During my last several years as the Gazette’s arts and features writer, I compiled a list of my favorite books of the year each December, given that newspapers all do that best-of-the-year thing and I thought it would be fun to get on board, too; I love reading those lists myself.
Though I retired in mid 2024, I’ve continued to write occasionally about books for the Gazette as a freelancer, and the paper has given me another opportunity to do so now. So here are some of my favorite reads of 2025, consisting mostly of titles from the past few years and a few from further back, listed roughly in the order I read them. Hope you find something of interest here.
‘Skippy Dies’ by Paul Murray
One of my favorite novels last year was Murray’s 2023 title, “The Bee Sting,” a tragicomedy about a struggling Irish family. I wanted to explore some of his other books and this year discovered “Skippy Dies” from 2010, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and a memorable portrait of adolescent life.
Fourteen-year-old Skippy, a central character in the story, actually dies in the novel’s opening scene — while taking part in a donut-eating contest with a classmate. I’m not giving anything away by saying that, as Murray spends the next 600+ pages filling in the background of this alternately poignant, funny, strange and dark story of life at a venerable but fading boys’ school in Ireland.
There are elements of farce that would be right at home in a story by Carl Hiaasen or Gary Shteyngart: a fatuous headmaster, a student convinced he can contact aliens with jury-rigged electronics, a pair of local teenage drug dealers with about four brain cells between them. But at its core, “Skippy Dies” is about the pain and joy of growing up and confronting the realities of adulthood, written with great verve and heart.
‘Hell Put to Shame’ by Earl Swift
Just when you think you’ve heard the worst of the horrors Black Americans faced in the Jim Crow South, along comes this 2024 title to raise the ante. Swift’s powerful narrative details the 1921 murder of 11 Black workers by a Georgia plantation owner, John S. Williams, who had essentially enslaved the men on his farm, then engineered their deaths when federal officials began investigating him.
The story explores the widespread peonage system, a form of debt slavery that persisted in the post-Civil War South for decades, in which white farmers paid the fines of poor Black men jailed on flimsy charges, promised them a chance to work off their debt, then basically enslaved them – decades after slavery had supposedly ended. Politicians, police, town administrators, and white landowners throughout the rural South all knew the system existed and turned a blind eye toward it or found ways to profit from it, Swift writes.
Williams was actually convicted, by an all-white jury no less, in a case that made national headlines. Yet convicted alongside him was his longtime Black overseer, Clyde Manning, whom Williams had ordered to kill several of the other Black workers or face death himself. Some of the men were dispatched with axes, and others were bound together with wire, chain, and sacks of heavy rocks and dumped in a river to drown. It’s a chilling tale of incredible cruelty.
‘The Raider‘ by Stephen Platt
Evans Carlson might not be a household name today. But during World War II, this New England-born Marine colonel became a celebrated figure for leading a personally trained team of Marines behind Japanese lines during the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942, contributing to a decisive U.S. victory and laying the groundwork for America’s Special Forces today. That story was told in part in the 1944 Hollywood film “Gung Ho!”
Platt, who teaches modern Chinese history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, covers much more in the first full biography of Carlson, who had a fascinating career in which he served both in the U.S. Army and the Marines, became friends with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and, as a Marine intelligence officer, developed close ties with Chinese Communist guerillas during their battle against invading Japanese forces during WWII.
In the anti-communist fever that engulfed the U.S. after the war, Carlson would be discredited by politicians and deliberately forgotten by Marine officials because of his links to the Chinese Communists. But as Platt’s crisply written history shows, he would be remembered by many of the soldiers he led as “one of the finest men I have ever known.”
‘The Vietnam War: A Military History’ by Geoffrey Wawro
I hadn’t heard of Wawro, who teaches and directs a military history center at the University of North Texas, before discovering this book at Forbes Library this past summer. But his account might become one of the best one-volume treatments of America’s biggest foreign policy disaster of the 20th century – or perhaps ever.
While chronicling all the political machinations and deceptions that led to the U.S. propping up a corrupt puppet government in the former South Vietnam, Wawro’s book also explains, in understandable terms, why all the firepower and modern weaponry U.S. forces brought to Vietnam was so often ineffective against a skillful enemy that fought most engagements on its own terms.
“This is the best kind of military history,” writes one reviewer, “full of compassion for American men fighting an unwinnable war against a ruthless opponent — and for the almost unimaginable suffering of Vietnamese civilians — but unsparing in judgment of the politicians and commanding officers who sent American troops into combat without a clear idea of what they were trying to achieve, while lying at every turn to deceive the US public about how the war was going.”
