Here are four recommended books, mostly influential for my writing/travelling.

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (London: MacMillan & Co. Ltd, 1937)

A bible for my generation of travel writers. The account of a journey taken through Persia and Afghanistan in 1933-4. Structured as a random diary, this a brilliant mix of personal vignette, scholarship and descriptive writing.

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I’ve got some interesting books to share with you this month, as always.

We’ll also talk about what’s coming up.

And that’s about it. What can I say? I’m steaming ahead on all fronts, and I hope you’ll find something here that interests you.

(One correction from the video: I mentioned a writer c…

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Edo-era (1600’s) woodblock prints depict a Venetian world where goods were transported through the city by boat. Even the Yoshiwara ‘pleasure district’ was called the Floating World.

Apart from the stately Sumida flowing past Asakusa and into Tokyo Bay, where are all those little rivers today?

Many were diverted or channelled underground. The rest were controlled, clad in concrete to prevent the sort of floods that once plagued low lying areas. Most look more like drainage culverts than the rivers they actually are.

I’d been wondering for years about two particular rivers, the Kanda River that flows through canyons of buildings past Ochanomizu, and the Nihombashi River that I’d walked along so many times this year.

I finally had a chance to float down both of them last weekend. I put together a few photos and a couple videos to give you a sense of what they look like. It’s a hidden side of Tokyo that few visitors or residents ever see.

The journey began at a lovely riverside spot on the Sumida right next to Hamarikyu Gardens, previously the Tokugawa shogun’s private retreat.

We left the sheltered harbour at Takeshiba Waters and entered the Sumida River where it opens into Tokyo Bay.

I’d passed down a long stretch of the Sumida by ferry years ago, from Asakusa to a dock near the base of the Rainbow Bridge to the artificial island of Odaiba. The waterside view is fascinating, but it was of course the minor rivers that interested me.

When we first returned to Japan in February, my wife and I stayed in a short let apartment (a monthly mansion, in Japanese) near Kayabacho. I crossed a bridge over the Nihonbashi River, where it enters the Sumida, every time I went out. Sometimes I’d see a little working riverboat putting up it. I always wondered where that river led.

I sat up straighter when we turned to enter it, cruising under that same bridge and down the stretch of water I’d walked along so many times this year.

Beyond a second bridge, we encountered the elevated Metropolitan Expressway that we would travel beneath for most of the journey. In a city as congested as Tokyo, there wasn’t enough free space to build highways in 1962 and so they raised them up and followed the rivers.

I’d seen the massive pillars of the Inner Circular Route CI beneath one of the Shuto Expressway’s junctions near the Kayabacho neighbourhood where we stayed, and now we were drifting among them.

This special cruise was part of the Tokyo Architecture Festival, so naturally an architect was with us to explain each the dozens of bridges we passed under. Many were named for an industry that flourished in the neighbourhood we were passing through. These iron, steel, stone and concrete structures are themselves keys to history.

We carried reprints of an old map that showed Edo-era Tokyo — long before all those artificial islands were built with reclaimed land in the Bay — scattered with dense patterns of family crests, noting the main businesses associated with each clan.

The area inside what was then the outer defences of Edo Castle were packed dense with the crests of the daimyo who maintained households around the castle of the Tokugawa Shogun, spent every other year there, and left family members as hostages when they went back to their distant fiefs.

The area previously occupied by those daimyo is now the vicinity of Tokyo Station and Nihombashi, and the land where Edo Castle once stood is the Imperial Palace and gardens, a vast green space that is the world’s most valuable piece of real estate, worth more than the entire state of California during Japan’s economic bubble years of the 1980s.

After winding around the palace precincts, we made a sharp turn north to meet the Kanda River where it flows through a canyon of buildings towards the Sumida River and the sea.

Our route took us past the Tokyo Dome (the city’s baseball stadium), where cheerful fans fuelled by beer had just left after a game.

We also passed Ochanomizu railway station, a junction where three lines cross, prompting train spotters to line nearby bridges hoping to capture a shot of three trains passing simultaneously.

Here are a few more river views.

It all went by so quickly, and it left me curious to explore canals and rivers on the other side of the Sumida.

I hope these images give you a sense of a hidden side of this city.

I’ve got a stack of books to share with you this month. I’m finally back in full swing now that I have a proper workspace again.

