2025 Favourite Fiction Part 1
"For years I have had the belief that all my questions will be answered by the books I am reading. Books, however, only lead to other books.” - Yiyun Li
This has been a really long year. A year of peaks and valleys in which the valleys were crevasses and the peaks were termite mounds. Through periods of hopelessness I read compulsively, finishing a hundred and something books. In the Sims 4 you can choose a lifelong aspiration for your character. “Read 20 books” is the dullest goal to achieve but it is the one I always choose, for there is something very appealing about sitting down and crossing numbers off a list. Yet reading is different to playing bingo. It offers the advantage of getting you trapped in someone else’s head. Whenever I hate the world and hate life and feel the urge to reject it, I remember, no - I just hate being trapped inside my head. Sometimes, not always, I just hate the dreadful audiobook of thinking.
There are ways to make one’s head more liveable. You can follow the usual suggestions. Healthy eating, sleeping, exercising, socialising and whatever. That works. You can sit and meditate til your thoughts are nothing more than whispers in an empty library. That works too. You can transmute your suffering into art, music or writing. That works for me, but one can go overboard. Or, the easiest way - you can divert your thoughts with videogames, movies, netflix, fuckin instagram reels. Well, I have nothing against entertainment as distraction - laughter is good medicine almost all the time. But of the diversions, books, for me, offer the most long-term lasting interest and pleasure. Sometimes I get a feeling of a big hand tugging at my voicebox - they call that awe. So in a life where every aspiration feels futile, it is comforting to have a quantifiable goal. One thousand books! to which I am halfway there.
Because I am trying to get better about speaking highly of things, here are my ten favourite books I finished in 2025. I will post the second half later. I’m not talking about books that came out this year, I didn’t read many of those. Forgive the earnestness. I am trying out capital letters, still trying to find my ass with both hands, so to speak.
10. Jon Fosse - Septology
A one thousand page novel consisting of a single sentence in which you are trapped in the mind of the world’s boringest man. The plot is: in the week leading up to Christmas, Asle has to sell some paintings and prepare some lutefisk for the Christmas dinner with his friend who he is slightly annoyed with. He is annoyed about his neighbour, also called Asle, and he really misses his wife. Thats the book but somehow, the writing propels you along and you stare at the book in a trance, breathing through your mouth, the pages moving themselves.
“And I see myself standing and looking at the picture with the two lines that cross in the middle, one purple line, one brown line, it’s a painting wider than it is high and I see that I’ve painted the lines slowly, the paint is thick, two long wide lines, and they’ve dripped, where the brown line and purple line cross the colours blend beautifully and drip and I’m thinking this isn’t a picture but suddenly the picture is the way it’s supposed to be, it’s done, there’s nothing more to do on it, I think, it’s time to put it away, I don’t want to stand here at the easel any more, I don’t want to look at it any more, I think, and I think today’s Monday and I think….”
It is like watching the phone of a kid on the bus as he scores the world record in Temple Run. Do I recommend this book? Not really, though I enjoyed the experience. What I really recommend is Fosse’s other book Melancholia, which is this kinda writing, but with a good story.
9. Gerald Murnane - The Plains
What if the wheatbelt seceded from Australia, but instead of continuing to farm wheat and sheep, the farmers dedicated all their time into ploughing the fields of aesthetics? Murnane imagines an alternative canon of wheat-based art, and the book is more or less a survey of the cultural history of The Plainsmen, where there is a culture war between two competing factions: The Horizonites, who believe all art should be about the blue-green strip of light on the horizon where the fields meet the sky, and the Haresmen, who believe art should revolve around the now-extinct rabbit-like marsupials that were native to the plains. People tell me that this book is really funny, but I didn’t notice the humour. To me, this book is a straightforward description of the most beautiful utopia.
