By Peter Neumann, ScD, Director
I’m not sure why, but I read more novels than usual this year. Perhaps it was in defiance of those articles I saw lamenting that men don’t read fiction anymore. Or because novels can provide singular comfort in turbulent times. Or that fiction offers a deeper way to understand the world, “the lie through which we tell the truth,” as Camus may or may not have said. Or simply because I became more tempted to sample from the teetering pile on my wife’s nightstand.
For the first time since I began posting these annual lists, I’ve divided my selections into fiction and non-fiction categories. I was also inspired this year to read about Dan Pelzer, who died in July at age 92, and whose New York Times obituary noted that he read at least 3,599 books in his lifetime according to his handwritten list. I’ll never catch up.
Nonfiction
The Fate of the Day, Rick Atkinson (2025). Having enjoyed the first volume (“The British are Coming”) of his American Revolutionary War trilogy, I bought the second one straightaway upon its release in May. I also heard Atkinson speak at the Boston Athenaeum and mumbled like a fanboy as he signed my book afterward. The Fate of the Day follows the War from 1777 to 1780, through Continental Army setbacks and counterattacks. Atkinson’s prose is often poetry, whether he’s dissecting military strategy or depicting a soldier’s-eye view of the conflict.
Reagan, Max Boot (2024). This is a big, balanced biography that attempts to demystify the nation’s often mystifying 40th president. Reagan’s sunny disposition and uncomplicated beliefs masked a politically savvy operator. Opponents underestimated him. Reagan let his staff sweat the details, but his brand of conservativism – anti-communist, pro-business, free trading – ruled the Republican party for decades. Boot argues that Reaganism also contained a strong measure of magical thinking that planted the seeds for today’s polarization and Trumpy populism.
Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to do About It, Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Ray Fisman (2023). You’ll learn a lot about information markets in this well-written and often witty book from three prominent economists: why your dental insurance is terribly inadequate, why pet insurance is so expensive, and why you can’t buy insurance that protects you against the possible costs of divorce. It comes down to selection (how insurers and customers sort themselves according to risk). Consumers purchase insurance to protect against potentially large expenses, and insurance companies sell policies to make money. The markets are exquisitely sensitive to which party has more information about the probabilities of a payout.
The Wide, Wide Sea, Peter Hampton Sides (2024). The third voyage of Captain James Cook, who circumnavigated the globe in the 1770s, is the subject of this account, which follows Cook from the South Pacific to the northernmost reaches of the Atlantic. There are bracing depictions of the miseries of 18th century seafaring and the crew’s many encounters with Indigenous peoples. Cook is a complicated character and his legacy a charged topic, but Sides even-handedly conveys his achievements and the consequences of colonialism.
Lorne, Susan Morrison (2025). I was in eighth grade when Saturday Night Live debuted in October 1975, which meant that by 1978 I was complaining that the show was not as funny as it used to be. But decades later, I still follow the show (though like everyone my age, I now watch the YouTube clips on Sundays) and feel a sense of ownership and nostalgia. Lorne tells you more than you need to know about the life and times of Lorne Michaels, the program’s founder and executive producer for over 50 years, but it is well worth reading. On full display are his comedic instincts, his Yoda-like pronouncements, and his very famous friends.
Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (2025). California has been trying to build high-speed rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco for over 40 years. Several governors in this environmentally friendly, Democrat-controlled state, have pledged to do it. But layers of regulation, opposition from local groups, and cost overruns have frustrated attempts. Decades after it was first proposed, not a single track has been laid. During this time, China has built 23,000 miles of it. This is one of many tales told by the authors, who argue that Democrats should lead efforts to innovate and build (housing, roads, transportation, clean energy) to better serve the people.
The Gods of New York, Johnathan Mahler (2025). I grew up on the not-so-mean streets of Queens and Long Island, and I’m a sucker for books about New York City history. The Gods of New York takes you back to the tumultuous 1980s, when Koch, Cuomo (Mario), and Guiliani ruled the metropolis, which had recovered from the bad old 1970s but faced heightened racial strife and many other challenges. Spike Lee, Bernard Goetz, Al Sharpton, and a brash young developer named Donald Trump take star turns.
Fiction
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver (2022). Channeling David Copperfield, Barabara Kingsolver tells the story of a boy in rural Lee County, Virginia in the 1990s as he encounters a series of modern Dickensian misfortunes amid the economic distress and opioid epidemic that plague the region. Young Demon is bewildered but resourceful, and always a sharp, unflinching observer of life in his slice of Appalachia.
James, Percival Everett (2024). Retelling a familiar tale through the eyes of a side character can come across as gimmicky, but Percival Everett pulls it off by flipping the script of Huckleberry Finn and conveying the story from the perspective of James (Jim), the enslaved man who accompanies Huck as he rafts down the Mississippi. James speaks in a dawdling vernacular to white folks, but code-shifts into crisp, standard English when talking to his fellow enslaved people and plotting his escape.
11-22-63, Stephen King (2011). Time travel novels can also be tricky, especially when the protagonist moves repeatedly between time periods. What are the consequences when each journey back can change elements that propagate into the future? In Stephen King’s capable hands, however, there is enough coherence and plenty of suspense as Jake Epping finds a portal and is carried back to September 1958. Can he find Lee Harvey Oswald and prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy?
The God of the Woods, Liz Moore (2024). Barbara Van Laar, a 13-year-old girl, goes missing at a summer camp in the Adirondacks. Her disappearance is especially fraught as she is the daughter of the camp’s owners, whose 8-year-old son vanished 14 years earlier, never to be found. Barbara’s counselors were out partying the night before. A serial killer has escaped from a regional prison and is feared nearby. Everyone has secrets, especially the wealthy Van Laars.
The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015). This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tells the story of a Vietnamese intelligence officer and his experiences in America after the Vietnam War. After narrowly escaping the conflict, he arrives in Los Angeles in 1975 with a ragtag group of defeated nationalist soldiers and refugees. But the officer is a mole, a Communist agent embedded with the evacuees to spy on them. What follows is an outsider’s darkly satirical look at American life and a moving if disturbing reckoning of the War through the eyes of Vietnamese Americans.
Brooklyn (2009) and Long Island (2024), Colm Toibin. I had enjoyed the 2015 movie Brooklyn, starring Saoirse Ronan as the teenaged Eilis, who travels from Ireland to New York City for work in the early 1950s. So I decided to read the novel upon which it is based, and then its sequel, Long Island, which finds Eilis in the 1970s living on Long Island with her family. Toibin is a master at capturing the interior life and moral struggles of his characters and small moments that reveal larger truths.
Other books I enjoyed.
Non-fiction
- Mark Twain, Ron Chernow (2025)
- A Marriage at Sea, Sophie Elmhirst (2025)
- Source Code, Bill Gates (2025)
- An Unfinished Love Story, Doris Kearns Goodwin (2024)
- Nexus, Yuval Harari (2024)
- This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin (2006)
- River of the Gods, Candice Millard (2011)
- Co-Intelligence, Ethan Mollick (2024)
- Black Box Thinking, Michael Matthew Syed (2015)
- Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America, Sam Tanenhaus (2025)
- Original Sin, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (2025)
- A City on Mars, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (2023)
- Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025)
Fiction
- Apeirogon, Colum McCann (2020)
- Long Island Compromise, Taffy Brodesser-Akner (2024)
- Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner (2024)
And in case you missed them, here are my best book lists from 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.
