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The Books I Read in 2025, Continued

January 5, 2026 - By vintown

Thirteen more books, let’s do this.

The Dream Hotel (2025) by Laila Lalami 7/10

A woman is sent to jail for her dreams. Does that sound sexist to you? That’s because it is. On purpose.

A strong entry into the technology-is-bullshit genre. There is some near-future tech that makes your life better, but the trade-off is that your dreams are monitored. A bad dream about your husband gets you flagged, a TSA agent has access to your dream file that gets you noticed, and then you’re in dream jail. They are also messing with your dreams in the name of capitalism, but that comes later.

I enjoyed this book, and I don’t want to take anything away from it, but this is definitely of a piece with a lot of anti-capitalism media that comes out. The notion that we live in hell and that things are only going to get worse is correct, but I sometimes wonder what good it does. At least this ending is somewhat hopeful.

For the Win (2010) by Cory Doctorow 7/10

The Harlan County War for MMORPG players.

This was a gift for Amber a year or so prior, and they loved it at the time, so I figured I should read it too. It’s nice to share things with your children. This is a pretty weird book as a chunk will be dedicated to the story, and then the next chunk will be explaining complex financial stuff that I totally understood already. Weridly, it works.

It’s billed as a YA novel, but it feels wrong to put this on par with most of that genre. It’s basically about exploitation, the fight to unionize, and the lengths that capital will go to stop that. Maybe Doctorow isn’t the best with dialogue or characters, but I’m still happy I read it and even happier my kid did.

Erasure (2001) by Percival Everett 8/10

An academic hates Push by Sapphire so much that he writes his own version and becomes famous beyond his wildest dreams.

I watched the movie American Fiction when it came out and had no idea it was based on a book. Then, for work, I was put into a book club where we read this, and my mind was opened. You’re not going to believe this, but the book was far better than the movie.

First of all, if you’ve only seen the movie, you have no idea how long We’s Lives in Da Ghetto goes on. If it’s not half the book, it’s mighty close. It’s a brutal story that hits every negative stereotype imaginable with the most racist unrealistic language the author could cook up, that is the author within the book (Monk) not Everett himself (however Monk may just be a stand-in for Everett,) but he also can’t help himself and some really great writing slips in to this story that is meant to be purposefully written bad.

I’d read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man when I was younger, and there is a lot of that in here. I think I might need to re-read that before I dig into this one again. There is a lot going on with Everett’s writing, and I just didn’t feel like I got all of it. What I did get, I loved.

When I watched American Fiction I thought it missed the mark. After reading the book, I really had no idea just how much. Forget that movie, read this book.

Down River (2007) by John Hart 3/10

A rich boy returns to his hometown where everyone thinks he’s a murderer. They still do.

I truly disliked this book, but I was determined to finish. I was reading the last few chapters in the basement while Sam was doing crafts, just trying to power through, and every few minutes I would bitch to her about something else I didn’t like. Just an unpleasant experience.

The main character had to leave his hometown after being acquitted of murder. He’s portrayed as very put-upon, like this ordeal ruined his life, and the only way he can be whole again is to come back. That’s a very normal trope for a book like this, but then you find out that his dad bought him out of their farm for millions of dollars. Fuck off.

I try to be kind to books I don’t like and chalk them up as not for me. However, this one won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel. Awards aren’t perfect, but something winning Best Novel shouldn’t be a bunch of over dramatic bullshit.

Bleeding Edge (2013) by Thomas Pynchon 9/10

A fraud investigator investigates a bunch of things, some of which may be tied to the supernatural or a terrorist plot, in the final days before 9/11/2001.

All of the other books on this list were first-time reads. This was my third time through Bleeding Edge, and I’ll be back next September.

I keep revisiting this book because it feels like there is an answer in here, a clue that I have yet to uncover. This last read had me searching out a vague reference to a shipping company with guards that wielded machine guns. It ultimately led nowhere, which is probably the point of all this.

