The trail, on a cold, rainy day, is long and challenging. You’re on the final leg through a forest of trees so tall that the already failing light of day is struggling to find its way down to the ground. Tired, chilled, wet, and just slightly panicky about making it back before dark, you see the lights of the trailhead lodge. You get to the door and discover it’s still open. Not only is it open, and warm, but you’re just in time for last call at the little coffee bar. Soon you’re sitting by the fire with hot drinks. You’re not only revived but revivified.

That was an experience I had with my family earlier this year. It strikes me now — if you’ll allow the leap — that discovering or coming back to a great book is a bit like that renewed sense of well-being, a glow amid the middling mayhems of everyday life. The following is our second annual offering of the books that provided a welcome glow for NR’s writers and editors in the year gone by — works that educated, inspired, and entertained us. We hope you’ll enjoy reading about our reading and wish you a happy new year. 

Luther Ray Abel, associate editor
For those who want a better understanding of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian espionage in the West, there’s no better way to imbibe it than through James H. McGee’s The Zebras from Minsk. The second in a series of American black operations to foil the new axis of evil, the story begins in the Appalachians and brings in our Scandinavian and Eastern European allies. Simulacrums of Jeffrey Epstein, leftists and right-wingers on the foreign dole, and a federal blindness to the scale of our enemies’ combined threat provide a Clancy-esque reality to fictional people and places. At just under 300 pages, the story moves with urgency, and I found myself anticipating the next release, with heavy hints it will address the Christian persecution in Africa.

My favorite of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, The Silver Chair, is the most alien of the series. Set in the far north, the protagonists and a Marsh-wiggle seek out a lost prince in a subterranean kingdom ruled by a witch. It’s a haunting, dour tale, maybe the most adult of the series until The Last Battle, and you won’t soon forget the imagery of the carnivorous giants, enslaved underdwellers, and the cruel beauty of the witch. It’s a damp book best read next to a freshly stoked fireplace.

Brian T. Allen, art critic
E Is for Edward, a centennial celebration of the work of Edward Gorey, reminds us that savants still wander the Earth. “I’ve been murdering children in my books for years,” the book illustrator once said, making the misanthrope in all of us smile. Lewis Carroll meets W. C. Fields, with a dash of Henry James.

Abigail Anthony, staff writer
My favorite book of 2025 was Tarr, by Wyndham Lewis. (Admittedly, I began the book, a gift from my Lewis-enthusiast boyfriend, and nearly dropped it, but then he informed me that the author tends to make the earliest pages rather painful to weed out the incompetent readers.) Tarr is a vivid portrait of unorthodox characters that kept me engaged and disturbed. I found the dark humor rather entertaining, although what I most appreciated was Lewis’s unconventional — even bizarre — command of the English language. Lewis has the strangest use of punctuation I have ever encountered, and each page contains a sentence that could be characterized as a syntactic puzzle. Tarr offers a complex plot with rather abrasive characters that will keep you entertained, while the prose provides a mental obstacle course to navigate through the intricacies of English.

Judson Berger, managing editor, NRO
I’ve already mentioned Edmund Morris’s TR biography Theodore Rex many times this year in the Weekend Jolt, so I’ll give a drive-by endorsement to that magisterial work — and pivot to highly recommend Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. It’s a book about time management — and meaning, happiness, fulfillment, all that stuff — for anybody who feels overwhelmed by the modern to-do list. That is, most of us. His core piece of advice is timeless: You’ll never, ever get it all done. Accept that. I’d say that’s news we can use. My only cautionary note is that while the book is helpful for anybody mid-career and up looking to reclaim sanity (and time), Burkeman’s advice could prove a bit too tempting to, say, new college grads for whom hitting the ground running is probably the most important thing.

Jeffrey Blehar, staff writer
For the last two months I have been combing through Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts and rediscovering the forgotten pleasures of a life of the mind. James was an Australian cultural critic who passed away in 2019; this work, a collection of alphabetically organized (and frequently digressive) sketches of intellectual and artistic personalities from the past century or so, serves as a guidebook to a life’s worth of political and artistic understanding. (I say “or so” because, while most of James’s miniatures are written about 20th-century figures, he also makes digressions into late 19th-century thought as well as the occasional entry on a formative political thinker like Montesquieu.) The choices are highly personal, global in reach — James was a proud polyglot — and searingly opinionated. As a critic, James can occasionally tend toward pungency — he loves jazz, but like most non-Americans fails to understand it — and an encounter with his prose oftentimes feels like having a vivid and wonderfully chatty argument over drinks with a friend. So many of the political thinkers and artists James focuses on were relatively obscure to American audiences even in 2007, when Cultural Amnesia was first published, and are now increasingly so. (How many in 2025 outside of France are familiar with thinkers like Raymond Aron or François Furet?) And therein lies the value of this book, and the meaning of its title: In an era when we are increasingly forgetting our intellectual heritage, here is a wonderful collection of reminders of the recent past.

