffiti on a Roman wall.

Adam and Eve in Paradise, by Eça de Queiros (1897). What a treasure, this 55-page novella by the wonderful de Queiros, translated into English for the first time by the wonderful Margaret Jull Costa. De Queiros’s take on Genesis has ape-like Adam sliding down from a branch “on the twenty-eighth day of October at two o’clock in the afternoon,” and had me laughing throughout, astonished that no one else seems to have approached such an absurd creation myth in such an inside-out, satirical manner. I gave out copies to friends like candy.

My Italian discovery of the year was Sicilian writer Annie Messina in The Myrtle and the Rose (1982, trans. Jessie Bright)and Le Palmier de Rusafa (1989, French trans. Jocelyne Sephord, unavailable in English), two of three novels Messina wrote, all towards the end of her long life (the third remains untranslated). Though the characters and locales differ, the novels tell similar tales of a Middle Eastern warlord developing an intense relationship with a rescued slave boy. The rather spare Myrtle seems almost a draft, sowing seeds that in Rusafa blossom into an extravagantly exotic baroque masterpiece. This is extraordinary, riveting fiction, fiercely red in tooth and claw and shrinking from nothing. [Ed. – Intriguing!]

Other Italian Journeys

You, Bleeding Childhood, by Michele Mari (2009, trans. Brian Moore) left me embarrassed that I’d never before heard of Mari, apparently among Italy’s living literary treasures. The 13 tales here center on characters who encounter literature at a young age. In “The Black Arrow,” the narrator steals his father’s copy of Stevenson’s novel of the same name, then is thrust into a moral conundrum when his father returns from a trip bearing another copy of the book as a gift. The child’s discovery of textual differences due to the gift being a different translation opens a world. In “Eight Writers,” the child’s obsession with sea adventures by eight famous authors encounters a case of mal-de-mer when he begins to mark their stylistic and thematic differences. In a favorite piece, “The Covers of Urantia,” Mari considers the impact of cover art, as his young reader reminisces on the covers of a popular series of horror magazines. Never let it be said that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Terrific stuff. 

L’Île des âmes (The Island of Souls), by Piergiorgio Pulixi (2019, French trans. Anatole Pons-Reumaux):a mystery of the “Sardinian Giallo” genre, concerning the reopening of a couple of cold cases involving ritualistic murders of two women following the more recent disappearance of another. The twist is that the cases are now being investigated by two women detectives, seemingly as an effort to sideline them. One might suspect the author of trying to be Sardinia’s answer to Sicily’s Andrea Camillieri, but Pulixi seems after something different: I was transfixed by his panorama of Sardinian culture, geography, and centuries-old mysteries – a great introduction to the island as well as the first novel in a series.

Other Italian gems: Behind Closed Doors: Her Father’s House and Other Stories of Sicily, by Maria Messina (Annie’s aunt) (1909-1928, trans. Elise Magistro), memorable tales of the rough lives of Sicilian village women in the early 20^th century; Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara (1933, trans. William Weaver) featuring impoverished villagers wrestling defiantly with a Fascist landowner diverting their water for his own uses; a timely reread of Silone’s The School for Dictators (1939, trans. William Weaver), a quasi-novel/political treatise in which an American Presidential aspirant travels to Mussolini’s Italy to learn how to import fascism to the U.S.; Vincenzo Latronico’s bestseller Perfection (2022, trans. Sophie Hughes), a biting treatment of today’s digital nomads which, as a portrayal of work culture, brought to mind Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman; the first volume of self-described “leader of strange dolts” Ser Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone (The Big Sheep, 1378, trans. W. H. Waters), a Boccaccio impersonation with infectiously fun tales stitched together by the dopiest of framing stories: two young lovers meet each day, tell one another a story, then slink off after this literary foreplay; the metafictional delights of Giorgio Manganelli’s To Those Gods Beyond (1989, trans. Marvin McLaughlin), from which I learned that while fiction is a prison, one can always invent a horse to make one’s escape; and finally Daniele del Giudice’s A Fictional Inquiry (1983, trans. Anne Appel), which I discovered the day after dreaming about an earlier del Giudice novel I’d read years ago only to find this one later in the day in a bookshop. [Ed. — !] To my further astonishment, A Fictional Inquiry pursues Italian critic Roberto Bazlen in a clever exploration of how one might have an outsized influence on literature without ever having published a thing.

