2025: A year in reading

book thoughts + recs

I wanted to celebrate some good books I read this year, scientifically meaning between January 1 and today. It’s a trend I like. Feels like every day they’re making it harder to do the good work. So we need to honor the good work when we see it and help each other go on.

The books below were published any year (mostly recent) and appear in no particular order. I sorted by genre to help my brain and maybe yours. I’m not going to include books I edited/published, for the sake of some critical clarity here, but I do really recommend those. I wrote about a couple of these previously on social media for Read Palestine week, resharing for wider audience. (If you read those notes already, thank you truly.)

On reflection I read a lot of these while on an elderly exercise bike or elderly elliptical machine. Some people think you can’t read on an elliptical, but you can if you pedal backwards, hold the book in your hands, and sweat on it. It’s not good for your neck, but your neck’s probably messed up already.

Thanks, all, for all the work. Sending love in dark days.

POETRY

Lisa Wells, The Fire Passage (Four Way Books). “In the unfortunate dive bar of daughters / descendent of daughters / you must dance with the one that brung you.” I loved this acute, very alive, terrifying and lush account of illness, of the self’s undoing, and return, response to Virgil’s ever-present charge—so easy to descend to hell, so hard to climb out. A book of rare wisdom and good company. “And the breaking is a means / of sparing a woman her own construction.” “I vow to banish these knuckleheads / just as soon as I get born again.”

Maxwell Gontarek, Study for Swimming Hole (Community Mausoleum). Finished this book and wanted to write its publisher (I have a chapbook on CM) to say how much I appreciated it, the words for which were something like: this is just a really good book of poetry. An oblique, intricate, joyfully keenly exploratory book that rearranges the brain. “what we stole in order to pretend / it constituted the substance of words / The form of the sentence ‘the fire the house is on’ / Give it an inch.”

Batool Abu Akleen, 48kg, trans. the author with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristinia Vita & Yasmin Zaher (Tenement Press). Wrote about here!

Ahmad Almallah, Border Wisdom (Winter Editions). Loved this collection, Almallah’s second, whose movement among languages, places (Philly, Palestine, New York, Beirut), pressures of memory, losses and the ongoingness of any one loss, furies, ironies, forms of love and of exile, builds a book that’s so much its own. Casual, mournful, confrontational, beyond honest in its account of “translaformation.” Notes I took right after reading: Walls—orange pipes—leaking—tongue—“I just want to write poems”

Stephanie Ginese, Unto Dogs (Grieveland). Great debut that combines lively formal movement with depth and ambition of content: a collection of poems about having a fertile and resistant body, about how contraception was tested on women in Puerto Rico, how Puerto Rico also endured “the highest rate of sterilization in the world,” how US reproductive meds and rights bear this history and hierarchy of bodies in empire... And if you’re in Cleveland, go see Stephanie as co-host of the variety show Con Tu, Sunday nights at Dunlap’s Corner Bar. “what is the body but a foul coin sleeping at the bottom of a pseudo silk sea // awaiting the rubbed pleasure of a transactional finger”

Hasib Hourani, Rock Flight (New Directions). This book-length poem is a propulsive imaginative work of resistance in/and Palestinian diaspora, a poet trapped among rooms, windows, birds, histories, suffocations, migrations and dying, connectivity of the internet, locked door of detention. I read this all at once, which I recommend. “the more time i spend with words the more i realize that they do not mean anything at all. a rock is not a rock until it’s thrown.”

Justin Cox, Stock Pond (Bench Editions). Wrote a blurb for this one, here it is: Stock Pond is an astonishing incantation in which words call forth the animals and ghosts we live among. Here is an ecopoetics for the western landscape of algo and algae, nature and nitrates that we’re damned and awed to wander. These poems follow the movement of fence and drought, bleached skull and flight, what’s cut down and remembered, human and sung. Justin Cox has an ear for music and reckoning, what it is to “learn to love from cattle country.” I am stunned by this book—how it’s both praise song and fucked inventory, of what’s been done, what persists.

