First Things editors and writers share the most memorable books they read this year.
R. R. Reno
Editor
Our political culture is changing. Book publishers are eager to put out books explaining the new forms of right-wing thought. A month ago, I tied myself to my desk chair to read one of them: Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura Field.
Field surveys some of the main figures in contemporary debates, which includes your humble scribe. A former fellow-traveler on the New Right, she offers hearty helpings of tell-all personal anecdotes. Field digresses into what she imagines to be refutations of New Right ideas that are too often little more than restatements of liberal pieties. It’s not a satisfying or insightful book. But at present, Furious Minds offers the most comprehensive survey of the intellectual side of MAGA conservatism.
Russell Kirk often emphasized the priority of the imagination over theory. With this truth in mind, I recently reread On the Marble Cliffs. Written by Ernst Jünger at the end of the 1930s, the novella meditates on the tribulations that arise when revolutionary nihilism gains the upper hand and social forms dissolve. The two main characters are brothers who wish to emigrate into an internal exile to cultivate their own souls. But events thrust them back into the unhappy world. Jünger wishes to meditate on a question all of us should be asking in our very different but increasingly troubled times: By what compass can we navigate?
Wishing to continue in a surreal dreamworld tethered to reality (Jünger’s admirable literary achievement), I picked up Julien Gracq’s minor classic, Balcony in the Forest. Outwardly a story of a French lieutenant stationed in a remote concrete blockhouse in the Ardennes forest during the months before the German blitzkrieg, the novel is best read as an allegory of our long (for some, short) tarrying on the portico of death. It’s a wonderfully hopeful novel, reminding us that we can indeed live.
At present, The Intellectual Life is on my nightstand. Written in the early twentieth century by French Dominican A. G. Sertillanges, this guide to study and reflection is at once detailed and practical and sweeping and inspirational. I discovered The Intellectual Life as a young college professor. This is my third or fourth time reading it, which I’m doing as slowly as possible, the better to read, mark, and inwardly digest.
Dan Hitchens
Senior editor
It’s been a challenging year for my country: increasingly ungovernable, taken apart by Australia in the cricket, and with a leadership class mostly devoted to establishing a state suicide service. I took counsel from Patrick Porter’s bracing manifesto for realism, How to Survive a Hostile World—an exemplary demonstration of how to write with academic rigor for a general audience; inspiration from Justin Pollard’s Alfred the Great, a lucid study of how a previous national crisis was overcome; and comfort from Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy, whose comedy is so well-constructed that you can’t bring yourself to object to Waugh more or less setting down the moral of the story in ten-foot-high capital letters.
Julia Yost
Senior editor
This year I read some of the work of Henry Mayhew, the Victorian journalist who produced the great oral history London Labour and the London Poor. The London underclass, invisible to the literate public, encompassed many species of human: coffee sellers, boot-lace sellers, old-clothes men, baked-potato men, flower girls, lucifer-match girls, chimney sweeps, crossing-sweepers, bone-grubbers, dustmen, nightmen, street-conjurors, circus clowns, cab drivers, scavengers, vagrants. Mayhew interviewed them, commissioned illustrations of them, visited their homes. The result was a humane and encyclopedic work of social science, capturing “the riot, the struggle, and the scramble for a living” in better prose than any social scientist ever mustered. Mayhew’s descriptions of the working methods of a bird-catcher, say, or a “tosher” (sewer-hunter), are marvels of clarity. His report on the means of illumination at a night-market is the equal of any descriptive passage in that century’s realist fiction:
Some stalls are crimson with the fire shining through the holes beneath the baked chestnut stove; others have handsome octohedral lamps, while a few have a candle shining through a sieve: these, with the sparkling ground-glass globes of the tea-dealers’ shops, and the butchers’ gaslights streaming and fluttering in the wind, like flags of flame, pour forth such a flood of light, that at a distance the atmosphere immediately above the spot is as lurid as if the street were on fire.
Mayhew documented non-economic aspects of life in the metropolis, too. His account of a balloon-ride over London is as revelatory as the ride itself must have been in 1852. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst called Mayhew’s work “the greatest Victorian novel never written.” It will reward anyone who has a notion to venture off the Great Books syllabus.
Carl R. Trueman
Contributing editor
This year I reread Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and followed it with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. Both books revolve around the conflict of the philosophies expressed by its actors in a context where death (in the form of terminal illness) shapes the discussion. These are bleak novels but offer insights into the developing modernities that gave birth to them.