“American” Literature

After all these decades I finally got to another Wilder in addition to Thornton above: Laura Ingalls, in Little House on the Prairie (1935). [Ed. – Genuinely curious how you managed to miss them in childhood, Scott!] I admired Wilder’s knack for creating limpid scenes using only the briefest descriptive sentences, as when the family reaches the grassland and young Laura sees that “In a perfect circle, the sky curved down to the level land, and the wagon was in the circle’s exact middle.”  For all the mockery generated by the related TV series, Little House struck me as practical and even “woke” to an extent that a lot of reactionary parents might miss (to the benefit of their bookworm children). [Ed. – Now read Eula Biss’s essay “No Man’s Land.”]

U.S.A., A Dramatic Review, by Paul Shyre and John Dos Passos (1960): I read John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy decades ago, completely oblivious to the existence of this stage adaptation that compresses 1,000 pages into a mere 75. This small marvel of theatrical writing nonetheless manages to convey the sound and sense of the trilogy, including newsreel footage in the performance, and features several striking scenes, in particular a magnificent monologue by Isabella Duncan.

Thanks to Alta magazine’s assessment of 25 great works of California fiction, I read two that were new to me. Mecca, by Susan Straight (2022) was an especially welcome discovery, its entwined stories linking diverse communities of Southern California around the nexus where Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties meet. The Alta piece also prompted me to take down from the shelf an unread copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990), discovering only after finishing that it had inspired One Battle After Another. It’s easy to see why this narrative would resonate today; Vineland’s outlandish tale of a young woman coming to terms with her vanished mother, a radical activist from the 1960s, takes a long view of the competing tensions between American democracy and the forces of reaction taking aim at it. I also enjoyed Christopher Tradowsky’s Midnight in the Cinema Palace (2025), a solid contribution to literature about San Francisco in its glimpse into the culture of the Castro neighborhood in the 1990’s.

Passing, by Nella Larsen (1929): How had I missed the boat on this unexpected window into the world of Black women able to “pass” for white? Reading it made me feel a gaping hole in my knowledge of American literature had begun to be filled. Indispensable. Thanks, Dorian! [Ed. – Another satisfied customer!]

The most compelling American fiction I read last year was, um, British: Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford (2023). Spufford’s stunning conception is the star in this speculative allo-historical thriller in which First Nations people govern a semi-autonomous U.S. state located around the city of Cahokia, today ruins of what was once the largest city in North America, but in Spufford’s vision an important 20^th-century metropolis eclipsing the tiny village of St. Louis across the river. The book brilliantly uses a popular genre to explore race, religion, and the construction of history, and adds to an expanding list of great works about the United States not written by U.S. authors. Thanks again, Dorian! Iksho Itala! [Ed. – A pleasure!]

Odds and Ends

Aside from scattered poems, Raymond Radiguet’s two novels, Le Bal de Comte Orgel and Le Diable au corps, comprise his entire literary output. But what an output! His death at 20 drew thousands to his funeral; his patron, Jean Cocteau, was said to be inconsolable for years. These two tales, each involving a transgressive love affair between an adolescent boy and a married woman, burn with life, wit, insight, and defiant assertion of youth. Le Diable au corps, with its betrayed husband a French soldier, so affronted French nationalists after World War I that even a film version of it appearing decades later was met with indignation.  

Someone here last year mentioned Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, so I picked it up and read this class-conscious dissection of an affair with admiration of her keen ability to needle in under people’s rationalizations and excuses and – like her occasionally self-mutilating narrator Frances – get under the skin and draw blood. [Ed. – Good description!]

The Prague Coup (2018), by Jean-Luc Fromenthal and Miles Hyman (trans. Lara Vergnaud), the only graphic novel on my list, recounts the story of Graham Greene’s trip to Vienna in 1948, ostensibly to consult on Carol Reed’s film The Third Man. Fromenthal unveils the story of Greene’s involvement in intelligence work and reframes The Third Man in its intelligence context as in part a coded message from Greene to double-agent Kim Philby. Bonus: the end pages sent me down a deep rabbit hole to learn about fascinating figure Elizabeth Montagu, Greene’s guide in Vienna, and to the remarkable film Four Men in a Jeep, shot in a Vienna still under rotating command by the U.S., U.K., France and the Soviet Union. [Ed. – This sounds great! First time I’m hearing of it.]