I also ran into what looks like a major problem with the podcast. I’m worried it might pull the rug out from under the work I’ve done since we moved to Substack a y…

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Life in Tokyo has finally settled in to long desk-bound days of writing followed by long sofa-bound evenings of reading, capped with a late night film. I’m trying to get out of my neighbourhood at least once every weekend, but sometimes it only ends up being a long walk to a nearby…

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I posted a couple short videos in February but this is the first official WAIR from Tokyo. I’m finally in a long-term rental house, with just enough stuff to make it liveable. And best of all: I have a workspace again.

Check out the video for updates on life in …

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Life is slowly returning to normal here in Tokyo’s western suburbs. We’ve moved into our rental house and bought the minimum furniture and appliances to make it liveable. I’ve even started recording new podcast episodes (more on that soon).

I’m happy to have a proper workspace again. It’ll look much nicer when my books finally arrive from Berlin.

The first thing I did when we finally officially changed our address was to register for a public library card at my local ward branch.

No matter where I am in the world, I feel immediately at home in a library: oriented in space by the catalog system and by the temple-like, almost ritual regularity of checkout desk, reference section, fiction and nonfiction.

I also feel oriented in Time—through the mathematical chronology of the history section, and in terms of the linear development of human thought through the eras of literature and poetry contained in the vast, sprawling fiction section, ordered only by the author’s last name and the alphabet.

But more than that, the library also orients me immediately in the timeline of my own life. I remember when I first read a book—what age I was, what I thought, how I saw the world, and how I felt. The history of old discoveries, of my development, is contained in its walls, but only I hold the key. The map, the thread of this path through the words contained in those books, exists only in my memory and is entirely personal. It is the chronicle of my growth into the person I have become.

Each reader is their own patchwork quilt of memories and stories, and each accumulation is unique. So much depends upon the age at which we encounter a particular book, and what came before it—in terms of books, but also in terms of the experiences of our lives. Our memories are also changed by the books and experiences that came after. Nothing is fixed in Time. The future can and does alter the past.

Our personal pasts can be chopped into distinct phases of chronology, just as an archaeologist sections a slope of soil. They can also be chronicled developmentally. The developmental chronicle is never complete, because each moment—each new experience or book—changes it. Each impact ripples out to earlier and earlier stages, changing things to a depth dependent only upon its weight, its specific density in terms of personal importance.

The fundamental question is whether or not we can ever accurately picture the chronological past. Can we truly separate out what we know now, and remember what we thought and how we saw the world at a given moment?

One way in to these slices of a life is through someone’s writing. The writing of a particular time period provides a glimpse into that person’s past—a version of that person from a distinct slice of time—a character-ological cross section that is gone forever with every passing moment.

In that sense, we are each our own repositories of knowledge. A ‘self’ is nothing more than a collection of memories—a living library.

I thought I’d film a little video tour of the place we rented in Tokyo. You might find the cultural differences interesting. (Please excuse the panting, I’m a little stuffed up.)

We just got the keys today, so th…

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It’s difficult to believe that my time in Berlin has come to an end.

Germany is a surprisingly difficult place to get out of, and not just because I still like Berlin so much.

We had to give three months notice on our flat, and there were varying periods of advance notice to get out of just about everything else. Even so, some of those bureaucrats just didn’t want to let me go. The all-powerful deregistration certificate (Abmeldung) is the only thing that’ll get the health insurance, German pension, mobile phone, tax office (Finanzamt) and bloody TV Tax bureaucrats off my back and out of my bank account, and I could only apply for that seven days before vacating our flat.

I started the process of thinning out my library late last year. I managed to let go of nearly 400 books, but we still shipped 69 boxes total, of which 36 were books and assorted notebooks, papers and drafts. I don’t know what the other stuff was. All my clothes seemed to fit in two suitcases.

Emptying our flat was another challenge. What’s the last possible day you can do without a piece of furniture, a kitchen item or a bed? I chipped away at it for two months, selling things on Kleinenzeigen — including all our appliances — and giving away a lot for free. That and filling screw holes in the walls and touching them up with a little paint. My desk was the last to go; I wanted to work right until the end. We were down to a mattress topper on the floor for the last three nights.

Somehow we got it all cleared out two days early, while working throughout. And then we moved to an Air BnB flat a few U-bahn stops away and handed over our keys a day early.