Richard Brookhiser, senior editor
Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë is an intimate look at a strange writer. All writers are perhaps strange, but Charlotte Brontë must win some sort of prize — eldest of three writing sisters (Emily and Anne were the younger), living in the parsonage of their father the Reverend Patrick Brontë in a small town on the backside of Yorkshire. Two elder sisters died at the grim school to which they all were sent; their lone brother, Branwell, who was supposed to be the family genius, became the family adulterer and addict instead; their father lost his eyesight. In this atmosphere Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre, Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, and Anne wrote Agnes Grey. Elizabeth Gaskell was the friend asked by Charlotte’s father to write her life after she and all her siblings had predeceased him. Favorite detail: Charlotte writes in bursts of inspiration but drops everything to perform domestic duties, such as peeling the eyes off potatoes that the aged family servant has missed. (For grins, see Eleanor Morton’s YouTube bit, “Anne Brontë’s Book Signing is a Disaster.”)

Michael Brendan Dougherty, senior writer
This was a year in which I did a lot of rereading. But here are two books that were new to me:

Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape, by R. W. Southern, is certainly not new, but Southern’s approach to building a biography of the medieval theologian who wrote Why the God-Man? is to simply give us as much as we can possibly know about the time and place he lived in, the institutions that formed him. He settles on a strong theme about Anselm’s single-minded search for God in every phase of his life. This does feel like a medieval portrait at times — vivid, full of suggestive interruptions and marginalia, but also sometimes flat.

In Beyond Radical Secularism, Pierre Manent, the conservative French philosopher, considers the strange contradictions of Islam living in a pretended secular France. “The goal of the defensive politics I am outlining is precisely to prevent such a transformation (in which Muslim ways would penetrate the whole of our way of life), which is in fact much less distant or unlikely than is generally thought. This transformation is now advancing under the protection of ‘secularism,’ which always promises a transubstantiation of Islam that will never happen, and has settled into a colloidal alliance with it that will last until Islam saturates the emulsion.” What Manent proposes is to free Muslims from most of the strictures of secularism but also to force Islam into neighborly relations with “complete freedom of thought and expression.” The whole book is a provocative work of thinking through a radical new problem.

Jessica Hornik Evans, managing editor, NR magazine
It’s impossible to imagine my life without the English novel. In recent years, I’ve found immense pleasure in a particular handful of English writers whose novels arc across the (more or less) mid-20th century. In the order of their births (from 1884 to 1912): Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Sybille Bedford, Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one), and Barbara Pym (my dearest favorite). This was the year of Sybille Bedford. She wrote only four novels (I’ll move on to her memoir and travel writings in the new year), all of them autobiographical, drawing on her remarkable life. Born to a German aristocrat and a half-Jewish mother, she spent her early years in Germany, Italy, France, and England, where she was sent to study and would later become a legal reporter; during World War II, she followed her friends Aldous and Maria Huxley in fleeing to America, and later returned to Europe. Jigsaw, which I read this year, is her best novel. The story of her youth (as her subtitle has it, an “unsentimental education”), it is not short on sorrows. Her style is like ocean waves — alternately loose and powerfully precise, shadowy and crystalline; always luminous and adventuresome. A taste: “Perhaps whatever life does to people, there is left a spark of individuality that will out like an edge of handkerchief from a pocket.”

Emma Foley, content manager
Living in New York City, working in conservative media, and planning a Catholic wedding offered an ideal combination for a dive into Venerable Fulton J. Sheen’s Three to Get Married. Then-Bishop Sheen thoroughly examines marriage as a reflection of the Triune God, where the lover, beloved, and divine Spirit co-inhere. Sheen emphasizes a husband and wife’s participation in Creation through the soul-saving act of procreation — as well as their everyday embrace of the Incarnation, where love is “a mutual self-giving that ends in self-recovery.” Three to Get Married serves as a reminder and a challenge for soon-to-be-spouses to let the Author of marriage continuously write their love story, not merely through the adventure that is wedding preparation but throughout their lifelong covenant.

