2025: My Year in Books

1. General Interest Recommendations

Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me. This was a standout for me this year -- Roy's beautifully written memoir of her rocky relationship with her mother. It is also a compelling intellectual autobiography that follows the arc of Roy's career, from her early days (training as an architect; acting in and then writing for films and television), to her more contemporary social justice interventions. The God of Small Things was a work of fiction, but every major character was based on a real person, and many of the difficult things that happened to the children in the novel are based on events experienced by Roy and her family. I especially appreciated the section in Mother Mary Comes To Me on the architect Laurie Baker, someone I'd not heard of before. 

Even now -- and after many, many years of teaching books like The God of Small Things -- I've still never seen Roy's early films (Massey Sahib, directed by Pradip Krishen; In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, which Roy wrote; and Electric Moon, which, frankly, I'd never even heard of!)

Massey Sahib (1989) is a kind of loose adaptation of Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson transposed to India; there's a version of it on up on YouTube here.

There's a version of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1990) here. (This film, which is based on Roy's experience in a school of architecture in Delhi in the 1970s, seems like the place to start)

I don't see any versions of Electric Moon (1992) online. (Probably ok; in her account of it in the memoir, Roy suggests that this film, a hybrid British-Indian production made with BBC funding, was a bit of a misfire.)

Caoilinn Hughes, The Alternatives. File under: thoughtful climate fiction. A readable but somewhat idiosyncratic novel of ideas; what would it really mean to move to rural Ireland and drop off the grid? What sacrifices would it require, especially in terms of your personal relationships and your family? At the center of this smart novel are four sisters, each with a Ph.D. -- one a philosopher, one a geologist, one a caterer, and the fourth a political scientist. The debates between the sisters form the core of the novel. Some of the philosophy might be a little abstruse for readers (Kant!), though Hughes does find ways to make it accessible enough and relevant to the core ethical dilemmas she wants to explore. 

Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore. File under: climate fiction + thriller. A novel set on a remote island outpost near Antarctica (Shearwater Island), with a group of caretakers whose main job is to protect a doomsday seed bank. The novel has the stylized language and lyricism of literary fiction, though in the second half it turns more into a thriller plot. Overall, it made me curious to visit the place itself, though given its remoteness that seems far-fetched. (Let's start by getting ourselves to Australia or New Zealand first...)

Percival Everett, James. I'm guessing most people in my circle have read this brilliant rewriting of Huckleberry Finn from Jim/James' point of view -- it was on everybody's top ten lists last year. I finally read it this year; it's very good. I especially liked the investment in James' interest in writing his own story: "With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. Wrote myself to here." Also: "I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written." This theme of the novel reminded me of other 'postcolonial' texts that write back to the Anglo-American Canon -- and that thematize the act of writing as a central part of coming to own one's subjectivity (see: J.M. Coetzee's Foe). I've never taught Uncle Tom's Cabin, but if I were to do that in the future, I would do it alongside James. 

2. Academic Books

In the course of a given year, academics might consult or access a pretty large number of academic books. We also get asked to read a fair number of books as reviewers for academic presses, which we obviously can't talk about publicly. We also can't talk about materials we read when reviewing colleagues for tenure and promotion. 

The books listed below are ones I read closely and recommend.   

Dana A. Williams, Toni at Random (2025). Given that I have been teaching and writing about Toni Morrison quite a bit over the past few years, this was an obvious choice. Williams does a great job of unpacking the significance of Toni Morrison's work as an editor at Random House, doing deep dives with the various projects she worked on. The discussion adds a lot to our sense of the state of play for African American literature in the 1970s, and also solidifies the sense that Toni Morrison was a force of nature everywhere she went.  