We took one last look through the flat, and one last walk around our neighbourhood — including Jungfernheide Park, where my wife did so much marathon training and where I trained for my Pyrenees traverse.

And then we trudged down the steps of the U7, knowing we would probably never see those streets again.

We found ourselves in a weird in between space. We were staying in an Air BnB apartment, so inside that flat it felt like we were traveling, with all the usual ‘living out of a suitcase’ routines. But step outside the door and we were in Berlin, a city I know so well.

We spent those last few days revisiting favourite places.

So many of my favourites are summer places, so we couldn’t go there: biking up and down the runways at Tempelhofer Feld followed by the biergarten, the Prater Garten in Prenzlauer Berg, reading on the grass of the Tiergarten, or sipping beers under the elevated line at Gleisdreieck, and picnics there with friends. There was nothing better on a summer day than biking around this city that is so big but so flat and bike-able.

Other Berlin memories are seasonal, like screenings and red carpet premiers at the Berlinale, and those are gone forever.

Others are still accessible, even in the depths of winter.

We walked through Gendarmenmarkt, surely Berlin’s most beautiful square, and continued on to Bebelplatz, the big square next to Humboldt University library where the Nazis burned books in 1933. I always stop to pay my respects at the empty library monument when I’m in the area. It’s one of my favourite places in Berlin.

We also went to Zwiebelfisch, our favourite bar, for one last beer, and talked about all the friends and visitors we took there over the years.

Chinese food at Aroma was also on the list. We’ve been going there since our first visit to Berlin in 2013.

A walk down Auguststrasse remembering all those years of galleries, openings and Berlin Art Week.

KaDeWe for champagne and oysters.

And a walk through our old neighbourhood of Bergmannkiez, where we spent our first four Berlin years. We were over there this summer with Paul and Sheila Theroux, but when you’ve got a couple days left, it’s those old places you always want to see.

The highlight for me was catching one last midnight screening of Casablanca at the little 32-seat Lichtblick Kino. They’ve been showing it every Saturday night at midnight for years.

And now I have to cut this short, just like my nine years in Berlin. It’s time to go to the airport. There’s only a couple hours left.

It’s strange to think we’ll probably never see these places again.

It’s difficult to believe that this is my last update from Berlin. My Europe years will come to an end in just two weeks.

I’ve got several updates for you this month. I’ll tell you what I’ve been reading in the new year, give you an update on my latest boo…

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From Goddess to Mortal: The True Life Story of Kumari by Rashmila Shakya (Vajra Bookshop, 2007). The autobiography of the first ex-living goddess of Kathmandu that I interviewed and described in our chat. An extraordinary insight into life inside the Kumari House, and a living goddess’s challenging return to the outside world.

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Curious to know what a living goddess looks like? Then scroll down.

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Christmas markets helps those of us who live in Berlin endure the first half of winter.

In the middle of summer it’s easy to forget that Berlin is on the same latitude as James Bay. It’s impossible to forget it when November sinks in, with dark mornings and even darker afternoons, and cruel gusting winds that whip across vast flats of Russia and Poland to infiltrate my jacket and flat on Germany’s easternmost fringe.

November in Berlin is a time of denial, followed by long underwear and even longer faces, but we barely have time for our scowls to settle into permanent facial crags of gloom because the beginning of December coincides with this most cheerful of traditions.

Christmas markets date back to the Late Middle Ages in the German-speaking areas of Europe. They’re normally held during the four weeks of Advent leading up to December 25th, but I’ve noticed those dates creeping out by stealth, into grey November and even infant January.

You’ll find them in just about every town square. The better ones spill into neighbouring streets. Stalls sell traditional German Christmas ornaments, furry hats, and wooden toys. You’ll even find rock music posters, the kind that plastered the walls of 1980’s teenage bedrooms. Many markets have singing and dancing entertainers, too.

There’s a chill in the air, a scent of woodsmoke hovering around the edges, and enough food and drink to stuff even the hungriest turkey. The highlight is, of course, glühwein — hot wine spiced with cinnamon, aniseed, cloves, citrus, sugar, and sometimes a shot of brandy for extra warmth.

Hungry? Queue up for a hot grilled bratwurst covered in mustard and dripping warm grease. Follow it up with Flammkuchen — fresh stone oven flatbread, topped with creamy white cheese, green onion and chunks of meat. Then stuff in a few roasted chestnuts, a dozen bite-sized donuts, and at least one pretzel filled with cream cheese and chives.