Jim Geraghty, senior political correspondent
Around Thanksgiving, David Strom of Hot Air said I was doing a pretty good job of filling the role of Dave Barry for conservatives, and I considered that about as high as praise can get. The real Dave Barry published his autobiography this year, Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up. Barry’s life story is not only every bit as hilarious as you would expect from his reputation, but it’s also insightful and wise, with wistful portraits of his much more serious and reverent parents, a note of regret about past marriages that didn’t work out, and a nostalgic portrait of high-flying misadventures in column-writing during what is likely to be the last great era of print newspapers. Somewhere between the rise of political correctness and the flourishing of partisan rage, American culture squeezed the space available for a figure like Barry — silly, goofy, an equal-opportunity offender more interested in the phenomenon of exploding toilets and strange phrases that would make good band names than in clap-ter. And go figure, it turns out we both started our careers at Washington’s antithesis of silliness and humor, Congressional Quarterly.

Andrew C. McCarthy, contributing editor
I confess that I got through not nearly enough of an ambitious reading list this year — lawfare has gone from a full-time job to something more akin to a stint in purgatory. I’ve started my mission to read all of C. S. Lewis’s major works but made it through only The Pilgrim’s Regress and Surprised by Joy. Each is inspiring in different ways, and I’m determined to do better (on both my reading list and applied inspiration in 2026). After decades, I reread Brideshead Revisited, having heard Charlie Cooke and our pal Hugh Hewitt discuss it, and felt an appreciation for it I’d missed all those years ago — which led to more Evelyn Waugh, sidetracking me a bit from more C. S. Lewis. After reading great books, I confess to being disappointed by Chris Cleave’s Everyone Brave Is Forgiven — it had its moments portraying the horrors and privation of war, but the oft-time strain to say something towering was a distraction. Currently, I’ve finally gotten to Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s new book, Listening to Law, and it’s terrific. She’s such a clear thinker and writer who, despite achieving the height of her profession, is very down to earth. Good for her . . . and for us!

Dan McLaughlin, senior writer
Most of the books I read this year were either for a review, interview, or column, or for the 1850s history book I’m currently writing. The best of the latter was probably Peter Booth Wiley’s 1990 book Yankees in the Land of the Gods, on the 1853 opening of Japan. A pair I might recommend as a matched set are Joanne Freeman’s 2018 book Field of Blood, on violence and dueling in the antebellum Congress, and Thomas Fleming’s 2013 book A Disease in the Public Mind, tracing the roots of the Civil War back to 1787. While Fleming’s book is too much of a Southern apologetic for my taste, and Freeman’s book is quite the opposite, both emphasize the psychological dynamics that progressively radicalized the two sides in the run-up to the war.

The one book I read just for the pure joy of it was Scott Ryan’s Moonlighting: An Oral History (2022), which collects interviews from just about every living figure involved in the classic mid-1980s detective rom-com, with the sad exception of Bruce Willis. I’d been rewatching the show on Hulu, and Ryan’s affectionate book covers the madcap nature of the show’s creation and production, the unanticipated rocket to stardom by the then-unknown Willis, the legendary rancor on the set, and what made the show so charming and groundbreaking (including its cinematic sensibilities and its famous routine shattering of the fourth wall).

Vahaken Mouradian, literary editor
“Dictator” is a word all too punchy and curt and useful to be squandered, as it often is, on illiberal imbeciles. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the generalissimo of the Dominican Republic between 1934 and 1961 (and president for some time before and during), was a dictator. Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat impresses this truth in a way that only fiction can. The Chief — and the Chief’s worthless sons and champion cocksmen, Ramfis and Radhamés — require total loyalty. How can you offer total loyalty to them if you direct even some to, let’s say, your parents or spouse or children or friends? This is the deeply personal essence of dictatorship: the relegation of the “little platoons,” of the family. Vargas Llosa’s fictionalized story of the plot to eliminate El Jefe — and of the conspirators’ familial sacrifices that led to and followed the assassination — isn’t his best. But even when Vargas Llosa’s not very good, he’s great.

Ramesh Ponnuru, editor, NR magazine
I am in the middle of two delightful and very different books.

Victor Brombert was an electrifying lecturer in the comp-lit course I took as a college freshman in the last millennium. He was also, unknown to the students, a hero of World War II. After he died last year, I took up his Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi, a study of eight major writers on death. He proves, as expected, a sure-footed guide through dark terrain.

But I put the book down when his theme started to hit a little too close to home. In the hospital, with my powers of concentration weakened, I wanted something lighter, and found it in the audiobook of P. G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves, narrated by Jonathan Cecil. I haven’t resumed listening, though, since being discharged. Maybe in the next few days I’ll find out how Gussie Fink-Nottle’s romantic difficulties are resolved, and then come back to Brombert too.

