Reading 2025: Fiction

My favorite novel of the past year is Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry.  It only took me 40 years to get around to reading, finally prompted to do so by this article by David Polansky in The Hedgehog Review.  I'd read the other book Polansky writes about, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, about twenty years ago.  Although admiring McCarthy's writing I much prefer Lonesome Dove.

Lonesome Dove is an epic tale, and much more hard and grim than I'd anticipated.  With its two compelling main characters, equally compelling side characters, and intersecting story lines it employs some of the sentimental tropes of traditional Westerns but tells an unsentimental, unyielding and, at times, brutal story.  It took about 75 pages to fall into its rhythm but since the novel is more than 800 pages that's an acceptable admission fee.

Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae remind me of the characters played by John Wayne in John Ford's The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, half-barbarous men needed to tame the frontier but who are unsuited to live there once it is civilized.  As Gus says to Woodrow, "Me and you done our work too well. We killed off most of the people that made this country interesting to begin with".

It had been many years since reading PD James crime novels featuring Inspector Adam Dalgliesh.  The Children of Men is not a crime novel, instead set in a near future England where children are no longer born.  Though full of action it is quite a reflective and pensive novel.  In some ways the future it predicts has already happened.  

Finding a new series of well-written historical novels is always a joy.  Alfred Duggan, an Englishman born in 1903, wrote 15 novels between 1950 and his death in 1964, and I read six this year.  While some are still in print, a couple I could only find secondhand as Ace Paperbacks, sold for 50 cents back in the 1950s!  Duggan's novels are all set in the classical or medieval eras.  The ones I particularly enjoyed were Conscience of The King, a speculative life of the founder of the Kingdom of Wessex in the sixth century, The Little Emperors, the story of the final chaotic years of Roman rule in Britain during the early fifth century, told from the perspective of a bureaucrat, and Knight With Armour, the tale of an ordinary English knight on the First Crusade.  Duggan is excellent in conveying the mental framework of his characters as reflecting the eras they lived in.  

Sink The Rising Sun is the debut novel by my friend Jon Gabriel.  Set in southwestern Australia in the opening months of America's involvement in World War Two, it is the tale of a submariner trying to stop the advance of Japan into the waters of Southeast Asia.  Well-researched and written, it's a gripping tale that accurately portrays the balance between boredom and action in the naval life.  Jon was a nuclear reactor technician on a submarine and brings his experience to this adventure.  

The High Crusade is 1960 science fiction by Poul Anderson, in which English knights and villagers during the Hundred Years War encounter an alien spaceship which they seize but then, in turn, find themselves hijacked and off to adventures in a distant galaxy.  How they cope and whether they succeed or fail in their new environment makes for an amusing tale.

Thomas Perry is a crime and mystery novelist.  Pro Bono, set in California with an well imagined and engaging plot, is the first Perry novel I've read. While writing this post I looked up his bio and found that he died in September 2025.  With thirty novels published I have a lot more ahead of me. 

Another historical novelist I enjoy is Robert Harris.  Precipice is set in the summer of 1914 when a British intelligence officer is assigned to find out how secret government communications were disclosed and stumbles across the affair between Prime Minister Asquith and the young Venetia Stanley.  A good read, but not his best.  If you haven't read Harris before I recommend starting with Fatherland; Act of Oblivion; Pompeii; or An Officer and a Spy.  His 2026 release is about Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the right hand man of Augustus, a great subject for a historical novel.

Finally, I read the latest installments by three crime novelists who I've collectively read more than 50 times.

The Lincoln Lawyer, Mickey Haller, features in Michael Connelly's The Proving Ground, involving a case in which artificial intelligence plays a role in the murder of a young woman.  Another solid entry from Connelly.

The 20th novel by Robert Crais starring Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, The Big Empty, is one of his best.  A mystery with some very unexpected twists.

Martin Walker's Bruno, Chief of Police series is set in the Vezere and Dordogne River valleys of France, a frequent destination for us over the years. I enjoy the settings for the novels, but the 18th in the series, An Enemy In The Village, continues the recent trend of a decline in quality in the stories.  If I had not enjoyed the earlier books so much I would stop reading the series.