Books I read in 2025
It seems popular to post a list of books one has read in the year. Unfortunately, I can’t remember which I have read and whether it was this year or last. Still less can I do an Instagram or TikTok post showing a physical pile of books. I have gradually remembered more though, but my achievement is a pathetic 25 rather than 50, 60 or 100. Of course I partly read other books, but I assume this game requires me to have read the complete books. The German-language ones I read in German. The sequence is not chronological.

Yiyun Li: Things in Nature Merely Grow
Yiyun Li: Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
John Burnside: A Lie About My Father
Kazuo Ishiguro: A Pale View of Hills (A film of this came out, but after reading the novel I thought it was too subtle to film – may get round to it)
Kazuo Ishiguro: An Artist of the Floating World (reread)
Jung Chang: Wild Swans (reread), started to read the sequel but not got far. (Wild Swans is brilliant because Jung Chang’s mother visited her some years after she moved to the UK and dictated sixty hours of memories of what it was like bringing up a family in the Mao era and keeping one’s opinions away from the children – also memories of the grandmother who was married to a warlord and had bound feet – so really the story of three generations of women)
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