Molly Powell, associate editor
Little, Big: Or, the Fairies’ Parliament, by John Crowley: While I do not share Harold Bloom’s nearly ecstatic ardor for this epic tale (the woman who is the main love interest is too much of a cliché), certain haunting scenes are unforgettable, especially those involving Lilac, product of an illicit union and stolen by the fairies as a baby. The changeling left in her place grows into a child and then disappears into the forest one summer’s day; many decades later, Lilac (but which one?) returns, still a little girl. Fairy and human, city and country, wise and wicked: Realms intermix, their inhabitants intermarry, lines are crossed or blurred. Less a whimsical fantasy than a disturbing, elegiac meditation on mortality and the nature of family and home in an ever-shape-shifting, ever-decaying, always mysterious, often numinous world.

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World, by Peter Wohlleben: There is as much wonderment in Wohlleben’s essays on trees as in any fantastical fiction. It’s a thrill to learn, for instance, that scientists still do not fully understand how trees transport through their system the massive amount of water they need, but if you place a stethoscope against the trunk, you can hear the water surging upward. And did you know that oaks subjected to all-night light in urban areas can suffer and even die from a kind of sleep deprivation; that thirsty trees can “scream” (emit vibrations) at an ultrasonic level; that trees under attack send chemical warnings to other trees of the same species? This is a book worth rereading and taking along with you as you walk through a park or trek through the woods. As for fantasy: The trees in the dazzling photos of the illustrated edition would be at home among Tolkien’s Ents.

Noah Rothman, senior writer
In researching my forthcoming book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, I finally had the opportunity to read Paul Berman’s 2003 book, Terror and Liberalism. A prolific essayist and longtime student of intellectual history, Berman contributes masterfully to an exploration of the left-wing psyche.

The book asks why the left-liberal tradition, with its emphasis on religious pluralism and toleration, seems to have a soft spot for violent totalitarianism. Over the course of this short book, Berman delves into the history of the American anarchist movement, the left’s infatuation with Leninist terror — the extent of which was known in America even before Stalin’s ascension to power, contrary to the revisionist history preferred by progressive intellectuals — and the sympathy for suicide bombings that American liberals betrayed during the Second Intifada. Berman’s pathbreaking work identifies how modern Islamist movements, including the Iranian regime’s, integrated “Marxist pointers” into their appeals to anti-Western constituencies worldwide. And the author locates in liberalism’s assumption of universal rationality its toleration for the savagery that liberalism itself rejects. “Palestinian terror, in this view, was a measure of Israeli guilt,” Berman wrote. “The more grotesque the terror, the deeper the guilt.” That outlook was applied soon enough to left-of-center analyses that accused America of inviting the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

It’s a rare work of intellectual history inspired by current events that is as poignant today as it was when it was published over two decades ago. Berman’s work is a triumph and well worth the read.

Sarah Colleen Schutte, associate editor
Full of delightful characters and whimsical plot twists, Beth Brower’s series The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion has captivated my imagination. Set in Victorian England, the books follow Emma, an orphan who is about to come into her majority and intends to settle down in her beloved neighborhood of St. Crispian’s with books and a cat, only to be foiled by a ridiculous relation. There is never a dull moment in Emma’s life, and her journals are equal parts amusing, romping, heartbreaking, and profound. While you’re waiting for Brower to finish writing this series (she’s working on book 9 of 24 — and yes, the wait will be worth it), check out her other books, especially The Q. You won’t be disappointed.

Maria Servold, associate editor
The best book I read this year was The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, by John U. Bacon. This fast-paced history tells the story of the famed wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a Great Lakes freighter that sank on November 10, 1975. Bacon’s book, which came out just before the 50th anniversary of the shipwreck this year, does a wonderful job of telling the story of not just the Fitzgerald and its crew but also the power of the Great Lakes and the impact of the ship’s sinking on the Midwest imagination. Beware: you may end up with Gordon Lightfoot’s anthem in your head for several weeks!

Haley Strack, staff writer
Is it some sort of heresy to admit in the pages of National Review that my favorite book of the year was Fourth Wing, the first in Rebecca Yarros’s popular romantic fantasy series The Empyrean? It has dragons, an elite war college, rivals-turned-lovers, and more. Fourth Wing wasn’t a literary work of art but it reminded me what it felt like to be immersed in a world of magic; now I’m rereading The Chronicles of Narnia. An honorable mention goes to Health and Safety: A Breakdown, by New Yorker staff writer Emily Witt, which chronicles her life as a reporter during the Trump era and her simultaneous immersion into a vacuous underground party scene in New York City. It was an insight into another fantasy world — the contemporary world of sex and drugs (Witt essentially sets out to investigate how hyper-accessible psychedelic drugs expand consciousness). Witt’s description of the city’s changing party scene is interesting. Readers skeptical of New York’s literati may find the book interesting for another reason — it’s a nearly perfect snapshot into the world of optimistic nihilism.

