Recommendations from 2025
29 Dec 2025Now and then I come across creations that I so wish were my own: by some magic the artist captures the world in a way I simply know is true—deep, fresh, sturdy, whimsical, wise. How do they do that? How do they use the artifice of their medium to show the truth of our existence? Well they may not be my own creations, and yet, in that link of humanity between us, they are mine, and I am theirs, and that’s what keeps this whole thing afloat.
Here are some of the things I found and loved this year:
Fiction
How I loved Marc Behm’s The Eye of the Beholder! A private detective obsessively stalks and protects a serial killer over the years; he imagines her as his long-lost daughter. A dream-logic sad-cop noir, I guess; fans of Disco Elysium will feel right at home here.
I also had a blast with Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (I’ve read volumes I and II). It’s a time loop story, like Groundhog Day or Edge of Tomorrow, and yet not at all like them; there is no mission, no life lesson, just the absurd notion of this impossibility actually happening and its effects on the protagonist’s family and love life, and on her outlook on consciousness and existence. I was amazed at how fresh it stayed after two full volumes, and I’m looking forward to the rest.
Carissa Orlando’s The September House was a very fun read: the titular house is haunted, and its owner (our narrator) oddly doesn’t mind, except in September when the walls bleed and the spirits get so dangerous no amount of exorcism seems to help. Or is the owner going mad?
Also huge fun: Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, a book of short stories on the topic of rejection. But reader beware: I hesitate as this is the cringiest, raunchiest, most misanthropic recommendation I’ve made in this blog, and it may well not be for you.
In an entirely different note, the atypically slim Something to Do with Paying Attention, from David Foster Wallace (an excerpt from The Pale King), has one of the best descriptions of a phenomenon of deep attunement with the moment that I’ve felt now and then, never enough, an experience full of attention and serenity though not necessarily joy, and that I find so difficult to replicate at will, or even to describe. Wallace calls it doubling, others of course call it mindfulness or aliveness, and this novella is worth reading for this description alone.
One unexpected perk of having kids is the discovery that Children’s Literature is often better than grown-up literature at expressing deep insights in raw form. With our kids getting older I risk drifting away from these gems, but a late find this year was Blake Nuto’s A Day That’s Ours (lovingly illustrated by Vyara Boyadjieva). The book is precious, and describes precious time.
Non-Fiction
My last read of the year was also one of the best: Eliot Weinberger’s An Elemental Thing. It is a collection of collage essays spanning millenia and the whole world, with an emphasis on pre-Columbian and Ancient Chinese cultures, mysticism, and the elemental. It feels incredibly eclectic, and I do mean “incredibly” literally: at several points I balked, thinking “there’s no way that’s true”, only to confirm Weinberger’s facts by myself. I don’t know how he finds these things; I don’t know how he puts them together. It’s a marvel.
It seems I have yet to mention the philosopher Byung-Chul Han in this blog. I’m not sure why, as I love his works; the latest of his I’ve read is Vita Contemplativa. It is a book written “in praise of inactivity” and contemplation, not as a means to recharge and become more productive, but as an end in itself, one we as a culture are losing the ability to even recognize.
A single memoir on this list: Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People, a chronicle of her time as a Facebook executive; the “careless people” were her peers from Zuckerberg and Sandberg down, and the target of their carelessness is our own social fabric. A constant stream of jaw-dropping, appalling behaviour from these clowns. I don’t usually read this kind of book, but Meta barred Wynn-Williams from promoting it so, action-reaction, I felt I had to. It’s good.
This year I went from deep, curmodgeonly scepticism about anything AI coding-agents related, to some degree of surprise, to vertigo, to the realization that my craft has changed irrevocably in the deepest ways. I learned how (and how not) to use Anthropic’s Claude Code and… it has been a deeply liberating feeling. For instance, there is a category of personal computing problems that I could solve given enough time—say half a day. But I never solve them because I never give myself the half-day to do so. When a good prompt gets the tool to do it in ten minutes, well. I blaze through them. Essential for me in navigating this space is the prolific blog of Simon Willison, who steers clear of the hype and shows by example what can be done, and how.
I have a soft spot for earnest self-improvement texts. I particularly enjoyed three this year. Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals is a set of insightful essays that go against the grain of the typical productivity literature, best read daily over four weeks as he suggests (I also recommend his blog, The Imperfectionist, with similar topics). Through Burkeman I learned of Paul Looman’s I’ve Got Time, a rare advice book that I still find helpful months after reading. And Brendan Barca and Pema Sherpa’s The Daily Buddhist is a devotional book that has accompanied me for the better part of the year, and has been a source of inspiration throughout.
