Month: January 2026

New from me in The UnPopulist on the occasion of making it through one full year of the second Trump presidency.

A positive for my reading life this year is that I’ve been reading more non-fiction than ever, though concentrated online thanks to running the link-sharing platform Seabird and curating our weekly Tidings newsletter of recommended stories. The downside of this is that I read fewer non-fiction books this year than at any time in memory, though I did make time for novels. Writing another of my own books certainly didn’t help either, and I’m excited for that project to be published this fall. I’ll have to do better in the year ahead. That said, here’s this year’s post rounding up the standout books I read in 2025.

Non-fiction:

The Sirens’ Call, Chris Hayes — Speaking of being distracted from reading, this is the most relevant current events book I read last year, critiquing the all-encompassing pulls for our attention online. I’m sympathetic to the diagnosis, if less so for suggested regulatory fixes. Worth reading alongside recent works by Robert Talisse; I also discussed the book a bit in my recent article about the Portland protests.

The Voltage Effect, John A. List — I rarely read business books, but this one on figuring out how to make good ideas scale is both good and relevant to my work on Seabird.

A Cheesemonger’s Tour de France, Ned Palmer — Picked up for a visit to France this summer. An English cheesemonger takes a trip around the country, highlighting the cheeses of each region and how they were shaped by local history. Very enjoyable!

The Comic Book History of the Cocktail, David Wondrich and Dean Kotz — It’s cocktails, it’s comics, and it’s by David Wondrich, so it’s no surprise that I liked it. I reviewed it here.

Modern Caribbean Rum, Matt Pietrek and Carrie Smith — At 850 pages I’ll confess I didn’t read this one cover-to-cover, but it’s an indispensable resource if you’re interested in rum, and it was invaluable to me in understanding facets of rum production.

Fiction:

Brotherless Night, V. V. Ganeshananthan — Superb novel about life in the Tamil region of Sri Lanka during the civil war with the Tamil Tigers. So grounded in and reminiscent of actual events that I constantly had to remind myself that it was a work of fiction. If I have to choose, this is the best novel I read all year.

Crooked Plow, Itamar Vieira Junior — Immersive magical realism set among the post-slavery but still oppressed tenant farmers of Brazil.

Felony Juggler, Penn Jillette — Autofiction from Penn of Penn and Teller fame. Not quite but almost autobiography, at least up to the part where the felony murder happens and the fictional plot gets properly set in motion, but as close we’ll likely get from him. A fun, comedic noir romp. Reviewed here.

The Magician of Lublin, Isaac Bashevis Singer — Whenever I travel somewhere new, I pick up a novel set there to read during the trip. For a visit to Krakow and Warsaw, this story of a womanizing Polish magician unsurprisingly appealed to me. My first read of Singer, recommended.

The Anomaly, Herve Le Tellier — Similarly for France, I finally got around to this popular, mildly sci-fi novel by a French author. Intriguing premise that takes a while to reveal itself (I suggest not reading the description), hard to put down.

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley — My previous visit to Switzerland introduced me to le Carré’s The Night Manager, but this year Shelley’s Frankenstein called out to me, in part due to hype for the new movie adaptation. Of course I knew the beats of the story, but it’s excellent on its own merits and rewards taking the short time to read it to experience how sensational it must have felt when new.

The Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving — I was expecting something a bit lighter for this pick for my summer vacation in New Hampshire. Very funny and imaginative in parts; whether it carries the weight of its darker elements is debatable. I’m intrigued enough to try more of Irving’s work.

I’ve been remiss in updating the blog! But for The Unpopulist, I wrote about joining the Portland anti-ICE protests:

This was very much not my typical Wednesday night. Though I live in Portland, where protesting is one of the city’s favorite pastimes, my preferred mode of political activism is sitting in a coffeeshop typing words on a screen. I’m less inclined to assemble in large groups in which my message is limited to what I can convey on a sign or t-shirt, surrounded by other protesters whose views may be at odds with my own. In Portland, the message of late had been reduced to pure absurdity, images of human-sized frogs staring impassively back at lines of federal officers in riot gear. As the protest went viral, I found myself intrigued to join. “What is it like to be a bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked. I wanted to know what it’s like to be an inflatable frog.

And for the Examiner, I reviewed David Wondrich’s new Comic Book History of the Cocktail:

Thanks to several decades of comic book saturation at the movies, we all know the plot beats of a superhero epic. An intriguing origin. A rise to power. An unexpected fall followed by a journey in the wilderness. Finally, a heroic victory and return, coming back stronger and wiser than before. 

It’s not too much of a stretch to apply that story arc to the cocktail, the subject of the latest book from drink historian David Wondrich. In The Comic Book History of the Cocktail: Five Centuries of Mixing Drinks and Carrying On, Wondrich teams up with illustrator Dean Kotz to tell the story of the mixed drink, from the hazy origins of the first punches to the dark days of Prohibition and disco-era Harvey Wallbangers, to the contemporary revival of old-school drinks, forgotten ingredients, and culinary prestige in the bar world.