Perhaps my most moving re-read of last year was of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, this time in the magnificent Peter Carson translation (Carson died a mere two days after finishing it).

Odder Odds and Ends

I’m not sure where I draw the line between books I consider odd and those I don’t. I read the first book of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (2020, trans. Barbara J. Haveland), about a woman trapped in a single day that endlessly repeats, and did not think to put it in this category. But Quebecoise writer Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba’s feminist eco-thriller Sauvagines (2022, available in English translation as Feral) swept me up into discomfiting aspects of an otherwise straightforward tale of a young woman serving a season as game warden in remote Kamouraska and finding herself squared off against a vicious, likely murderous, poacher. [Ed. – Ordering now!]

The Gardener Who Saw God, by Edward James (1937), stuck out no doubt because its author did. This too-hefty work by one of the patrons of Surrealism, a British lord who ended up in the jungles of Michoacan where he built his own surreal folly garden, Las Pozas [Ed. – This sentence has already contained many improbable things—where will it go next?], may not be stellar as literature, but it contains at least two major attractions: a fictionally-tweaked glimpse into the early world of Surrealism (Magritte, Dalí and others were guests at James’s estate), and a stunning spiritual conversion scene with the force of a Blake painting. I learned of the novel’s existence from Eve Babitz, perhaps one reason the book proved nearly impossible to find.

More solidly in the oddities category, Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) had trailed me since university, when those who had read it seemed dismissive. My expectations were not high, but I ended up deliriously checking off the oddities of this bizarre, messy tale of a ship stowaway’s adventures. One lengthy passage takes place entirely in the dark of a ship’s hold (I kept trying to imagine it on a stage). There is a magnificent description of water that evokes all the magic water can evoke. But with its frequent alterations of black and white seeming to anticipate Melville’s Moby Dick and a disturbing set of scenes pitting the ship’s crew against “savages,” the novel’s treatment of race makes it one of the strangest literary artifacts of American slavery and racial phobia.

Perhaps the oddest book I’ve ever encountered [Ed. — !], David Lindsey’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) begins in sordid circumstances on Earth and moves to other such circumstances on Terra, a planet orbiting the binary system of Arcturus. In a confusing sort of pilgrimage, its louche main character sets out across the planet in search of illumination (think: the quest in Mount Analogue meets the ghastliness of M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud), encountering surprising planetscapes, a plethora of strange beings, several impossible colors to which Lindsey gives names, and even a population of creatures who use gender-neutral pronouns. The violence of the book, however, came as a shock; I could not help but think of it as an oblique reaction to World War I. [Ed. – Readers, this is the kind of content you don’t get just anywhere.]

Good Trouble

Several works resonated more directly with the challenges of our times and served to ground and put into perspective whatever else I read.

Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows(unfinished, last worked on in 1964, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler), concerning Stalin’s purges and the incarceration of millions, may be less powerful than his two-volume World War II magnum opus, Stalingrad and Life and Fate, but incisively depicts the paranoid totalitarian state that resulted in informers and victims, seen through the lens of one such victim upon his release after 30 years in the gulag.

Étienne de la Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontière (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude – 1548), a brief disquisition on why human beings voluntarily surrender agency to accept the tyrants who oppress them, seemed as timely as ever. Moreover, it contains some of the most lucid prose I have read in French, especially impressive given that de la Boétie, bosom friend of Michel de Montaigne, wrote it between the ages of 16 and 18.

Finally, Crooked Cross (1934) by British writer Sally Carson, who lived in Germany during the beginning of the Third Reich, unfurls as though in real time. Carson zooms in on the Kluger family of Kranach, an alpine village above Munich, the novel playing out like a granular study of how quickly and corrosively Nazi fanaticism took hold: the novel takes place entirely within the six months following Hitler’s assumption of power. Popular upon its publication, the book vanished until the recent discovery of a single extant copy. Thanks to Persephone Books, Carson’s novel contrasting acquiescence and resistance to totalitarianism has been revived – and at the right moment. [Ed. – I have dallied so long in putting up this post that Persephone’s reissue of the sequel is now available…]

Thank you for reading, safe passage and felicitous literary adventures to all in 2026. [Ed. – Thank you, Scott! So many riches here.]