8. Kazuo Ishiguro - Remains of the Day
In this book, you are trapped in the head of an old English Butler, a seeminglu two-dimensional stock character who can only speak in Butler words about Butler things; but like all of us, he exists in the world and occasionally his rigid life is impacted by troubling events - a dying father, the outbreak of WWII and a fleeting chance at love - yet the Butler allows his only concerns to be Butler concerns. Yet even NPCs in videogames are human, and although they can only say a handful of things, we assume that beneath their limited script, they have some form of interiority. Reading his monologue, we see the Butler’s conscious thought is as robotic as his actions, yet we come to understand that beneath this surface of dignity, his life is filled with tragedy and regret. When what has been repressed slips through, it pierces like a shiv to the heart.
I listened to this audiobook while snipping rusty sheets of tin, and though I often tuned out, (this Butler can be realllly boring), I still think about certain scenes all the time. A life sentence of masculinity and sertraline have made it near-impossible for me to cry, but this is one of those books where if I really think hard enough, I can drip a few tears.
7. Henrik Ibsen - Hedda Gabler
Hedda Gabler, published 1891, is funnier than most things I have ever read. At its heart, it is a crow-black satire about the spectrum of normiedom. Ibsen fires his pistol blankly across the barriers of class, gender, and taste. No normie is safe, but it’s the educated normies of the leisure class who cop the most. There is George Tesman, the normie academic, who can only quote and revise what others have written; then there is his foil Eilert, the creative genius normie, who shuns the middleclass pretensions of the Tesmans, yet destroys himself with normietive pleasures before he can rise above them; and then there is Hedda, the anti-normie normie, who sees that the world is vapid and pointless, yet with no interests or identity of her own, she is no better than the normies - worse - she can only take and destroy. “The snares of the world are manifold” writes Ibsen in Ghosts, who understood that normiedom is the baseline human condition in which one resigns or continues to struggle. EDIT: this is an uncharitable take - the characters are written to be products of their world. Ah well. What I like about this play is that it does in 90 minutes what The White Lotus does in a whole season. With a magnifying glass, Ibsen studies the social dynamics between his characters til they all go up in flames.
6. Elizabeth Hardwick - Sleepless Nights
A thin novel that is barely a novel. It is more like a jumble of auto-biographic recollections, prose-poems, essays and character pieces, labelled and packaged as a novel. Does this sound worth your time? Well, I know autofiction gets a bad rap among those who don’t read fiction anyway, but, what makes Sleepless Nights worth reading is not the narrative, but the sentences! The strange and incredible sentences on every page that make me stop and reread and reach for the index cards.
“The Automat with its woeful, watery macaroni, its bready meatloaf, the cubicles of drying sandwiches; mud, glue and leather, from these you made your choice.” (27)
“The small, futile shops around us explained how little we know of ourselves and how perplexing are our souvenirs and icons. Watch the strangers in the city, poor people, in a daze, making decisions, exchanging coins and bills for incurious curiosities, the unexceptional novelties.” (27)
“J. suffered in his loves from seizures of optimism, a blighting frenzy quite unknown to me. A meeting, an attraction, aroused in him a rich, agitated possessiveness. He rushed into the future with the first glance, swept along by a need for connection that extended the moment before it had begun. He was one of those who look into new eyes and say: Now I am going to be happy.” (37)
In some ways, Sleepless Nights is a condensed version of Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook (also on this list), in that it is a seemingly shapeless work where you are trapped in the head of someone who can see the world with ultraviolet light. Most books I read are from the perspectives of brain-damaged men - thats most of 20th century literature, so it’s refreshing to read something from another perspective for a change: the perspective of a really smart woman.
Both Sleepless Nights and Golden Notebook are fictional memoirs with over-thinking protagonists and postmodern narrative structures, but where Lessing’s writing is manic, like someone writing their whole life story in the week preceding a nervous breakdown, Hardwick’s style is depressive - you can tell every line has been ruminated and reworked and cut and cut and cut until there’s almost nothing left, but what is left sings like a wonderful bird. They are almost the same book but differ in prep. One is slowcooked and the other is boiled.
THE LIST WILL CONTINUE NEXT TIME