My scholarly book of the year is Angela Franks’s Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self. I had the privilege of reading the manuscript before publication and was dazzled both by its learning and its commitment to articulating a Christian understanding of selfhood. Franks surveys historic understandings of the self and then engages in detailed dialogue with continental thinkers, such as Heidegger, Deleuze, and French post-structuralists.
I remain skeptical that Heidegger has much of use to say beyond his concept of enframing, but Franks does a remarkable job of showing how so many of these thinkers allow us to see more clearly into the problematic nature of our age. This is a book that deserves wide readership. One thing it made me think of yet again: There is still a tale to be told of what happens when philosophies forged in the context of European catastrophes (Nazism for Heidegger, the German Occupation for French intellectuals) are transplanted into a culture such as that of the U.S. That too must have significance for how the thought of such figures has shaped American attitudes.
Ephraim Radner
Columnist
“None is righteous, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10), as St. Paul writes, is a claim that ought to instigate at least a little self-reflection on our part. The Serbian novelist Danilo Kiš’s A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and the Australian critic Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time couldn’t be more different. Yet they are connected by their treatment of moral complicity in human cruelty and political abomination. Kiš’s novel is by far the better book: spare, brilliant, frightening. But its studied indifference in fictionally reporting the barbarous riptides and quicksands of Stalinist fellow-traveling is almost too painful to read. James’s personal encyclopedia of mostly twentieth-century cultural figures he deems important to know (and whose personal acquaintance he delights in telling us about) is tendentiously fun. More serious is his treatment of those with (or resistant to) the dirty hands of communist or fascist sympathies. Beneath James’s intellectual romp is a sobering reminder of the weaknesses and only rare fortitudes most of us display in our confrontation with evil. Both Kiš and James, in their contrasting registers, provide good context for our hearing of St. Paul.
Peter J. Leithart
Columnist
Jason Staples’s Paul and the Resurrection of Israel is the best study of Pauline theology in years. By distinguishing “Jew” (descendant of Judah, resident of Judea) from “Israel” (the scattered twelve-tribe nation), Staples clarifies Paul’s interests and arguments. In Christ, God proves himself God of Israel, so committed to saving his people that he also gathers in Gentiles with whom they’ve mingled. In a philosophical vein, Felix Ó Murchadha’s thrilling A Phenomenology of Christian Life shows how the Incarnation’s mixture of heaven and earth desecrates pagan cosmology.
I finally finished Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things. Monumental as it is, I closed the second volume with the disappointed worry that, for all his touting of flowy, poetic right-brainedness, McGilchrist finally rests his case on left-brained neuroscience.
Two books cut through the swirl of debate about the post-war consensus: Alec Ryrie’s The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It explains how Hitler haunts our morality and politics, and Sean McMeekin’s Stalin’s War puts Stalin at the center as winner of both the war and the post-war.
During autumn, I went on a P. G. Wodehouse bender, then picked up Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel as a chaser. After Tom Stoppard died in November, I found an Audible collection of radio plays and discovered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead remains every bit as silly as I remembered. Together, Rabelais, Wodehouse, and Stoppard send me laughing into 2026.
Mary Harrington
Contributor
The impact of digital media on literacy has been much discussed in the press this year and formed the thematic backbone of my 2025 book stack. I began with Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: a prescient 2006 study of the author’s background as a print journalist, and his lived experience of cognitive change through engagement with digital reading. The Shallows takes in neurological, literary, and first-hand aspects to explore the radically different affordances of digital media. On the same theme I also revisited Walter J. Ong’s seminal Orality and Literacy, as well as the book that made Marshall McLuhan famous, on the impact of the printing press: The Gutenberg Galaxy. Though it took me considerably longer, I also read Elizabeth Eisenstein’s meticulous, 700-page scholarly response to McLuhan: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, a book so rich in detail it feels, itself, like a medieval illuminated manuscript.
In the light of our technological moment, I also read (on the practical side) Palantir CEO Alexander Karp’s The Technological Republic, and (more theoretical) Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Nearer. As a chaser for these at points—frankly alarming—tech-optimist perspectives, I turned to Edward Feser’s Scholastic Metaphysics, and felt on opening it as though I was uncovering things hidden since the foundation of the world (at least, the modern world). A little further down the same philosophical rabbit-hole I devoured the exquisite essay Leisure: The Basis of Culture, by Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper, and thence hopscotched to Angela Franks’s superb new study of modern selfhood, Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self.
Finally, as a Brit, my country’s postmodern woes have been on my mind, as well as all around me. On this theme I read Bonnie Lander Johnson’s elegiac Vanishing Landscapes: The Story of Plants and How We Lost Them. In it, Johnson explores the social history of staple plants, including apples, grapes, and saffron, whose use and mythology played important roles in medieval English life. Johnson is an early modern literary scholar at Downing College, Cambridge, and her book abounds in literary and historical texture: a feast for lovers of deep England, and perhaps my favorite new title this year.
