Looking for a stocking stuffer for the book lover on your list?
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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