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.