2025 in books
I aim to read a bunch of fiction and non-fiction books every year. For the first time this year I'll share some recommendations, from this year's batch. This includes 5 books from various genres and writers - the order doesn't represent how much I liked them though.1. Rutger Bregman: Moral Ambition
HVG Könyvek, 2025
I simply loved this book. Not because I agree with everything he says, but because it's enthusiastic, ambitious and positive about the future we can build. I read a lot of non-fiction that aims to explain the world we live in, but often one puts the book down more depressed about the future than before - now it wasn't the case here. Bregman walks us through a bunch of positive examples of changemakers and "morally ambitious" individuals, pointing out the patterns between them. This book is a very intelligent response to the general apathy and acquiescence of meaningless work (c.f. Bullshit jobs by David Graeber), the main premise being that we can lead more meaningful lives if we define our goals right, and choose our career accordingly. These are ideas that I'm preoccupied with and reading so many uplifting examples really made my day. On top of his enthusiasm I've really appreciated Bregman keeping both feet on the ground: he is realistic about personal limitations, burnout and obstacles one has.
2. Bohumil Hrabal: Too Loud a Solitude
Európa, 2025
I think Hrabal is my newest favourite foreign writer. As Eszterházy says on the cover, his writing is so familiar that he might as well have been Hungarian.We're following the everyday life of Haňťa whose job is compacting wastepaper, including banned books in communist Czechoslovakia. He is a book collector, and a compulsive reader. No wonder the authorities banned Hrabal's book, its message about the indestructability of ideas and knowledge couldn't be more clear: no machine or regime can crush ideals. The protagonist's constant drinking and hallucinations give a dreamlike feeling to the whole text. I find it hard to convey how powerful Hrabal's storytelling is, and how much Haňťa's despair has touched me. The fact that Hrabal himself worked in a similar function, compacting wastepaper gives an incredible twist to this story.
3. Jorge Luis Borges: Fictions
Penguin Classics, 2000
I've reached for this one a bit cautiously, as the positive opinions about JLB didn't come from folks I'd generally share my taste with, but I'm happy I did, as it has absolutely enchanted me. Now, I'm not generally a fan of postmodernism, but maybe it was down to the writers I've read so far. Borges' intertextuality felt effortless, almost offhand as opposed to previous writers whose text felt laboured to me. It is a collection of short stories loosely held together in two books (The Garden of Forking Paths - 1941, and Artifices - 1944). It's language is very poetic, which makes it somewhat less accessible, but considering the quality of the storytelling these are still fast-paced stories. I think what drew me in about them is JLB's appreciation of abstraction and symmetry - some of the stories are almost Mathematical in their subject (e.g. A survey of the Works of Herbert Quain or The Library of Babel). I felt really at home in the storytelling and the tenderness by which the author described and used these concepts.
4. Hwang Boreum: Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop
Európa, 2025
I was cautious about this book too, it having won the Goodreads award and being very widely praised on the internet - not the type of book I tend to enjoy. It was a very pleasant surprise however; a 400 page meditation on the nature of work, and what makes life worth living.Now, these are things that I read, think and talk a lot about anyways, but mostly in a sociological, or psychological context. It was very nice to be confronted with the same ideas and dilemmas, but in a fiction novel: through character development, conflicts and personal issues rather than abstract analysis of the world we live in. I've read the Hungarian translation which occasionally contained silly use of words and outdated slang, but I can't be sure whether that is the translation or the language of the book (I would be surprised by the latter given the story in the book about the overly pedantic office worker's cruel critique of the use of Korean language in contemporary novels). This is only the second Korean book I've read (after the Vegetarian), and I feel like the cultural distance makes it even more interesting how we're facing the same existential questions in very different places on the planet. Finally what was a bonus for me is the book recommendations I've jotted down whilst reading this novel: the Glimpses of World History and The Refusal of Work have immediately made it to my to-read pile. I would absolutely recommend this novel as a feel-good alternative (or complementary reading) to e.g. Byung Chul Han or Mark Fisher.
5. Yanis Varoufakis: Technofeudalism
Penguin, 2024
This was my first book from Varoufakis, but definitely not the last. Being fairly familiar with contemporary critique of capitalism, his account takes the "rentier capitalism" argument a step further to claim that the phase we're entering can be better described as a feudal system, and more specifically feudalism revolving around cloud capital.I'm not going to fully agree with his position, I think he overstates parts of his arguments. Nonetheless, Varoufakis is a master storyteller, who manages to draw a new model of the world economy of the 2020s, place it in historical context, and show how we got here, but importantly also where we can go from here.