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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
Please note: most of the links above are affiliate links. Purchasing a book through those links will (hopefully) support my work with a few fractions of a penny. Your support is greatly appreciated.
The post The Best Books I Read in 2025 first appeared on Ryan Murdock.