The answers I’m looking for, the answers Maxine is searching for, are out there, but they are just out of our reach, and it doesn’t even matter if we find them, because the bad people will still have done what they have done, and there is no undoing it. Every conspiracy theory is true, from Montauk to 9/11, but it doesn’t matter because there was nothing we could do to stop it. Just do your best, and raise your kids right.

The Poisonwood Bible (1998) by Barbara Kingsolver 8/10

A Baptist missionary moves to the Congo and ruins the lives of his wife and four daughters.

This was another book club pick that I liked more than my co-hosts, but I wish it were shorter. 500+ pages is a lot, especially when the happy moments can be counted on one hand. I’ll admit that feeling is partly on me for trying to be the read-a-whole-book-in-one-or-two-sittings guy.

The story is told mostly from the children’s perspective, and their father is an absolute monster. You can see how bad an idea this is from the beginning, but he ignores all the warning signs (and the actual tragedy) to continue on. He cares more about this thing than his family, and it takes way too long for the rest of the family to wake up to that reality.

Each girl is written extremely well, and their characters don’t so much grow as become what they’ve always been meant to be. Adah is an all-time great character. The historical elements, very real and shitty things done by Western forces, worked for me because they don’t come from preaching. They come from lived-in examples in the characters’ lives. Colonialism, pretty bad.

Shadow Ticket (2025) by Thomas Pynchon 7/10

Milwaukee PI heads to Europe in search of a cheese heiress during the rise of Hitler.

(Any joke description I thought of for this one wouldn’t match the actual premise, so why bother?)

Pynchon continues to be amazing. The Milwaukee-level detail in the early part of the book is amazing, and it’s embarrassing to say that the guy knows my own city better than I do.

This book drew comparisons to Bleeding Edge and Inherent Vice as the third straight Pynchon book to feature a P.I., but this is far different than those two. The protagonists in those other two were far more likable, well-drawn, and driven. Hicks is America personified. He longs for a past that doesn’t exist, he gets along to get along, and is mostly indifferent to the horrors happening all around him. He’s not searching for anything; he’s mostly just doing what he’s told.

I’ll need to reread this one eventually to clarify my thoughts, but if you want more, I highly recommend this review.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 9/10

A guy tries to write about his war trauma, but writes a time-travel science fiction story instead.

My first pick for the book club was a book that I’d never read, but always wanted to. I was a big Breakfast of Champions fan in my teen years and somehow never got to this.

I think the reason is that I hate how much World War 2 stuff is in the world. It feels like there have been 15-20 new books/TV shows/movies about it every single year of my life, and I was good after Saving Private Ryan. Even when I read antiwar, I also read “centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden”, and that sounded so bleak to me that I kept pushing it down the list. As usual, I was completely wrong about everything.

This book deserves all the praise it gets and more. It is all that it is cracked up to be and more. The type of book you will read in a day and think about for the next two weeks.

There is probably much longer and better analysis out there than I’ll attempt to get into here. Instead, I’ll just say that I’m excited to read this again and again. When I do, I’ll probably push it to a 10/10.

Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson 7/10

A hacker goes to work for a powerful A.I. against another A.I. in the inspiration for every movie you’ve ever seen.

Since I was reading old things I’d never read before, I decided to try Neuromancer. As a huge Matrix fan, someone who has seen Blade Runner upwards of fifty times, and a guy who loved the short-lived The Peripheral on Amazon Prime, I figured I should actually read a book by this guy. Whether I’d read him or not, he has clearly been a part of my life for a very long time.

It was honestly strange reading this book. So many things that seemed well-trodden and familiar were actually blaringly original. I can’t tell if the plot was predictable or if it had been borrowed so often that it now seemed so. This book was released in 1984, but it talks about cyberspace and the internet in ways that seem familiar now, even though they were likely completely foreign to all but a handful of computer nerds at the time.

