Insights: The Best Books I've Read In 2025
Every year, like the completist geek I am, I keep a record of every book I read. Here are the five I enjoyed the most in 2025.
Reading regularly continues to be important for my mental health, especially when it comes to winning a few small victories in the ongoing battle against digital distraction. And it was a pretty good reading year, thanks to some great books and two long-ish trips away, during which I deleted all social apps, and made sure I had some good books to hand.
As ever, I kept a record of everything I read in 2025 in a regularly updated reading list, which you can see here. Inspired by reader/subscriber Tim LeRoy, I also began a Looking Sideways book store.
Buy anything from here and you’ll be supporting independent UK book stores (ie not paying for Jeff Bezos’ next rocket), as well as helping finance Looking Sideways (I get a 10% commission) in a really simple way. Win/win, right?
As is now a Looking Sideways tradition, I’m ending the year by sharing the five books I’ve enjoyed the most.
Want to discuss any of my selections, or share any of your own 2025 reads? Click here or let me know in the comments:
1. Mayflies, by Andrew O’Hagan
One of the things I am really enjoying about getting old is how much your long-term friendships deepen and take on new dimensions.
And I get older, I realise that the friendships I formed in my teens were an attempt to create a surrogate family after the demise of my actual one.
It’s one reason why I have always taken friendship so seriously, and do what I can to support and be loyal to my friends.
And it’s why I think I enjoyed Mayflies so much. It is an elegant, elegiac treatise on the peculiarities of male friendship, and our blokey reluctance to deal with our own mortality, which made me reflect deeply on how I view these topics. And if that isn’t the job of art, I don’t know what is.
Buy it here.
2. Stoner, by John Williams
“There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history”.
I loved Butcher’s Crossing and Augustus, the other John Williams books I’ve read, but this beautiful paean to an ordinary life completely floored me.
I’m sure anybody else who’s read it will understand what I mean. Who’s out there?
More here.
3. Death of an Ordinary Man, by Sarah Perry
“He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was”.
Another thing about getting older: the unavoidable realities that are death and sickness.
In our society in particular we appear to be uniquely, historically unwilling to acknowledge these mundane inevitabilities. Which is one reason why I loved Sarah Perry’s new book, a remarkable and very moving examination of the death of her father-in-law.
As with everything Sarah Perry writes, there’s a liturgical, deeply compassionate note to this devastating book that reminded me, in this case, of CS Lewis or Montaigne. It’s that good.
More here.
4. I Am Dynamite! by Sue Prideaux
I really didn’t expect this biography of German philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche to be so beautifully written and riotously entertaining.
It’s also a welcome and frequently hilarious reminder that even greats like Nietzsche were basically petty creative egomanics; constantly worrying about why their friends hadn’t fed back on their latest work, how on earth they were going to raise money for their next project, and why nobody would review their book, and so on.
I enjoyed it so much I wrote this really lengthy blog about it, which you can read here:
5. Fire Weather, by John Vaillant
John Vaillant’s account of the Fort McMurray fire is the best book I’ve ever read about our chronic addiction to fossil fuels, the way that this has shaped our recent history, and the devastating havoc this voracious behaviour has wreaked on the environment.
It’s the perfect companion piece to Lucy Walker’s Bring Your Own Brigade, which we discussed at length in our episode 248 conversation earlier this year.
Read something I should add to my 2025 list? Any books you particularly enjoyed this year that you’d like to share? Just want to geek out on reading and books with other members of the Looking Sideways community? You know what to do….
I’ve just finished Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico. It’s a short but powerful book about a couple in modern gentrified Berlin and There’s also no speech in it which is an interesting device in context of the novel.
This year in celebration of the kid's overseas exchanges, I loved Hannah Kent's Always Home Always Homesick - made me think about living on the other side of the world to my original home and my constant curiousness about belonging.
Mostly I've read for work and so its been about philanthropy, social change and inequality. One of my fave books in this series is The Promise Of Giants - turns out John Amaechi is Manc, similar age, playing basketball at a time I was really into it and the first 'leadership' story is about an accident clubbing on Canal Street. First time a 'leadership' book has been written in a real language and with examples that are relatable to me.
Listened to loads of Audio books to cut out the noise so I can work - turns out that the Jackson Lamb, Smiley, Peter Grant, Shardlake, Kosuke Kindaichi, and Martin Beck are helpful co conspirators. Feels like 2026 will be the year of the female crime detective - recommendations welcome.
Looking forward to the turning off of the socials and diving into the reading pile over the holidays. I've been collecting your recommendations and so have a large collection by the side of the bed.