At this point, you might think you’re full. But trust me, you’ll want a little something for the subway ride home. Got a serious sweet tooth? You’ll find strips of liquorice in a rainbow of colours, warm candied nuts, candied apples and candied grapes, sticky nougat, and that most traditional standard, old-fashioned marzipan.

Forget about fitness resolutions, they can wait until January 1st. Right now, you’re getting fit for a good long hibernation.

I’m not much of a Christmas person. We usually travel outside Europe at this time of year. But I do like the markets in Berlin.

Gendarmenmarkt is one of my favourites. Sure, it’s touristy, but the 18th century architecture around the square — the old Konzerthaus, the Französischer Dom, the Deutsher Dom, and the statue of poet Friedrich Schiller — gives it such a magical atmosphere at night.

You’ll also want to check out those little markets that only last a few days, like the one at Richardplatz, site of the old Bohemian village of Alt-Rixdorfer, founded in 1737 in what is now the district of Neukölln. The stalls are run by charitable associations and cultural groups, and you’ll find everything from Swedish glögg to vegan food, and even South American peanut soup, gently lit by hundreds of kerosene lamps.

The market in Spandau’s old town is also good, as is the big market in Potsdam, near Frederick the Great’s palaces.

I think the most romantic place in Berlin to jingle your bells is the Christmas market in front of Charlottenburg Palace, the rococo summer residence of a Prussian queen. It’s the closest one to our flat, and the market we visit most often.

I don’t know if it’s the outdoor drinking — a winter version of the biergarten Germans are so fond of — but Christmas markets will even put a smile on the typical Berliner’s face.

I’m looking at them a little more closely this year in the knowledge that I’ll probably never see them again. After nine years in this city (and fifteen years in Europe) we’re getting ready to leave the continent next month.

So cheers from Berlin, and Merry Christmas. I hope you have a wonderful day wherever you spend it.

Thank you to everyone who listened, watched, read and enjoyed Personal Landscapes this year. Thank you to my guests — I had some really great ones this year. And thank you to the Club Members who continue to make this podcast possible.

It’s the time of year when I tempt you to blow what remains of your savings on the printed page. 

If you want to be cash-poor but book-rich, then you should take financial advice from me.

I’ve got some great books to recommend this year.

As usual, I read and re-read a lot of travel literature to prepare for Personal Landscapes podcast conversations. I also have a few essential history reads to share, and some outstanding fiction, biography and nonfiction.

Each of the books below made my list because it was memorable, important, or just thoroughly enjoyable, and each is worth your time. I hope you’ll track them down.

Okay, first up, my Top Pick of the Year…

TOP PICK: The Vanishing Point by Paul Theroux

Nearly all of Paul Theroux’s fiction is about a person — usually male, often a writer — trying to solve a problem. In several of the stories from The Vanishing Point, his new collection, that problem doesn’t have a solution. 

He describes a vanishing point as a moment when seemingly all the lines running through one’s life converge and one can see no further, yet we must deal with the implications. “It doesn’t really vanish,” he says. “It’s just that you can’t see what’s beyond it. It’s not invisible. It’s unreadable. A mystery.”

The stories in this new collection span the globe, from Hawaii and the South Seas to Africa and New England. They have all the qualities I love in Theroux’s writing: a sharp bite of satire that skewers pretension, crisp dialogue, and an eye for the small, clear detail — an action, a pattern of speech, an element of dress — that reveals someone’s deepest character. 

He describes the things we all see but don’t mention in polite conversation, and he shines a light on thoughts we actively avoid.

I also reread his novel Blinding Light this year, and The Collected Short Novels (two of which were new to me, much to my surprise and delight). I’m re-reading all of Paul’s fiction as I make my own attempt on a novel after two decades of writing nonfiction.

Get your copy of The Vanishing Point here. And listen to my podcast conversation with Paul Theroux about the book on Personal Landscapes.

Okay, moving on. 

In the category of travel literature…

Clear Waters Rising by Nicholas Crane

This remarkable book tells the story of Nicholas Crane’s seventeen-month walk along the chain of mountains that stretches across Europe from Cape Finisterre in Spain to Istanbul. He wanted explore Europe’s last mountain wilderness, and to meet the people who live on the periphery of the modern world.

