Tag Archives: nonfiction

Top Ten Books 2025

December 4, 2025 djarmul 5 Comments

I’m starting my annual Top Ten book list with a confession:

I ended last year’s list with a vow to finally read The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s epic biography of Robert Moses, the ruthless builder of New York’s roads, bridges and parks. Alas, I only made it halfway through this 1,344-page masterpiece.

That’s because there were so many new books I couldn’t wait to read. Now that we’ve reached year’s end, I have ten great ones to recommend, starting with four nonfiction picks.

In Careless People, former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams provides a devastating look inside the company. She portrays a toxic corporate culture, unfettered power and and leaders “devoid of any normal human feeling.” Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and their team pursue profit relentlessly while avoiding moral consequences. I wondered about the author’s own role in all of this but still found her account compelling.

Source Code: My Beginnings is an origin story for another tech giant. It’s Bill Gates’s memoir about his early life, ending with him establishing Microsoft. He’s remarkably open about his childhood. He struggles with his immense, but neurologically atypical, intelligence, often acting like a privileged brat. I felt compassion for his parents and teachers but especially for young Bill as he careens through adolescence before finding his calling in the emerging world of personal computers. It’s a surprisingly moving journey.

Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson describes how Joe Biden and his inner circle covered up his physical decline, resisting calls to drop out of the 2024 presidential race. I was disgusted as I read the details of how his enablers misled the country and paved the way for Donald Trump’s return to the White House. I already knew the basic story, of course, but still couldn’t stop reading this account based on more than 200 interviews. It would have been even sharper with a closer examination of the role of the press, including Tapper’s own network, CNN.

Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus is my last nonfiction pick. Elaine Pagels, a religious scholar at Princeton, draws on her decades of research to assess why early Christian narratives may have veered from what actually happened to Jesus. The story of his virgin birth, for example, may have emerged to counter claims of his illegitimacy. Accounts of his resurrection may be responding to the humiliating nature of his death. Ultimately, though, the story is one of hope emerging from darkness. I’m not a Christian but I found her analysis fascinating.

My favorite novel of the year was Angel Down, which Daniel Kraus writes in a single sentence divided into paragraphs and sections. It’s a supernatural horror tale set in World War One. Five soldiers encounter an actual angel stranded in No Man’s Land and try to rescue her despite the unimaginable carnage around them. Amid this horror, the soldiers demonstrate greed, paranoia, faith and hope, showing what it means to be human in the most extreme circumstances.

Death plays a central role in another fiction pick, Bug Hollow. Here it’s a single death in a much gentler setting. Michelle Huneven brings us to California to meet the Samuelson family, whose beloved son Ellis drowns in a freak accident shortly after leaving for college. The family is still reeling when Ellis’s former girlfriend appears and reveals she is pregnant, needing help. The characters navigate their grief and, especially after the baby is born, slowly come together to rebuild a family. It’s a powerful story of human resilience.

Another family drama is Vera, Or Faith, the latest from Gary Shteyngart. It’s the story of a socially awkward 10-year-old girl who must navigate both her unusual family and a country racing towards fascism. Vera’s father is a hipster Russian magazine editor, her step-mother a WASP and her biological mother a Korean woman whom Vera longs to meet. She leaves home to find her, confronting an America where white power is enacted into law and women’s rights are trampled. This bittersweet coming-of-age story is filled with Shtenygart’s usual social satire and wit.

Like Vera, the central character in Jennifer Trevelyan’s A Beautiful Family is a young girl who sees life differently. This time it’s in 1980s New Zealand. Young Alix is trying to make sense of both family tensions and the mystery of another girl who drowned in the beach town where her family is staying. Trevelyan tells the story through Alix’s eyes as she slowly gathers clues about what was actually a murder, as well as the truth about her parents’ fragile marriage.

Another of my favorite novels, Daikon, by Samuel Hawley, is set in Japan in the final days of World War II. Its premise is that the United States developed a third atomic bomb in addition to those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This bomb fails to explode and ends up in the hands of Japan’s military, which races to reactivate it to drop on the Americans. The urgent task is assigned to a nuclear physicist who wants the war to end but is desperate to rescue his wife from prison. The fate of San Francisco and the war hang in the balance of how he responds.

Last on my Top Ten list is The Doorman by Chris Pavone, which reminded me of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities with its biting depiction of race, class and wealth in New York City. Interlocking stories play out in an expensive apartment building on the Upper West Side. A loathsome billionaire, his beautiful wife and an arts dealer with a mid-life crisis find their futures wrapped up with the building’s doorman as racial tensions explode nearby. It’s a satiric page turner with a satisfying climax.

