Some of what I read in 2025
I know we’re already mid-January and I’m a month late to the end-of-year round-ups; but as the new year starts I am taking a look back and sharing some books that left a mark.
Best book on a topic I’m currently obsessed with: Karen Hao’s Empire of AI. A solid introduction to the topic and a detailed account of the evolution and rise of OpenAI and ChatGPT, with portraits and interviews with some of its founders. This is very skeptical but measured take that lays out arguments about the AI industry’s hidden costs, imperial agenda, and outright obfuscation of its goals. What Hao strongly suggests but doesn’t come right out and say is that the leadership of OpenAI and other similar ventures are a bunch of self-aggrandising, self-interested, disingenuous assholes. Hao shows how people like Sam Altman went very quickly from claiming to want their companies to be open and transparent and to protect us from future AI perils to embracing a hugely capitalised drive to acquire dominant market share, keep their training models secret, and avoid serious regulation. Whether they’re claiming that AI might be an existential threat or that it will solve climate change and fix healthcare — problems too intractable for us humans to figure out — the answer is always the same: their company is the one that needs to accelerate and monopolise the technology, and the undefined future benefits from this outweigh all current downsides. Some other reading on the topic that I’ve found interesting: The Parrot in the Machine, James Gluck’s review in the NYRB of two other critiques of AI; Evgeny Morozov’s essay Socialism After AI in the Ideas Newsletter; and ChatGPT is a Gimmick by Jonathan Malesic, on teaching writing at university today (which I came to by way of an episode of the Know Your Enemy podcast).
Last year I also, a bit by chance, read three of the biggest (in the sense that they got reviewed everywhere) new novels: Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, and Miranda July’s All Fours. My favourite of these by far was All Fours, which is funny and surprising and has some wonderful writing. It’s not worth summarising the plot, but I will just say that it starts with a forty-something female artist whose marriage is stuck taking a cross-country trip and stopping one hour from home in a small town where she becomes erotically transfixed by a younger man; she stays in town to pursue him, while spending a small fortune beautifully redecorating a motel-room-turned-hideaway. What got a lot attention are the graphic sex scenes, and they are striking. So are many of the narrator’s observations — about work, fame, friendship, sexual tension between spouses, parenting, aging, desire — observations that fill one with a sense of recognition and sweet unfamiliarity at once, that feeling of re-discovering the world through another sensibility. The book falls apart a bit in the second half, goes in a lot of directions, but then again this messiness is part of its appeal. It also spells out its this-book-is-about-a-woman’s-perimenopausal-midlife-crisis point a bit too often for me. But these are quibbles. I really enjoyed it.
I found Rooney’s book equal parts entertaining and frustrating, and often ridiculous. (Something I got no hint from reviewers, who all seem cowed into respect by Rooney’s commercial juggernaut status). I admire Rooney’s politics, particularly on Palestine, and I admire her talent. But I have liked her books less and less since Conversations with Friends, even as they have become more ambitious in terms of engaging with politics and society and big ideas and literary references.
In Intermezzo I found many of the scenes with Ivan — a former chess kid prodigy, now an awkward young adult embarking on an affair with an angelic older woman — quite touching. His slightly neurodivergent voice is genuinely sympathetic and often funny. As always in Rooney’s books, everyone is extremely attractive and likeable (although they must doubt their attractiveness and worth); supposedly brilliant (although we are told rather than shown this); and suffering from problems largely of their own making. Some examples of the ridiculousness: For some reason, Ivan’s older brother Peter’s stream-of-consciousness is rendered with fragments of inverted speech in the style of Star Wars’ Yoda (“his coat he takes off;” “Her hand he feels on his forehead; “Her mouth he kisses again” etc.) Peter becomes near-suicidal over the terrible prospect of having a polyamorous relationship with two lovely women, both of whom are open to whatever arrangement will make him happy. This conundrum, and a misunderstanding between the brothers, is all the plot offers to create mild narrative friction. Meanwhile, the sex scenes that were Rooney’s calling card back in the day are still there at regular intervals but have become … embarrassing. There is always dirty talk and degradation-lite, but all couched with a lot of caveats about how everyone respects and feels safe with each other.
Finally, Creation Lake — I hated it, as did every other person I talked to about it. I was all the more surprised as I remember really liking The Flamethrowers. I hated it so much I wondered if there was actually something interesting going on — I kept trying to articulate what I found so dissatisfying about the experience. The word that ran through my mind as I read this account of a female industrial spy infiltrating an annoying radical environmental commune in France was “curdled.”
The narrator, Sadie, is cynical in the way that stupid people are — not because she knows too much, but because she knows nothing and isn’t curious about anything. She despises the activists she infiltrates because they are middle-class, pretentious male pigs. She despises the one she is dating because he can’t tell that she is deceiving him. He deserves it, because as Sadie informs us, “he had a kind of mannered affection for old Paris, … conceived of reality as stage-directed in black and white.” (But as she helpfully informs us: “The truth is that even when Jean-Luc Godard and people like that were making those movies in black and white, which actors in fedoras who talk like gangsters, they were already an affectation.”) She despises France and the French. Compared to Americans, “The French might have better novels (Balzac, Zola, Flaubert) and they have better cheeses (Comté, Roquefort, Cobequeau). But in the grand scheme that’s basically nothing.”
And she despises anyone with any political beliefs:
“People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed ideas on how society should be organised. When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away.
What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self? What is inside of them?
Not politics. There are not politics inside of people.
The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinion and “beliefs,” is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white sale.
This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being.
What in the love of God is she talking about? I wondered. (And she likes the salt metaphor so well she comes back to it again). As Brandon Taylor wrote in the LRB, in a wonderfully right-on review: “It’s like, stand up sister! Use your human mind!”