‘North Woods’ by Daniel Mason
The star of Mason’s acclaimed 2024 novel is a patch of forest and a cabin in an unnamed part of western Massachusetts. But Mason fills his inventive book with myriad supporting characters who, over the course of three-plus centuries — beginning with a Puritan couple who flee their rigid colonial settlement to live on their own in the woods — come to live on or visit the land, weaving an emotional tapestry over generations that invokes love, heartbreak, the cycles of nature and even ghosts.
Some of the book’s chapters hang together better than others — Mason tells part of the story with poems and songs, including one about a mountain lion that kills a sheep inside the cabin — but collectively it makes for a story of loss and reclamation, with gentle humor and lyrical descriptions of the natural world.
I liked “North Woods” enough to check out one of Mason’s earlier books, 2018’s “The Winter Soldier,” an historical novel with a more conventional structure but a somewhat obscure setting: battles in the Carpathian Mountains during World War One between troops of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires.
Lucius, a young medical student in Vienna, enlists in the Austrian Army, thinking he’ll be sent to a well-staffed field hospital. Instead he’s assigned to a crude medical outpost, in a commandeered church in the mountains, with a single nurse, a mysterious woman named Sister Margarete. It’s a beautifully written novel about love, the challenges and doubts doctors face, and the sweep of war and history.
‘The Fate of the Day’ by Rick Atkinson
I’ve been a fan of Atkinson since reading his three-volume “Liberation” history of the U.S. Army’s experience fighting in Europe in WWII. This year I took on the second volume of his new trilogy, a history of the American Revolutionary War, and found myself just as immersed in the late 18th century.
Atkinson, a key talking head for the recent Ken Burns/Sarah Botstein PBS documentary on the war, is one of the best narrative history writers around, able to mesh battle details and skillful portraits of key figures like George Washington and Benedict Arnold as well as sketch a broad canvas on the war’s progress from 1777 to 1780, as the fighting became a global contest including the French and Spanish as well as the Brits and Yanks. Immensely readable even at over 800 pages.
‘The Antidote’ by Karen Russell
Like “Swamplandia!,” her acclaimed 2011 book, Russell’s newest novel (a finalist for a 2025 National Book Award), blends humor, magical realism, and pointed social observation, this time about the consequences of overfarming and ignoring or forgetting the past.
Set in a fictional Nebraska town during the Dust Bowl, “The Antidote” follows a small group of characters battling the elements, including a “prairie witch” in whom people deposit memories they’d like to forget. Amid the destruction of farmland from plowing under marginal land for quick profits, the town’s residents must also come to grips with the past, including the elimination of the Native Americans who had lived on these lands for centuries until white settlers arrived.
From a gum-chewing, irreverent teenage girl who lives for basketball and mourns her dead mother, to an awkward farmer whose land miraculously remains fertile amid the dust storms, to a government photographer whose camera somehow produces images from the past, “The Antidote” is, as one reviewer noted, “as profound as it is wonderfully strange.”
‘The Feeling of Iron’ by Giame Alonge
Ingredients for a great thriller: Take an evil Nazi scientist who conducts gruesome experiments on Jewish prisoners, then escapes justice at the end of WWII when the CIA takes him under their wing. Have two of those prisoners survive the war, then set them on the tail of the aging Nazi in the early 1980s in Central America, where he’s now become a drug dealer and a ruthless mercenary in the Reagan administration’s covert war against Nicaragua.
Alonge, an Italian screenwriter and novelist — his book has been translated by Clarissa Botsford — brings a cinematic feel to this tightly written story, exploring themes of survival, vengeance, self-destruction and the long shadows of history. I subtract some points because of too many typos.
‘I Never Met a Story I Didn’t Like: Mostly True Tall Tales’ by Todd Snider
I was deeply saddened when the folk and alt-country songwriter and singer Todd Snider, one of my favorite performers, died in November at age 59 from pneumonia. So I did something I should have done years ago: got a copy of his looseknit memoir and story cycle, which came out in 2014.
Like a modern-day Will Rogers, Snider was known for his sly but good-natured wit, delivered in his songs and the rambling monologues that were a key part of his shows. Above all, he had the ability to turn a sharp, honest light on troubling issues in his own life, such as screw-ups with drugs, to illuminate things for the rest of us. “I Never Met a Story I Didn’t Like” delivers lots of laughs and heart and can be enjoyed by Snider fans and general readers alike. R.I.P., brother — your music and spirit will live on.
Steve Pfarrer, now retired, is a former arts and features reporter for the Gazette.