Ali Black, We Look Better Alive (Burnside Review Press). I first encountered these poems when Ali was taking classes in the NEOMFA, I feel like I should say, and it is very moving to see them now in this beautiful collection, with a photograph by Donald Black Jr. on the cover. Ali’s work as writer, educator, and cultural worker reverberates throughout Cleveland. This book is a precise and visionary work of grief, Black womanhood and girlhood, mothers and daughters, students and teachers, beauty and mourning, YouTube and funeral homes, “The poet says we should grieve / with grace and no one owes you / anything so I walk around / the way my mother used to— / head high, lowkey alone.”

NONFICTION

Amy Kaplan, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (Harvard UP). If I’ve seen you in person, I’ve probably talked to you about this book. You may know Kaplan’s work on “manifest domesticity,” her influential The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture, her contributions to American studies; sadly, she passed in 2020. This book (from 2018) examines how the “special relationship” between the US and Israel is based in and reinforced by culture. Kaplan offers powerful close readings of cultural works that have represented Israel to American audiences, showing how “cultural perceptions” shape the field of the political. It’s essential reading, for US readers illuminating both our own mythmaking from the Puritans onward and the origins of the bipartisan governmental commitment to the US–Israeli genocide in Gaza. Kaplan traces how an enduring cultural consensus formed around the US–Israel alliance, and how narratives have been shared and adapted, traded back and forth, between these two nations—reinforcing and naturalizing claims of exceptionalism, settler colonial dynamics, the waging of the “war on terror.” A stunning work of reading, from Leon Uris’s Exodus to Steven Spielberg to the Left Behind series and more. “This book aims to recover the strangeness of an affinity that has come to be seen as self-evident.”

Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Knopf). This book has been rightly much lauded so I’ll just add my gratitude, for how El Akkad articulates the irrevocable moral injury and unbearable ongoing awakening of recent years, living within the borders of US empire during livestreamed genocide in Palestine. I think his choice to incorporate memoir—his life in Egypt, Canada, and the US—and an account of his work as journalist and novelist amid the horrors of the “global war on terror” is key to the book’s thinking, which I thought I’d mention since some readers seemed to question why the memoir was relevant. An anguished and excoriating work that is desperately—and generously—working to find a place from which people may speak meaningfully of the unspeakable and our complicity therein.

Roy Scranton, Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress (Stanford UP). This book will help you think, in ways large and small, about how to be a person during climate crisis, or: “How do we live ethically in a world of catastrophe?” I’m always grateful for the scope of Roy’s work, how fully he tries to answer to the “everything” problem that climate change is, while insisting on the value of the arts and humanities in the face of that problem, as lens, as response, as means to endure beyond the betrayal of our systems and narratives. Another great work of close reading and of argument, with a rowdy, vital edge and deep care. Also loved talking to Roy on our podcast.

Richard Evans, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich (Penguin). This is a 21-hour audiobook I listened to while riding the Route 11 bus (also recommended, though often late picking up downtown). Disturbing combination of activities. Previously in my life I had been interested more in the rise of Nazism as a system and less in individual psychologies, but then suddenly I wanted to know how this apocalyptic violence answered to specific perpetrators, and here’s this excellent book. It follows dozens of individuals who emerged from unexceptional backgrounds across German society to build the ideology of the Third Reich and commit its world-destroying crimes. Especially illuminating features include comprehensive accounts of Hitler’s rise from Munich through the Night of the Long Knives (which I’d never fully understood), the role of academia and far-right professors in the rise of Nazism, the vicious hateful incoherence of how German Jews were blamed for Germany’s defeat in WWI, the resentments of “downwardly mobile” men (including Hitler), whose class status did not match their fathers’.

FICTION

Caren Beilin, Sea, Poison (New Directions). Caren has a new novel and it’s so wild and wicked, moving and good. The book centers on the toll and meaning of gynecological crimes; somehow and importantly, it’s also funny. Caren and I did an interview for the Cleveland Review of Books that I’ll share soon, I say more there, but everyone should read this and/or hear Caren read it (in person, and/or she does the audiobook, thank god!). I laugh so much at her readings I should really leave.

Ali Smith, Gliff and Companion Piece (Pantheon). A lot of you told me I’d love Ali Smith and I was slow. I’m sorry, she’s amazing. As a friend said, she’s figured out how to write political literature whose politics are somehow just another manifestation of the novelistic form, its thinking and feeling, while being also the fullest manifestation. Both these novels are beautiful and unbearably incisive. Gliff is a special work of magic about the violence of our times and what we can still hope for together. I would like to make a PSA though: if you are a person who can read on the page, don’t listen to Ali Smith on audiobook. That’s not her scene. I regret that I listened to one of her earlier novels this way because I honestly didn’t understand as fully everything she’s achieving with the fluidity of her syntax and structure.