There are times that the book gets bogged down in computer jargon that I wasn’t sure was real or made up. I would get through a passage and have no idea what I just read, but when I re-read those passages, it made sense. I think I got it all, and in the end, it was a worthwhile endeavor. I’m just not sure I can have a strong opinion on this book.

Quick confession, for the longest time, I thought this book was the basis of Strange Days (1995). I also watched that for the first time this year, and it left me feeling mostly the same. This probably blew people’s minds when it came out. Today, not so much.

I Cheerfully Refuse (2024) by Leif Enger 10/10

Bass player finally gets to be the main character in future hell world.

There is a scene in Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc (2025) where two characters do a movie marathon. The first few movies are sold out, and the crowd is going crazy for them, but the characters in the film don’t care. They keep going, the crowds around them love them, and still, they feel unfulfilled. Finally, they decide to give it one last go and see the last show of the day in a nearly empty theater, and that last film touches them so much they are brought to tears.

That’s what this book was to me. I read a lot of things that I really liked this year, but nothing could come close to this. This was all that I ever wanted from a book. This made everything that came before worth it. This, honestly, made my year.

I have never been someone who underlines sentences in books. In fact, I abhor the process as someone who once bought a used copy of The Lords of the Realm by John Helyar that had so many highlighted and underlined sentences that it was unreadable. I say this because I Cheerfully Refuse is the first book that has ever made me realize why someone would do it. There are so many beautiful lines, so many life lessons, and bits of philosophy that you never want to forget. I don’t just want to underline them, I want to tattoo them on my brain.

I mentioned earlier these near-future dystopia books where everything is bad and hopeless, and that’s the point. This is very much not that. This is a near-future dystopia where everything is bad and hopeless, yet it manages to fill you with so much hope and love that you have to put the book down because you’re ugly-crying. Or at least you would do that if you weren’t a big, strong man who watches sports. Like me. I’m that man.

To me, this book is perfect. 10/10, highest recommendation.

Still Life (2005) by Louise Penny 6/10

This was a book club pick because it is one of the most popular books on the website. I got myself into a bit of trouble with the users when I called it a “cozy mystery,” and I was told it was very much not that. I guess they are technically correct, but to me, if we’re talking about a small town that isn’t on a map, the detective is surprised by every murder, and all the people in town are unique characters, those are all characteristics of a cozy. Still, I’ll defer to the experts on this one (people who actually read cozy mysteries).

Not really a book I’d ever read without the book club. It was good if you’re into that sort of thing.

Trigger warning: A stereotypical gay guy sings “It’s Raining Men”.

Assassins Anonymous (2024) by Rob Hart 5/10

It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous, only instead of booze, they are addicted to assassinating people.

My final book of the year was a major disappointment. I was a big fan of Rob Hart’s The Warehouse, the ultimate fuck Amazon book. I never read his follow-up, but a friend told me he enjoyed the action scenes in this one, so I decided to check it out. In my own writing, action is an area I am a bit self-conscious about, so at worst, I figured it would help with that.

I did like the action, and the early part of the book where the assassin’s past came back for him hooked me a bit. However, it was all downhill from there.

Why, if this guy regrets assassinating people, would he justify directing regime change at the behest of the super CIA he works for? There’s no regret there. Ahh, I need to call my sponsor! I fell off the wagon and invaded Venezuela and killed eighty people, but I guess it’s okay because Exxon’s stock will go up. It’s either all bad or none of it is. Time to redo your steps, guy.

Also, do we always have to follow the strongest, baddest assassin who ever lived? Can’t we just get like the fourth best?

Once There Were Wolves (2021) by Charlotte McConaghy 10/10

I didn’t want to end on a down note, so I’ll just put this here. I read half of it in December, and finished the other half on January 1st. It almost counts.

I have to do a book club about it, and I may write a post about it, so I don’t want to give too much away, but I’ll leave by saying that this is a perfect book. A full-on ugly cry that I will be thinking about and gifting to people for a long time to come. I finished reading and immediately bought this poster.