Crane walked along the Pyrenees, crossed the Cévennes, climbed Mont Blanc in winter and traversed the Alps, and then wandered through the Carpathian and Balkan ranges using long-outdated maps from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  

It’s an incredible story of endurance, and a celebration of culture and landscape. I read it in the lead up to my own high traverse of the Pyrenees last summer.

Get your copy here.

Wild Coast by John Gimlette

What do you know about those three tiny countries at the top of South America? Can you even name them? (Hint: Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.)

John Gimlette set out to see this barely-explored jungle land for himself. His journey took him from the hideouts of runaway slaves to penal colonies, outlandish forts, remote Amerindian villages, a space port, and what’s left of Jonestown, where members of Reverend Jones’s cult committed mass suicide in 1978. 

I’m fascinated by obscure countries and forgotten corners of the map. Anytime I think about writing a book about one, I find John Gimlette has already done it. He’s one of my favourite  writers on out-of-the-way places, and this is one of his best.

Get your copy here.

Walking With Sam by Andrew McCarthy

If you grew up in the 1980s like I did, you know Andrew McCarthy from Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo’s Fire. But Andrew is more than an actor and director. He’s also an award-winning travel writer. 

His writing is introspective, vulnerable and self-deprecating. He weaves memoir with vivid descriptions of people and place, and grapples with questions like how to balance a solitary nature with the desire for intimacy.

Walking With Sam is about crossing Spain on the Camino de Santiago, a journey Andrew made twice: first alone, and then with his teenaged son as Sam prepares to set out into the adult world. 

I also read Brat: An 80s Story, his wonderful memoir about a life in movies. And I re-read his first book The Longest Way Home.

Get your copy of Walking With Sam here. And listen to my podcast conversation with Andrew McCarthy on Personal Landscapes.

A Training School for Elephants by Sophy Roberts

In 1879, a forgotten Irish adventurer called Frederick Carter marched four tamed Asian elephants from the coast of East Africa to the edge of the Congo. He was sent to establish a training school for African elephants so they could be used to transport cargo in place of vast armies of porters.

It’s a tale of ineptitude, hypocrisy and greed filled with powerful chiefs, ivory dealers, Catholic nuns and dissolute colonial officials set against the beautifully described landscapes of Tanzania, the Congo, Brussels, Iraq and India.

Get your copy here. And listen to my podcast conversation with Sophy Roberts on Personal Landscapes.

Europe by Rail by Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries

Guidebooks are utilitarian things. Paper bricks we crammed in our backpack when wandering the world in the analog era. But every once in a while I come across one that changes the way I travel.

Europe By Rail is a beautifully-published book that covers 50 key rail routes across Europe, blending practical advice with narrative storytelling, and a focus on slow travel by local trains. You’ll also find country information, off-beat diversions, sidebars on historic railway stations and carriages, and tips on fares and ticketing that’ll help you navigate Europe’s complex rail network.

This wonderful resource has been inspiring travel dreams for over 30 years. The 18th edition was published in October 2024.

Get your copy of here. And listen to my podcast conversation with Nicky Gardner on Personal Landscapes.

In history…..

Island at the Edge of the World by Mike Pitts

I was obsessed with Easter Island as a teenager. I read every book about it in my small town public library, and every English-language book at my university.

They all said roughly the same thing: a small, isolated group of people living on the world’s most remote inhabited island couldn’t have sculpted, moved and erected the enormous statues that are Easter Island’s most famous feature. Or if they had, they must have been consumed by a monument building obsession that led them to cut down all the trees, causing mass starvation and warfare,anddestroying their own civilization in the process.

Archaeologist Mike Pitts tells a very different and far more compelling story. 

He draws on a forgotten archive of interviews and excavations by a woman who spent sixteen months there between 1914-15, a time when there were still people old enough to remember a functioning island society before slavers and missionaries.

Pitts also draws on the latest research to build a picture of a remarkable cultural flourishing in a remote and unforgiving environment, by people with a highly sophisticated system of agriculture and a rich tapestry of myths, religion, political stratification and artistry.

Get your copy here. And listen to my podcast conversation with Mike Pitts on Personal Landscapes.