Chad L. Williams, The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World War (2023). I read this while working on an article on African American Poetry of World War I. It is a really gripping, involving biography of just one small section of Du Bois' life and career -- his engagement with World War I. For a writer who published so much and who had so much success, this is also the story of a notable failure -- Du Bois tried and failed to complete a book documenting the Black experience in World War I. As is well-known, Du Bois himself went to France at the tail end of the war to meet with and understand the experiences of Black soldiers in the segregated U.S. army; what he discovered was pretty shocking. Here, the author extensively consulted the manuscript of that yet-unpublished work alongside traditional biographical sources.  

Danica Savonick, Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College (2024). I was happy to run into Danica at the Toni Morrison conference at Cornell this past fall, and she was kind enough to give me a free copy of her book. It's a fascinating look at the radically democratic and feminist pedagogy practiced by a group of writers teaching at CUNY during the brief era where students could attend college for free. Savonick's book gave me a new perspective on these writers, but also on the prospects for a different kind of college teaching -- driven by the ideal of social justice first and foremost. The most eye-opening chapter for me was the one on Toni Cade Bambara.

Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024). This one was widely talked about on publication in 2024, especially on social media. I finally read it this past spring, and assigned the "Imaginary" and "Writing" chapters in my Digital Humanities grad seminar. To my eye, it's a powerful diagnosis of our contemporary digital / social media-driven malaise, building on and updating Jamesonian Postmodernism for the streaming era. The book is written in a lively style, with memorable epigrams and conceptual hooks ("Shit is very bad"), suggesting that Kornbluh is as susceptible as the rest of us to doomscrolling and social media brainrot, though she also knows we can do much, much better. Kornbluh makes a claim for the importance of not just mediation and narrative, but theory itself in pushing back against economic structures and technological paradigms that seem designed to prevent us from thinking clearly and carefully about our world. (Arguably, the commercial generative AI turn that really exploded after the book was published only intensifies the dynamics Kornbluh is describing.) 

Judith Brown, Modernism and the Idea of India: The Art of Passive Resistance (2024). Built on Gandhi's idea of "passive resistance" (which he would later refine and revise as "satyagraha"), Brown argues that modernist writers and artists in the South Asian context found ways to engage politics and resist the hegemony of capitalism and colonialism that were a little oblique and ex-centric -- passive, if you will. Here, I especially enjoyed the thoughtful, well-researched readings of individual authors and artists -- there are chapters on the painter Amrita Sher-Gil, Rabindranath Tagore, R.K. Narayan, Ahmed Ali, G. V. Desani, Virginia Woolf (focused on her representations of India in books like The Waves), and the architect Le Corbusier, who designed the city of Chandigarh.  

Hollis Robbins, Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition (2020). Robbins brings a deep knowledge of poetics and poetic form together with an even deeper knowledge of the African American literary tradition. She has impressive chapters on African American sonnet writers like Claude McKay, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Margaret Walker, but also close readings of many other, more obscure African American writers -- people like Alberry A Whitman and Leslie Pinckney Hill.  I read this in connection with support of my digital project, African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology. 

Ramachandra Guha, Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, The Tribals, and India (1999). This is a book Guha wrote well before India After Gandhi (2007). It's a compelling account of a problematic figure. Despite Verrier Elwin's flaws, one shouldn't write off the important work he did in documenting and advocating for Adivasi communities, especially in the years before independence. Also some fascinating stuff about Elwin's relationship with Gandhi here. I read this in connection with the project on Adivasi Writers I was working on in summer 2025. 

Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012). Butler published this book more than a decade ago; I didn't read it at the time. Looking at it this fall, I found it thought-provoking and relevant as we continue to grapple with the genocide in Gaza and a conflict that appears to have no pathway to resolution. Butler's engagements with theorists like Levinas, Arendt, Benjamin, Buber, and others are intriguing, especially as they show a line of specifically Jewish dissent to Zionism that goes back to the 1950s and 60s. The direct critique of Zionism is limited to certain chapters; the book as a whole is a work of theory and reflection. There is also some really great material on Edward Said and a concluding chapter that looks at Said alongside the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. I read this in connection with the talk I gave at NAVSA on Victorian Zionism, based on the chapter on that topic in my first book, Literary Secularism. 

