by Dietrich
This has been another banner year of reading for me. These are my dozen favorites, books that spanned the dusty backroads of the American West in the 1940s, the frozen streets of a fictional Copenhagen, the moral rot of 1950s Los Angeles, and the slow, heartbreaking decay of a Beatles partnership, with generous detours into Wonderland, Florida swamps, Dublin pubs, and the bayous of Louisiana. My tastes refuse to get stuck on a single genre, so it’s a mixed bag of the ones that floored me, listed in order of their original publication date.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain – Wallace Stegner (1943) A restless dreamer drags his wife and sons across the early-20th-century West chasing one doomed scheme after another—gold mines, bootlegging, homesteading—while the family slowly fractures under the weight of his merciless vision of success. Stegner does families like nobody else.
Sula – Toni Morrison (1973) In a small Black neighborhood in Ohio, two girls grow up inseparable, then choose radically different paths—one marries and conforms, the other burns every bridge she crosses. Their bond becomes the town’s defining legend and its original sin.
The Big Nowhere (L.A. Quartet #2) – James Ellroy (1988) Three cops—one ambitious, one crooked, one haunted—get tangled in a triple murder investigation tied to union wars, Hollywood blackmail, and a serial killer who carves up his victims to a jazzy soundtrack in postwar Los Angeles.
Tell-All – Chuck Palahniuk (2010) A fading Golden Age movie queen and her too-loyal assistant spiral into a hallucinatory plot involving plastic surgery, blackmail, and a tell-all memoir that keeps rewriting itself—literally—every time someone dies.
After Alice – Gregory Maguire (2015) While Alice is off chasing white rabbits, her friend Ada Boyce tumbles down the same hole on a rescue mission and discovers a darker, more sardonic Wonderland where the Red Queen’s court is plotting something far worse than croquet.
A Man With One of Those Faces – Caimh McDonnell (2016) A Dublin everyman who looks like “every police sketch ever” agrees to visit a dying stranger in hospital for cash—only to wake up with gangsters, cops, and a bunny-wielding granny all convinced he’s somebody worth killing.
Mangrove Lightning (Doc Ford #24) – Randy Wayne White (2017) Marine biologist—and occasional government assassin—Doc Ford investigates a series of bizarre attacks on a charter captain's family, linking them to a near-century-old unsolved multiple murder in the Florida Everglades.
Clown Town (Slow Horses #9) – Mick Herron (2025) Disgraced MI5 agent River Cartwright investigates a missing book from his grandfather’s library that unearths a decades-old, dangerous state secret from the Troubles in Northern Ireland. As MI5’s First Desk scrambles to contain the fallout, the 'slow horses' of Slough House get tangled in the mess, all under the watchful, cynical eye of Jackson Lamb..
The Usual Desire to Kill – Camilla Barnes (2024) In a dilapidated French farmhouse, a translator juggles the chaos of caring for her eccentric, aging parents and her estranged sister's arrival, forced to confront a lifetime of family secrets, sibling rivalry, and the complicated nature of love and death.
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs – Ian Leslie (2024) A lyrical, track-by-track chronicle of the Lennon-McCartney partnership—how two teenagers invented each other, rewrote pop music, and slowly, inevitably broke each other’s hearts, told almost entirely through lyrics and studio chatter.
Embedded – John Lansing (2025) Framed Army Ranger Dakota Judd goes undercover in a white-supremacist prison gang, then deeper into their armed militia, for the FBI. One mistake and he’s dead. Fast, brutal, redemptive.
Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie – James Lee Burke (2025) In the brutal dawn of the 20th century, young Bessie Holland—daughter of the indomitable Hackberry—navigates a Texas ravaged by oil barons, gangsters, and her own ghosts, finding fierce guidance from a suffragette teacher as she battles for justice, family, and the love she’s never known.
Here’s what’s on the Stack:
What in the World? – Leanne Morgan (2024) A stand-up comedian from Tennessee delivers a big-hearted, zero-filter memoir about raising kids, surviving divorce, hot flashes, Jesus, and why Dollar General is a legitimate food group. Basically therapy in book form, but funnier.
Bread of Angels – Patti Smith (2025) A spare, luminous blend of memoir and poetry: Smith trails her late husband’s ghost through Detroit and Tangier, communes with Joan of Arc, photographs graves, feeds cats, and turns grief into fleeting sacraments. Less a book than a whispered Polaroid sequence.
Here’s to the last of 2025 and the promise of 2026—may they both deliver armloads of books to wreck all our sleep schedules, hijack our commutes, and leave us muttering about characters like they’re real people.
All the best for the holidays and happy reading.
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