Valerie Stivers
Contributor
Prior to my conversion to Catholicism, I underwent the worldview-shattering personal apocalypse of having children in progressive, secular Brooklyn. The experience was best described by a New York Magazine headline of the time, “All Joy and No Fun”—though it was pretty light on the joy, as well. Ever since, I’ve been trying to understand what went wrong, and what should have been different. Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, by Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, contains the most illuminating answer I’ve found so far, though it addresses the question only obliquely.
Were I to recommend a library of required reading for young mothers, this book would be in it. Pakaluk, an economist and social scientist at Catholic University, set out to understand American demographic collapse by exploring its opposite: families who have lots of children. The book is both “the first qualitative study of the American women resistant to the trend of low birth rates,” and a profoundly moving exploration of the thoughts and family structures of people who appear to be enjoying themselves.
Algis Valiunas
Contributor
I read two worthy books about Oxford types recently, and they can hardly be said to describe the same place, the same sort of people. Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski have written a group biography of four brilliant Christian writers and friends who flourished there around 1920–1970, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. Shunning the modernist themes and technical funhouse distortions of their Bloomsbury contemporaries (Cambridge types), they favored tried-and-true storytelling methods, which they applied to a host of imaginatively florid genres considered beneath the dignity of serious twentieth-century literature: “myth, science fiction, fable, epic fantasy, children’s fantasy, and more.” To re-enchant the spiritually arid modern world was their aim. “Fantasy literature was, for the Inklings, a pathway to [the] higher world and a way of describing, through myth and symbol, its felt presence. Fantasy became the voice of faith.” Tolkien in particular enjoyed immense acclaim and vast readership, and Lewis became the most influential Christian layman of his time, through his works of popular theologizing even more than through his fiction. It is easy enough for even a supposedly well-read person of conventional secular education to overlook these writers; I reached my eighth decade without having read any of Tolkien’s or Lewis’s fiction, and Barfield and Williams were only obscure names to me. A deficiency I’m trying to make good.
Then there’s Black Chalk, the first novel by the Oxford law graduate Christopher J. Yates, an excursion into the heart of darkness by way of a game of nihilist malice among friends and lovers. Where the Inklings had to face the terrors of two world wars, the cutthroat rivals of Yates’s Pitt College Game Soc are the victims of the Age of Thatcher, compassionless banshee whom all decent undergraduates must mock with extreme loathing, while they destroy one another with their clever and ever more sinister amusement. If one can excuse the political fatuousness (whether it’s Yates’s own or just his characters’), this is a well-made study of soulless youthful intelligence out to prove its superiority at all costs, among the very best people in the best of places. God save us all.
Thomas G. Guarino
Contributor
One of the great books of the twentieth century is Thomas Kuhn’s post-positivist manifesto, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s vocabulary (paradigm shift, theory-laden interpretation, incommensurability) has worked its way into every academic field and even into everyday life. Kuhn masterfully exposed the non-cognitive, socio-cultural factors that deeply affect scientific conclusions but are often overlooked or concealed. (He would have smiled knowingly at the mantra, “follow the science.”) Unfortunately, Kuhn’s work lists toward Kantian constructivism, so that even moderate realism is conflated with positivism. Nonetheless, his limpid prose and vibrant examples make this groundbreaking book well worth reading or rereading.
For lighter fare, I suggest Ruth Nelson’s Our Lady of the World’s Fair, an entertaining account of the hard work and political machinations involved in bringing Michelangelo’s Pietà to the New York World’s Fair in 1964–1965. Nelson offers a blow-by-blow account involving New York’s archbishop, Francis Cardinal Spellman, as well as legendary powerbroker and builder Robert Moses. An elementary school student at the time, I clearly remember standing on the moving sidewalk that briskly conveyed visitors past the transplanted masterpiece. Little did I realize the vitriol the Vatican was subjected to for allowing the world’s most famous sculpture to be shipped abroad. One critic called the move the most dramatic act of vandalism in Rome since the fifth century. But the Vatican Pavilion was hugely popular with the public, drawing over twenty-seven million visitors in two years, second only to the General Motors exhibit.
A final recommendation is Taking Religion Seriously by the well-known political scientist Charles Murray. A long-time agnostic who considered religion irrelevant, Murray now argues that there are solid reasons for reconsidering that position. In accessible, almost conversational prose, he investigates the rationality of theistic and Christian claims, offering readers a thoughtful, well-argued journey toward palpable, if not quite determinate, belief.