Captives and Companions by Justin Marozzi

When we think of slavery, most of us imagine overcrowded Atlantic ships hauling human cargo to a cruel plantation economy. The Atlantic slave trade began in the 15th century, and was abolished in the United States in 1865. But slavery was practiced in the Islamic world for much longer. It dates back to the 7th century, and endured openly until late in the 20th century. 

Hereditary slavery still exists in Mali and Mauritania, and the Arab states have the highest prevalence of forced labour in the world today. Why do we know so little about this? And what forms did it take? 

Justin Marozzi set out to answer these questions — and more — in this compelling new book that traces the extraordinary variety of slavery in the Islamic world, and brings life to voices of enslaved people, from 8th century concubines to 20th century pearl divers.

Get your copy here. And listen to my podcast conversation with Justin Marozzi on Personal Landscapes.

In biography and memoir…

True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen by Lance Richardson

Peter Matthiessen is a towering figure of twentieth-century American letters, and the only writer to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction.He’s also a difficult man to pin down because he accomplished so much in so many different areas.

He co-founded The Paris Review and spied for the CIA. He’s best known for The Snow Leopard, his book about a Himalayan journey, but he thought of himself as a novelist first. Others focused on his nature writing, his environmental advocacy, and his staunch defence of Native American rights.

He was a serial adulterer, a neglectful parent, short-tempered and self-absorbed, and yet his writing students praised his generosity, and he had wonderful lifelong friends. He was also a spiritual seeker who reached the highest ranks of Zen Buddhism.

How do you come to grips with a life as varied as Peter Matthiessen’s? It’s no surprise that this gripping biography is nearly 800 pages long.

Get your copy here. And listen to my podcast conversation with Lance Richardson on Personal Landscapes.

Robert Byron by James Knox

Robert Byron was the most important travel writer of the 1930s. If you remember him at all, it’s probably for The Road to Oxiana, his 1933-34 journey to Persia and Afghanistan. The book is written as a travel diary, with dates corresponding to the five notebooks he kept on the journey, but this is a highly crafted account filled with lively dialogue and rich architectural description. Paul Fussell thought it reinvented the travel book, and Bruce Chatwin’s championing of it ensured its place in the literary canon. 

Byron was an irascible character: a highly educated snob who hung out with the wealthy but lacked his own trust fund, a mean drunk, a bit of a dandy, and a quarrelsome ranter. He was also a pioneer in the appreciation of Byzantine history, he fought to save Georgian London, and he was one of the first voices raised against Hitler’s fascism.

James Knox captured it all in this first full-length biography. Required reading for anyone who considers themselves a travel literature aficionado.

Get your copy here.

In fiction…

The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark

This is the story of a mysterious Scotsman called Dougal Douglas who moves to a little London borough and wreaks havoc amongst the lives of its inhabitants. Is he the devil or just a very bad influence? We never really know for sure.

It’s a brilliantly funny book. This passage in particular gave me stomach cramps:

‘My wife,’ Druce said, ‘… it’s like living a lie. We don’t even speak to each other. Haven’t spoken for nearly five years. One day, it was a Sunday, we were having lunch. I was talking away quite normally; you know, just talking away, and suddenly she said, “Quack, quack.” She said, “Quack, quack.” She said, “Quack, quack,” and her hand was opening and shutting like this—Mr Druce opened and shut his hand like a duck’s bill. Dougal likewise raised his hand and made it open and shut. “Quack, quack,’ Dougal said. ‘Like that?’

Spark does so much in such short books. Her prose is chiselled and sharply observed, with excellent dialogue.

I read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie years ago, but it was my only exposure to this brilliant, scathingly funny writer. Paul Theroux put me on to her other work. He recommended The Girls of Slender Means, which I also read this year, as well as A Far Cry From Kensington.

You can read Paul’s account of his meeting with Spark in his collection Figures in a Landscape. She really seemed like a character from one of her books.

Get your copy of The Ballad of Peckham Rye here.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ by Sue Townsend

This brilliant work of comic fiction is set in England in 1981. It’s written in diary style by a 13 ¾ year old unreliable narrator, and conveys all of the physical and emotional angst of life on the cusp of adolescence.

Mole writes candidly about his parents’ troubled marriage, his crush on a girl called Pandora, and life as a misunderstood and self-described tortured intellectual. 

