During my last several years as the Gazette’s arts and features writer, I compiled a list of my favorite books of the year each December. Though I retired in mid 2024, I’ve continued to write occasionally about books for the Gazette, so here are some of my favorite reads of 2025, consisting mostly of titles from the past few years. Hope you find something of interest here.
‘Skippy Dies’ by Paul Murray
One of my favorite reads of 2024 was Murray’s 2023 novel, “The Bee Sting,” a tragicomedy about a struggling Irish family. This year I tried an earlier title, “Skippy Dies” from 2010, a memorable portrait of adolescent life at a venerable but fading boys’ school in Ireland.
Fourteen-year-old Skippy, a central character, does in fact pass away in the novel’s opening pages — while taking part in a donut-eating contest with a classmate — and Murray spends the next 600-plus pages filling in the background of this alternately poignant, funny, strange and dark story.
There are elements of farce here that would be right at home in a story by Carl Hiaasen or Gary Shteyngart: a fatuous headmaster, a pair of local teenage drug dealers with about four brain cells between them, and more. But at its core, “Skippy Dies” is about the challenges of growing up and confronting the realities of adulthood, written with great verve and heart.
‘Hell Put to Shame’ by Earl Swift
Just when you think you’ve heard the worst of the horrors Black Americans faced in the Jim Crow South, along comes this 2024 title to raise the ante. Swift’s powerful narrative details the murder of 11 Black workers in 1921 by a Georgia plantation owner, John S. Williams, who had essentially enslaved the men on his farm, then engineered their deaths when federal officials began investigating him.
The story explores the widespread peonage system, a form of debt slavery that persisted in the post-Civil War South for decades, in which white farmers paid the fines of poor Black men jailed on flimsy charges, promised them a chance to work off their debt, then imprisoned them on their farms.
Williams was convicted of murder in a case that made national headlines. But so was his longtime Black overseer, Clyde Manning, whom Williams had ordered to kill several of the other Black workers or face death himself. It’s a chilling tale of incredible cruelty.
‘The Raider‘ by Stephen Platt
Evans Carlson might not be a household name today. But during World War II, this New England-born Marine colonel became a celebrated figure for leading a personally trained team of Marines behind Japanese lines during the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942, contributing to a decisive U.S. victory and laying the groundwork for America’s Special Forces today.
Platt, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, covers much more in the first full biography of Carlson, who served both in the U.S. Army and the Marines, became friends with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and, as a Marine intelligence officer, developed close ties with Chinese Communist guerillas during their battle against invading Japanese forces during WWII.
Carlson would be discredited after the war by anti-communist politicians, and the Marines basically expunged him from their history. But as Platt’s crisply written history shows, he would be remembered by many of the soldiers he led as “one of the finest men I have ever known.”
‘The Vietnam War: A Military History’ by Geoffrey Wawro
Wawro has written a new study of the war that chronicles all the political machinations and deceptions that led the U.S. to prop up a corrupt puppet government in the former South Vietnam. But he also explains, in understandable terms, why all the firepower and modern weaponry U.S. forces brought to Vietnam was so often ineffective against a skillful enemy that fought most engagements on its own terms.
“This is the best kind of military history,” writes one reviewer, “full of compassion for American men fighting an unwinnable war against a ruthless opponent — and for the almost unimaginable suffering of Vietnamese civilians — but unsparing in judgment of the politicians and commanding officers who sent American troops into combat without a clear idea of what they were trying to achieve, while lying at every turn to deceive the US public about how the war was going.”
‘North Woods’ by Daniel Mason
The star of Mason’s acclaimed 2024 novel is a patch of forest and a cabin in an unnamed part of western Massachusetts. But Mason fills his inventive book with myriad supporting characters who, over the course of three-plus centuries, come to live on or visit the land, weaving a generational tapestry that invokes love, heartbreak, the cycles of nature and even ghosts.
I also enjoyed one of Mason’s earlier books, 2018’s “A Winter Soldier,” an historical novel set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War One. Lucius, a young Austrian medical student, enlists in the army, thinking he’ll be sent to a well-staffed field hospital. Instead he becomes the lone “doctor” in a crude medical outpost in the Carpathian mountains, alongside a single nurse, a mysterious woman named Sister Margarete. It’s a beautifully written novel about love, the challenges doctors face, and the sweep of war and history.
‘The Fate of the Day’ by Rick Atkinson
I’ve been a fan of Atkinson since reading his three-volume “Liberation” history of the U.S. Army’s experience fighting in Europe in WWII. This year I took on the second volume of his new trilogy, a history of the American Revolutionary War, and found myself just as immersed in the late 18th century.
Atkinson, one of the best narrative history writers around, can mesh battle details and skillful portraits of key figures like George Washington and Benedict Arnold with a broader view of the war, in this case from 1777-1780, encompassing famous battles such as Saratoga and Monmouth Courthouse. Immensely readable even at 800 pages.
‘The Antidote’ by Karen Russell
Like “Swamplandia!,” her acclaimed 2011 book, Russell’s newest novel (a finalist for a 2025 National Book Award), blends humor, magical realism, and pointed social observation, this time about the consequences of overfarming and ignoring or forgetting the past.
Set in a fictional Nebraska town during the Dust Bowl, “The Antidote” follows a small group of characters battling the elements, including a “prairie witch” in whom people deposit memories they’d like to forget. Amid the destruction of farmland from plowing under marginal land for quick profits, the town’s residents must also come to grips with the past, including the erasure of Native Americans who once lived on these lands.
From a gum-chewing, irreverent teenage girl who lives for basketball and mourns her dead mother, to an awkward farmer whose land miraculously remains fertile amid the dust storms, to a government photographer whose camera somehow produces images from the past, “The Antidote” is, as one reviewer noted, “as profound as it is wonderfully strange.”
‘I Never Met a Story I Didn’t Like: Mostly True Tall Tales’ by Todd Snider
I was deeply saddened when the folk and alt-country songwriter and singer Todd Snider, one of my favorite performers, died in November at age 59 from pneumonia. So I did something I should have done years ago: got a copy of his loose-knit memoir and story cycle, which came out in 2014.
Like a modern-day Will Rogers, Snider was known for his sly but good-natured wit, delivered in his songs as well as the rambling monologues that were a key part of his shows. Above all, he had the ability to turn a sharp light on troubling issues in his own life, such as screw-ups with drugs, to illuminate things for the rest of us. “I Never Met a Story I Didn’t Like” delivers lots of laughs and heart. R.I.P., brother — your music and spirit will live on.
Steve Pfarrer, now retired, is a former arts and features reporter for the Gazette.