Youssef Rakha, The Dissenters (Graywolf). It’s been beautiful to witness the reception of Youssef’s first novel written in English, formally wild and gorgeous, which covers seventy-some years of history in Egypt through the figure of one woman character, Amna/Mouna/Nimo (she’s known by three names), how she knows and is known by those around her, knowledge in the form of intimacy, power, politics, radical hope, radical despair. Also loved talking with Youssef on the podcast.

Madeline McDonnell, Lonesome Ballroom (Rescue Press). This book is so fucking funny and smart. A great book for anyone who has ever been or known a woman who ever had or was a mother and ever went or considered going to the bar.

PLAYS

Yasser Abu Shaqra and Agnes Borinsky, eds. Futures: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab Theater (53^rd State). Wrote a blurb for this too: When I finished reading the six plays in FUTURES I felt I’d become a vibrating point in an expanding, impending, defamiliarized world. The six playwrights included—Arzé Khodr, Wael Kadour, Leila Toubel, Sami Nasr, Rim Mejdi, Yasser Abu Shaqra—are each keenly distinct in their work and insight. Gathering them here in translation makes for a stunning, multifarious, explosive book. Displacements, hauntings, authoritarian shadows, linguistic power struggles, families severed and returned, choices and dark absences of choice, mercy and its opposites, remembering and forgetting among ghosts and migrations and others’ dreams… These playwrights (and translators and editors) are preparing their audience, with love and imagination and lucid horror, for our own futures, grabbing our hands as the train picks up speed.

DETECTIVE FICTION

This year apparently I read 30 books of detective fiction, mysteries, and/or thrillers. It’s sort of a lifestyle. Most of the time I had a migraine and/or it was between 3 and 6 am. Highlights include Adrian McKinty’s dark and terrific Sean Duffy (not that one) series, a Catholic cop in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, starting with The Cold, Cold Ground and the last one I personally read was Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly, achieving the goal of putting a Tom Waits song in my head at the time and again now. I don’t often read detective novels written by men so please note this enthusiastic rec, really enjoyed these books, their humor, ambition, ranginess, social realism, real sense of noir. (Contrary to some writers’ beliefs, noir is not cynical, it’s the opposite, I can prove this in the bar of your choice whenever needed.) Also appreciate that McKinty’s online bios tend to include how broke he was for much of his successful writing career, until his more recent breakout thrillers like The Chain, which I like a little less but that’s fine, I support people trying to make enough not to get evicted again and have to drive Uber and stop writing. This year I also especially appreciated works by Alison Gaylin and Kia Abdullah. Thank you to everyone who has ever written a solid detective novel, you are my doctors.

TV

I watched a lot of TV this year and one show stood out from the rest. On what show can you see Pedro Pascal, Jeremy Allen White, Jason Jones, Samantha Bee, Elliot Gould, Raúl Castillo from Looking and Task, Zoe Winters from Succession, your favorite secondary character from The Departed (“You know me!”), to name just a few? Where can all these people get together and indict Dick Cheney for war crimes while an entire family from Iowa looking happily at an NYC storefront display is casually killed with a car and never mentioned again? This show exists and it is called Law & Order. In order to write a poem about Law & Order as it lives in my mind and the American mind, I think, I went back and started watching it again. Friends, the entire absurd plot of eight episodes of All Her Fault is at most one normal episode of Law & Order. So much happens every time. Say someone picks up the wrong pair of pants from the drycleaners. This episode could be about the corrupt global trade in unsafe pharmaceuticals, exploitative academic real-estate deals in Spanish Harlem, the genre of the narcocorrido, journalists committing blackmail against talk show hosts committing sexual harassment of journalists, the troubling diagnosis of pre-existing personality disorders used by the VA to avoid paying benefits to veterans, Bush-era torture memos, defense lawyers conspiring to commit murder with their clients, you have no idea. Everything will happen. Every kind of politics will eventually manifest at least for like a minute. It’s bonkers, it’s moving, it’s how America kind of understands itself, it’s tight as hell, and there are 497 episodes, enjoy.