Here he is on Easter: “FRIDAY APRIL 17TH Good Friday. Poor Jesus, it must have been dead awful for him. I wouldn’t have had the guts to do it myself. The dog has mauled the hot-cross buns; it doesn’t respect any traditions.”

There isn’t a page that isn’t funny. 

Get your copy here.

Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

Shadow Country is a semi-fictional account of E. J. Watson, a sugar planter and notorious outlaw in the Florida Everglades who was gunned down by a posse of neighbours for murders he may or may not have committed.

Watson lived and farmed in the Ten Thousand Islands in the late 1800s, when it was still a lawless frontier that was just as wild and even more cut off than the American West.

His life and grisly end is told first through a series of first-person accounts from his neighbours and witnesses, then by his son Lucius who attempts to reconstruct his father’s life, and finally by Bloody Watson himself, in a monumental fictional imagining that recreates the story from opposite points of view.

Matthiessen was so obsessed with the Watson legend that he wrote a trilogy about it, and then went back and rewrote it as this single, massive volume. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2008, and it remains a great American epic.

Get your copy here.

Far North by Marcel Theroux

The narrator of this gripping post-apocalyptic novel, Makepeace Hatfield, lives on the frontier of a failed state, the remains of a cluster of towns founded by American emigrants to Siberia. She is the last of them. She patrols the ruins of her city, salvaging books, making bullets and keeping her guns well-oiled. 

When she finally leaves her city behind, Makepeace ventures into an unravelled world. She finds shelter in a stockaded village of religious fanatics but is soon turned over to slave traders, and put to work in a labour camp where the most fortunate among them are sent into the ruins of a Soviet science city in search of technologies no one understands. 

Throughout all of her solitude and her hardships, Makepeace takes solace in doing things, in the physical tasks that ensure her survival.

This line really stayed with me: “Things have a life built into them. You just never expect to be in at the end of anything. You never expect to be among the last.” The West feels more and more like this today.

I also read Strange Bodies, a novel about a man who comes back from the dead. Theroux tackles our obsession with mortality, issues of identity, and the use of technology to surpass human limits, anticipating current discussions around AI and LLMs by at least fifteen years. 

Get your copy of Far North here.

Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

How do you sum up one of the greatest short story writers of all time? I took this collection on a train journey to Gdansk, and read these spare, impressionistic descriptions of snowbound Russia as a cold wind cut in from the Baltic. 

Favourites, off the top of my head, include: ‘Gusev’, ‘The Student’, ‘Ward No. 6’, and ‘A Boring Story’.

Get your copy here.

And finally, in general nonfiction…

Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties by Foster Hirsch

I’d always imagined the 1950s as complacent, overly-earnest, and comfortable. A  bland period of mass consumerism, new labour saving kitchen gadgets, and dull husbands in grey flannel suits who worked at dull office jobs and came home to a cocktail, followed by a three-course meal and separate beds. I’ll admit, my image may have been formed by childhood books like the Hardy Boys, whose gee whiz earnestness even seemed phoney to six year old me.

Foster Hirsch turns this view on its head in his account of Hollywood’s most turbulent decade. He writes about the end of the studio system, the rise of new technologies like Cinerama and 3D, the communist witch hunts and the Hollywood blacklist, and how old genres faded away even as the nuclear era spawned sci fi. 

It’s a fascinating look at the United States at its peak as a world power, and the political and sexual upheavals of that decade. A lifelong film aficionado, I came away with a long list of 1950’s movies I’d never seen.

I also reread Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir, Hirsch’s definitive study of my favourite silver screen genre.

Get your copy here. And listen to my podcast conversation with Foster Hirsch on Personal Landscapes.

Filterworld by Kyle Chayka

Digital platforms promised us personalization but their algorithms homogenized culture to a bland lowest common denominator instead. They don’t just influence what we consume, they also determine what is produced as artists shape their output to fit what gets seen and what gets shared.

Ever wonder why trendy cafes all look the same no matter what city you visit? Are you tired of the relentless sameness that has cursed books, art, music and film since the early 2010’s? We are all trapped in Filterworld, even those of us who aren’t addicted to smartphones.

This fascinating book traces creeping, machine-guided curation as it infiltrated the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces — and includes a few ideas for escaping it that might surprise you.

Get your copy here. And listen to my podcast conversation with Kyle Chayka on Personal Landscapes.