A character this dumb is hilarious and could be milked for comedy or pathos; but Kushner offers us no other viewpoint than Sadie’s, and nudges us to align with it by trying to make every other character even more unlikeable and superficial. There are no foils to Sadie who might be sincere or passionate or joyful. Sadie’s dismissive, self-satisfied and ignorant attitude is mirrored throughout the novel. The impression you get is that the author is too cool to even try, that this is a weird simulacrum of a novel, a cursory gesture in the general direction of writing a novel. The plot is listless and nonsensical. A baffling, glib book.
Best book I finally picked back up and finished on a vacation: literary critic Edmund Wilson’s 1940 To The Finland Station. This book opens in 1824, when a young French history professor named Jules Michelet — a man from a poor family that worships at the altar of learning — became intrigued by a mention of the Italian historian Giambattista Vico and “immediately set out to learn Italian.” It ends in 1917 with Vladimir Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station in St. Petersburg at the onset of the October Revolution. The book’s brilliant conceit is to trace the lives of men and the voyage of ideas, the history and emergence of Communist thought.
It is obvious why this book is a classic; it’s intellectual history at its finest. The erudition is astounding, but what makes it a masterpiece is the writing. Wilson re-creates the momentum of a set of new, influential, overlapping ideas breaking out, developing, contending, then forcing their way into history. The portraits of the various figures who carried these ideas along — the empathy and brio and imagination with which they are sketched — are delightful. It doesn’t hurt that many of these men seem to have been incredible characters, with out-of-the-ordinary reserves of daring, arrogance, delusion, kindness, self-sacrifice or stubborness.
Marx and Engels’ relationship and their characters (Marx’s being generally impossible), are wonderfully described. Here is a small taste of one of Wilson’s endlessly quotable passages:
“As a Jew, Marx stood somewhat outside society; as a man of genius, above it. With none of the handicaps of the proletarian from the point of view of intellectual training or of general knowledge of the world, he was yet not a middle-class man …Certainly his character was domineering; certainly his personality was arrogant, and abnormally mistrustful and jealous; certainly he was capable of vindictiveness and of what seems to us gratuitous malignity. But if we are repelled by these traits in Marx, we must remember that a normally polite and friendly person could hardly have accomplished the task which it was the destiny of Marx to carry through—a task that required the fortitude to resist or break off all those ties which—as they involve us in the general life of society—limit our views and cause our purposes to shift.”
As for Wilson’s analyses of historical context or Communist ideas and writings, I don’t know if I agree with all of them, but I found them wonderfully engaging, as they are offered with such clarity, confidence and vivacity. Here is a writer who knew exactly what he thought, a master of his subject who captured it with eloquence and imagination, who communicated his passionate interest in it.
Best book of literary criticism (although it’s hard to say that it belongs to any genre): Geoff Dyer’s 1997 book Out of Pure Rage. This is his book about trying and failing to write a study of D.H. Lawrence; although it is also a book about Lawrence (with some very interesting things to say about him); and about Dyer’s own breakdowns and travails and travels; the difficulty of writing anything; and pushing through that difficulty (as he writes: “Anyone can have a breakdown, anyone. The trick is to have a breakdown and take it in one’s stride. Ideally one would get to the stage where one had a total nervous breakdown and didn’t even notice.”) The books’ epigraph is a citation from Lawrence about one of his own projects: “Out of sheer rage I’ve started my book on Thomas Hardy. It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy I am afraid — queer stuff — but not bad.”
Here is one of the passages I earmarked that made me laugh again on re-reading it (and that speaks 100% to my personal experience):
“Writers suffer more from the flu more than other people and I suffer more from the flu than other writers. If you’re going out to an office or a factory every day then there’s always a holiday element in being sick. You might not feel great but you are at least having a few days at home: it’s a rest, a chance to watch afternoon telly. Whereas writers are home all day anyway; they can watch all the afternoon telly they want. What the flu does is stop them working — so there is, albeit in a heavily diluted from, a sense of being on some kind of holiday. Whereas for me, even when I was feeling a hundred per cent I rarely got down to any work. I could be in the best of health, and all I did was mope around, shuffle around in my slippers, wait for the early-evening news. In terms of what I got up to on a daily basis there was next to no different between my healthy routine and my flu routine. Basically, I realised when I was laid up with the flu, I lived each day as though I was laid up with the flu even when I didn’t have the flu. Having the flu made no difference — except that I felt terrible.”
The two writers I took really deep dives into — writing reviews of their work and spending a lot of time thinking about them, their surroundings, their life stories — were the Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri and the Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth.
And finally, two books that staid with me were Hoda Barakat’s slim novel “Night Post” (translated into English as “Voices of the Lost”) and Batool Abu Akleen’s poetry collection 48 grams. That may be partly because I also got a chance to meet both authors and interview them for episodes of the BULAQ podcast — Barakat in her apartment in Paris, and Abu Akleen over a bad internet connection from Gaza. It was an honour and pleasure to talk to a great writer like Barakat about her life, her writing process, the changes she’s seen in the literary landscape — and how much she hates doing TV. It was also an honour to talk to Abu Akleen. And it was a particularly crazy and heart-sickening thing to interview someone who could have been killed any day in the previous few years, and who ran the risk of being killed any day afterwards (who might even be heightening her risk by going to an internet cafe to talk to us). She has since managed to leave Gaza. But there are so many Palestinians like her — with their own youth, talent, grace, courage, generosity, ambitions — whose lives have been snuffed out, or whose lives continue to be unconsciounably constrained and threatened.