2a. Digital Humanities Books:

Amy Earthart, Digital Literary Redlining: African American Anthologies, Digital Humanities, and the Canon (2025). This book is very close to my own thinking and orientation to digital humanities scholarship, and Earhart's interest in anthologies (including contemporary, mainstream anthologies as well as anthologies focused on minoritized writers) is also one I have had, especially in the Anthologies I've been looking at for African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology. Earhart's main conclusions derive from the dataset she built (published separately here; created with the help of a number of students and grant support), categorizing and cataloging the authors and texts in dozens of anthologies. There's a lot to think about here in terms of methodology (do we count the numbers of texts in the table of contents, or the number of pages authors are given?), but also some thought-provoking big-picture conclusions. The Canon is less exclusive now than it was, say, in the 1980s, but the big anthologies are still more conservative than you might expect. A question I am myself thinking about might be: what will happen to anthologies as we shift further towards digital platforms? Will they still define the 'Canon'?

Martin Paul Eve, The Digital Humanities and Literary Studies (2022). Nice, readable survey of digital humanities as a field. It features some thoughtful responses to the critiques of DH that were happening in the late 2010s up to 2020 or so. Eve's book has a good balance of technical accounts of computational humanities and big-picture questions. Next up on my reading list is Eve's newer book Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History (2024). Open access available...

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Digital Humanities (2022). Solid anthology with many well-known DH practitioners featured. I started with Johanna Drucker's "Normative Digital Humanities," Amy Earhart's "Feminist Digital Humanities" and Roopika Risam's "Postcolonial Digital Humanities Reconsidered." But also take a look at essays by Martin Paul Eve, Melissa Terras, Brian Croxall and Diane Jakacki, Shawna Ross and Andrew Pilsch, and many others. 

Computational Humanities (2024). Another solid DH volume, one that I was especially interested to engage since I have been getting more invested in computational methods. I started with Roopika Risam's account of learning to code; I went on to helpful and accessible essays by David Bammon, Crystal Hall, Mark Algee-Hewitt, and others. There's an open-access version up somewhere...

Dennis Tenen, Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write (2024). A thought-provoking short book that could be a good asset in teaching undergraduates about the role of artificial 'paper machines' for assisting and structuring writing that preexist today's generative AI. Some of the engagements might be obvious choices -- Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace on the Victorian Difference Engine and Analytical Engine -- but I really enjoyed the discussion of Vladimir Propp. The most relevant chapter for courses dealing with / responding to AI from a humanistic perspective might be Chapter 8 ("Big Ideas"). 

3. Pleasure Reading

This spring I devoured quite a number of Tana French books in sequence: The Searcher, The Likeness, In The Woods, Broken Harbor, The Hunter, Faithful Place, The Secret Place. Tana French is really good! A nice balance of satisfying genre plots with considerable attention to characterization, back story, and local color. I especially liked the rural Ireland settings of The Searcher and The Hunter, and hope to see more from French in that vein in the future. 

I also read Gregory Maguire's Wicked for the first time, in connection with the movies. Not at all what I expected! Happily, I read this before giving it to my kid to read; she would have hated it, to be honest. I got through the book to its conclusion, though I didn't like it well enough to read its sequels.

I am known to read Stephen King ebooks on occasion, especially when in transit, sitting in doctors' offices, and when otherwise dealing with insomnia. I read a bunch of these this past year, including The Outsider, If It Bleeds, Holly, Never Flinch, You Like it Darker, 11/22/63 -- and probably a few others I'm forgetting. The most impressive as a conventional novel might be 11/22/63, though I definitely also enjoy more horror-themed / gothic narratives like Holly (which has a strong post-pandemic / Trump era vibe). 

My daughter was reading Shirley Jackson for school, so for the first time I read The Haunting of Hill House and Dark Tales.