Other novels I enjoyed, some of which were published a year or two earlier, included Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney; King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby; Hotel Ukraine by Martin Cruz Smith; All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker; The Midnight Library by Matt Haig; The Quiet Tenant by Clémence Michallon; The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley; Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421, by T.J. Newman; Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway; and Wild Houses by Colin Barrett.

Other favorites of the year included books set in countries we visited in 2025. These included A Field Guide to Happiness, by Linda Leaming, and Radio Shangri-La, by Lisa Napoli, both set in Bhutan. Black Butterflies, by Priscilla Morris, and The Tiger’s Wife, by Téa Obreht, both unfold amid war in the Balkans. David Diop’s Beyond the Door of No Return takes place in Senegal, where we hope to visit.

My favorite travel book of the year was On the Hippie Trail, by Rick Steves, which recounts the journey he and a friend made across Asia in the 1970s. That’s what my friend, Mitch, and I did as well, following a similar path. Steves’s book brought back many memories of a trip that transformed my life.

Looking ahead, I hope to finish The Power Broker, and this time I really mean it. I even took this anticipatory photo in The New York Historical gift shop claiming “I finished The Power Broker.” For now, I wish you a great year of reading and, as always, invite you to share your own suggestions in the comments section.

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The Missing Genre

May 28, 2018 djarmul 7 Comments

Where are our “coming of older age” novels?

Our society celebrates “coming of age” novels, from Huckleberry Finn to The Catcher in the Rye. Newer books fit into this genre, too, from The Fault in Our Stars to blockbuster series like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games.

But how many novels can you name whose central characters are retired or aging?

You might be able to think of some after awhile if you’re a dedicated reader ike me. But they are not so obvious and, as best I can tell, not recognized as a genre even though more than 46 million Americans are now over the age of 65, a total projected to more than double by 2060. I looked online and found lists here, here, here and here, all filled with examples of great books with older characters, but they still don’t feel like a “thing” to me.

The recent death of Philip Roth got me thinking about this. (Another great writer, Tom Wolfe, also died. It was a bad week.) Roth famously explored the challenges of older age. When I learned of his passing, I had just finished The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, a powerful story about an African American teenager who sees her friend killed by police. I loved her book but it’s worth noting its central character was a young person, just as in The Goldfinch and some of the other books I’ve read while serving in the Peace Corps.

My list just topped 100 and, out of curiousity, I went back to see how many of the novels had older protagonists. There were a few, such as Everybody’s Fool by Richard Russo and A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler. But most of the books dealing with older age were nonfiction, such as two good ones I read recently: Michael Kinsley’s Old Age: A Beginnner’s Guide, about his experience with Parkinson’s Disease, and Marc Freedman’s Prime Time, about people creating new careers and identities after leaving the conventional work force. Many nonfiction books for older readers focus on financial planning and other practical questions. Those books are often suggested even when you search online for fiction about older people, as shown below.

The percentage of American adults who read books has remained relatively unchanged in the past few years, according to a 2016 report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. The median American reads four books a year. Print books continue to be more popular than audiobooks or e-books, which are more popular among younger readers, who read slightly more books than older Americans.

Younger adults are more likely to read for work or school while adults of all ages are equally likely to read for pleasure or to keep up with current events. In other words, the readers are still there, even as independent bookstores struggle to survive. So why aren’t more novelists focusing on “the coming of older age” — and why aren’t these books treasured as a genre in the same way we celebrate stories about people at the other end of the age span?

Sure, there are classics such as Shakespeare’s King Lear or Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, and more recent characters such as Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman or John Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. But their ubiquity or cultural impact are small compared to, say, Harry Potter. (I don’t think Disney World is considering a thrill ride yet about Medicare, with parts A, B, C and D.)

I wish more great novels featured characters my age. I don’t understand why they don’t. Obviously, the books assigned in our high schools are more likely to feature characters and stories of interest to younger readers. But how about for the majority of readers who are older than that — people like me? Why don’t our bookstores have shelves devoted to these audiences on topics other than how to apply for Social Security or deal with dementia?

Maybe it has to do with the economics of the book industry, but books don’t sell advertising like television shows, which want younger viewers to buy their beer and cars. Maybe older characters are harder to fit into genre fiction, like mysteries or romance novels. Maybe they’re not taken seriously by younger Americans, a thought that occurred to me this past week while reading Dan Lyon’s Disrupted, his hilarious but unsettling account of working at a startup company in his mid-50s.

Maybe it’s something else. I guess I’m too old to figure it out myself.