I started this year chronically injured and believing I wouldn’t be able to run again, and I’m closing it with a habit of 5-6 runs per week. I’ll have more to say about my recovery in a future blog post, but a key piece was learning about the neuroplastic component of chronic pain, as described very accessibly by Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv’s The Way Out. If you struggle with chronic pain, this is a good entrypoint to figure out what to do about it.
TV and Movies
So many good movies this year! Ryan Coogler’s Sinners may have been my favourite: vampires in the 1930s Mississipi Delta are drawn to the transcendental power of Blues music. Sui-generis, raw and pulsating.
Ari Aster’s Eddington is a neo-Western about an explosive confrontation between a small town Sheriff and Mayor at the start of COVID, featuring those mask debates and conspiracy theories I’d rather not think about again except in a format as good and unpredictable as this.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another features pathetic far-right wingnuts, somehow (as so often) in power, hapless left extremists (very much like those in Are You Willing to Die for the Cause?), and the regular people caught up in this mess. This makes it sound like a downer, but the movie is preposterous fun.
Kathryn Bigelow’s nightmarish A House of Dynamite loops through the same nuclear threat sequence three times, each time from a perspective at a power rung above the previous (and more bafflingly incompetent the higher we go). I found strong echoes of Allison and Zelikow’s excellent Essence of Decision in the treatment.
And finally, just out on theatres, Josh Safdie’s frenetic Marty Supreme is true to the theme: like a table tennis point, the plot swings from major threat to major save (to double-major threat…) at exhilarating top speed.
Four good TV shows: Severance’s second season was as much a knockout as the first; a delight. The Beast in Me is a thriller with Claire Danes as an author writing a book about her potentially murderous next-door neighbour, played by Matthew Rhys—slight connections with Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.” Following Rhys led me to the fantastic The Americans, about deep undercover Soviet spies in 1980s Washington posing as a regular couple, kids included—we’re halfway through the second season and enjoying it all. And Pluribus just finished its first season. The premise (an alien virus transforms nearly all of humanity into a placid, content hive; we follow an uninfected woman making sense of it) is great, and while it’s still to be determined whether it will end a great show, it’s worthwhile so far.
Games
Cooperative games continue to evolve and rack up awards, and I’m happy to see that. The one I enjoyed the most this year is the Slay the Spire boardgame. It is a pretty perfect adaptation of the excellent videogame, and the cooperative aspect meant I was able to have long hours of fun playing it with my son and friends. In Bomb Busters (which won the Spiel des Jahres award) the players are bomb defusers working collaboratively to defuse ever harder challenges; in Earthborne Rangers they are rangers in a post-apocalyptic wilderness, much of the fun is discovering the world around them; and in Fate of the Fellowship they are characters in the Lord of the Rings trying to destroy the One Ring and stop the onslaught of the Dark Forces—the game adapts the Pandemic system quite effectively.
Turing Tumble is a wonderfully inventive toy: a mechanism to build marble-powered computers, Plinko board-style. Supposedly for kids.
Perhaps the game I enjoyed playing the most is Blue Prince, a puzzle adventure videogame filled to the brim with mysteries, a slightly eerie atmosphere, and enough randomness to avoid things getting stale. We’ve solved the “main” puzzle (“find the 46th room of this ever-changing 45 room mansion”), but there are still so many loose ends that we’re coming back for more.
Miscellaneous
My musical discovery of the year was Frank Dupree—wonderful talent, brilliant choices, so much energy. Check him out with a Big Band Kapustin concerto here.
We visited Toronto in June. It’s still a lovely city, and within its St Lawrence Market you can still, after all these years, find the generous man from Honey World providing sample after sample of delicious honey. And we found he sells it online! Never have I had as much honey as I’ve had since June.
Meanwhile, back in Victoria, Ay Mi Mexico is our new favourite Mexican food restaurant (their consomé de birria and tacos de pastor are great). And after Charelli’s closed at the start of the year, the next best place to find great cheeses became The Farmer’s Daughter, in Sidney.
We had guest birders this year, and ambling around town with them made me appreciate the drama and beauty of the world of birds hidden in plain sight. Along with their guidance, the Merlin app (“Shazam for birds”) and a good pair of binoculars (I got the Celestron 8x42 Trailseeker ED) were crucial. Speaking of birds, our visit to The Raptors, in Duncan, was a blast.
Finally, I learned about the Clark Geomatics maps recently—specifically the Salish Sea and the Vancouver Island ones. They are astoundingly beautiful. An excellent level of detail and cartographic decisions. I don’t have the wall space for them all; I wish I did!
As ever, I enjoy hearing from you if you liked (or didn’t!) any of these recommendations, or if you have something I might like. Have a fantastic 2026!
(Previously: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, …)