Andrew Stuttaford, editor, NR Capital Matters
The book I most enjoyed in 2025? Despite a fierce challenge from Craig Brown’s clever and darkly entertaining Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, a book from a few years back about one of Britain’s stranger royal miscreants, I settled on The Director by the German author Daniel Kehlmann. First published in 2023, it appeared in English this year. It is based (loosely and sometimes not at all) on the faintly Faustian story of G. W. Pabst, one of the greatest of Weimar’s film directors, who later ended up working in the Third Reich. The Director is a dazzling, wildly inventive examination of work with, if not unreservedly for, evil, and of the power of the excuse that almost anything can be justified in the name of art — and survival.

Jennifer Tiedemann, commissioning editor
This year, my favorite book turned out to be the one that was most useful to me: Paul Hollywood’s BAKE. As a long-time fan of The Great British Bake Off, and an even longer-time lover of carbs, I loved the idea of being able to learn some new skills from the master of bread himself, and this cookbook delivers in spades. If you try nothing else from the cookbook, make it the baguette recipe. Does it take a couple of days to go from ingredients to dough to finished loaf? Yes. Is it more than worth it? Also yes. As soon as I’m done with holiday baking, you can bet that this will be the first recipe I return to.

Armond White, culture critic
Returning to Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939) at the time when the Pacific Palisades were burning in Los Angeles — as if confirming West’s prophecy — forced me to recall the cynicism that appealed to my own undergraduate sophistication. Sadly, it matched the cynicism disguised as sentimentality that makes millennial undergrads hate capitalism, adore suspected corporate assassin Luigi Mangione as a pop star, and lament Rob Reiner’s grisly comeuppance with no sense of shame. West’s prophecy exceeds mainstream media’s warped social perspective — the political treachery that makes West’s prediction of “The Burning of Los Angeles” come true. All these years later, nothing in pop culture equals the power of West’s writing or his timely vision:

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

That passage is worth quoting and acknowledging with trembling humility.

Mark Antonio Wright, executive editor
Over the years, I’ve read a lot of C. S. Lewis, and I thought I knew his quality as a writer through his Narnia novels, The Screwtape Letters, and nonfiction works such as Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. But after reading his final novel, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956), I must say, just as Shaq would, “I owe you an apology, Mr. Lewis. I wasn’t really familiar with your game.” Lewis himself agreed: He called Faces “far and away my best book.” The story is a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche — narrated by Psyche’s older sister Orual. Don’t yawn — because it’s so much more than that. It sets Greek humanism and philosophy against the pagan gods, the collision of the rational mind and matter against spirit. The book seeks to answer Orual’s question: “Why must holy places be dark places?” Why must the sacred, if the sacred contains Truth, be so mysterious? As we discover, the answer is that sacred places are dark and mysterious because we need faces to see the divine light. Well, why don’t we have faces? The answer to that is because we are all two-faced. It’s a mystery and an explanation that you simply must read in the new year.

Craig Young, associate editor
Of the two most significant books I read this year, one I grabbed the day it came out, and the other I read 96 years after it was published. (When I say “read,” I mean I listened to the audiobook, my preferred method of reading books these days.) The War for Middle-earth: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm 1933–45, is Joseph Loconte’s latest exploration of how the two great 20th-century authors came to create the worlds that we love in their fantasy classics, including The Chronicles of Narnia series and The Lord of the Rings. Ten years ago, in A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War, Loconte described the effects of World War I on the two authors, who both served as junior officers at the front. This time around, he revisits that trauma and discusses the disillusionment that subsequently gripped the culture around them and the authors’ explicit attempt to push back against that cynicism, drawing on the heroic narratives of the ancient myths that they loved. The gathering storm of a new worldwide cataclysm added impetus to their efforts. I’d always heard of the Inklings, the literary group at Oxford where Lewis, Tolkien, and several other authors would read their works in progress and offer and receive criticism. But Loconte provides delightful insight into the relationships among the men, what they were thinking and worrying about, and the impact the group had on their work. Shortly after finishing Loconte’s book, I decided to take a closer look at that first great war and checked out All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque’s grim semi-autobiographical depiction of war in the trenches. All I’ve got to say about that is war is hell.