Broken Republic by Chris Reiter and Will Wilkes

Germany’s post-war recovery was an economic miracle. It didn’t just put the nightmare Nazi years behind it. The modern country rose from the ruins with astonishing speed, rebuilding shattered cities and transforming companies like Mercedes-Benz, Bayer and Siemens into titans.

Germany was on the rise in a good way. And then it all started going wrong.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ended the cheap gas Nord Stream dream, plunging the country into an energy crisis so severe that politicians were pressing their thumbs and hoping for a warm winter. The social contract also shattered as frustration with high levels of immigration and a decline in living standards stoked tensions that fuelled the rise of the right wing AfD.

But signs of trouble were visible long before the covid pandemic pushed us over the brink. Read this book to understand why.

Get your copy here. And listen to my podcast conversation with Chris and Will on Personal Landscapes.

Fixing Your Feet by John Vonhof

This incredibly useful guide to injury prevention and treatment should be on the shelf of every hiker, marathon runner, and adventure racer.

It covers everything from pre-hike foot care to shoe fit, insoles, socks, gaiters and lacing options, and much much more. I found the sections on blister prevention and treatment most useful.

I read this a couple months before doing a high traverse of the Pyrenees this past summer, from Atlantic to Mediterranean. It kept me largely blister-free throughout my nearly 800km hike, and it made the few blisters that I did have very easy to deal with. Highly recommended for the hiker on your Christmas list.

Get your copy here.

There you have it. Those are my main picks from 2025.

I also did an enormous amount of rereading this year, including Behind The Wall by Colin Thubron, The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen, and a heap of John Gray: Isaiah Berlin, Straw Dogs, The Silence of Animals, Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern, Black Mass, The Immortalization Commission, The Soul of the Marionette, Seven Types of Atheism, and Feline Philosophy.

I was also able to treat myself to more of William and Ariel Durant’s epic Story of Civilization — Volume 5: The Renaissance. and Volume 6: The Reformation. I look forward to continuing this journey next year.

I hope you’ll share my list with others who might enjoy these recommendations.

One last thing, since it’s that time of year.

If you’re looking for a book for Christmas, why not consider mine? Paul Theroux called it “a new kind of travel writing” in the New York Times and The Telegraph. 

A Sunny Place for Shady People has been described as “A Year in Provence meets The Godfather”. And I guess that sort of sums up my life on a small Mediterranean island. Read it and see for yourself.

What stood out for you in 2025? Please share your best reads with me in the comments below.

The post The Best Books I Read in 2025 first appeared on Ryan Murdock.

Here are this year’s favourite reads from Personal Landscapes alumni Paul Theroux, Sara Wheeler, Nicholas Shakespeare, Caroline Moorehead and many more.

Paul Theroux

Of the many books I read in 2025, a great number of Canadian novels — because I’m writing a book about Canada — and at last Mandela’s excellent A Long Walk to Freedom, by far the best was a slim novella that I’d first read long ago, Benito Cereno by Herman Melville. It was collected in the 1850s in “The Piazza Tales” with “Bartleby” and “The Encantadas” which are also wonderful, but “Benito Cereno” is the best of the bunch, the account of a slave revolt on a Spanish ship off the coast of Chile in 1799.

The ship, seemingly in distress, is visited by a concerned American captain, Amasa Delano, who has no idea of what has happened, because the leader of the revolt, Babo, from Senegal is pretending to be the servant of Cereno, while in fact he is the mastermind of the revolt. The deceptions, the nuances, the wit and suspense are magnificent, and the comparisons with Tousaint’s uprising in Santo Domingo are deliberate.

I ended up reading it three times in a row, the way you might listen to a symphony, to

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I’ve spent the month at my desk writing and reading, and I have a stack of books to recommend as 2025 winds down.

I also have an update for you on what to expect from the podcast in 2026.

What stood out in your November reading, and what would you like to r…

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It’s been a busy writing month for me, with a trip to Canada and a new book project in the works.

Watch the video for this month’s reading summary and podcast-related updates.

What stood out in your October reading, and what would you like to recommend?

Please post yours in the comments below. I’d love to…

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His groundbreaking book The Dark Side of the Screen has long been my guide to my favourite genre. His excellent filmography at the back of the book helped me discover 152 film noir, many of which I’d never have found on my own.

Curious about where to start? Here are his favourites.

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