—J.H.H. Weiler, NYU Law; Co-editor-in-chief, International Journal of Constitutional Law (I•CON)
Here, yet again, is my pick of “good reads” from the books I read in 2025. I want to remind you, as I do every year, that these are not “book reviews”, which also explains the relative paucity of law books or books about the law. Many excellent ones have come my way this year, as in previous years, but an excellent law book is not always, in fact rarely is, a “good read” in the sense intended here: curl up on the sofa and enjoy a very good read, maybe even as a respite from an excellent law book. I usually point out that some of these “good reads” are not necessarily literary masterpieces—though in the list this year each recommendation is for a book which in my eyes is a lot more than a “mere” good read, a handful are truly masterpieces. A lot more than ten good reads came my way this year. The selection process was tougher than usual. I was guided by my possibly misguided notion of trying to provide titles which would cater for very different tastes. I myself am hopelessly eclectic.
1. Kate Atkinson, Life after Life (Penguin Books UK, 2013; Reagan Arthur Books USA, 2013)
You must have asked yourself once or twice whether a “fatal” choice—a choice that conditioned the trajectory of your life—was the right one. Law or medicine, perhaps; practice or academia; maybe even choice of a partner. And then you might have tried to imagine what life would have been like had that “fatal” choice been a different one. In all such cases, the choice was yours to make.
But sometimes it is happenstance, pure luck—good or bad—that is determinative and has huge consequences for our lives. In such a case, the word “choice” is irrelevant. It was not your choice, life chose for you. My professional life would have been entirely different had the composition of my doctoral jury, in the selection of which I had no say, been other than it was. I have often wondered what that other life might have been.
It is this second scenario that provides the premise for this captivating novel by Kate Atkinson. The premise is set in the very first chapters. Ursula Todd, who is to be the protagonist throughout the unfolding drama, which spans much of the 20th century from and through WWI to WWII, is born (in England, where most of the story takes place) on a snowy night. It is a difficult birth; a doctor is urgently needed and called to save the newborn. He gets stuck in the snow. Ursula’s life comes to an end. What would her life have been like if the doctor had managed to arrive, one wonders. In chapter 2, the narrative is repeated, but in this case he does arrive. Now we will know.
This sequence repeats itself at certain subsequent junctures of her life. And we thus get to see what her life would have been had an external determinative event been different.
Do not be put off by this weird sciency-fiction premise. Suspend your disbelief and you will be richly rewarded. Atkinson handles it in a masterful way. The genius of the book is that we see the same Ursula, and those surrounding her, principally parents and siblings, responding in different situations—an intricate play between that which is constant and that which changes in our lives.
To give but one example, in one of her lives, Ursula marries a German and moves, in the 1930s, to Munich with her husband. There she befriends Eva, an assistant in a photographer’s atelier. A child is born and develops a respiratory complaint. Mother and child need a vacation in the fresh air and Eva invites them to stay with her at her lover’s summer house. You have guessed, it is Eva Braun and the lover is AH. Now you want to quit and move to the next recommended good read. This is too much you think. Don’t. This episode is an example of Atkinson at her best. The narrative is credible and compelling. The ending of this life is wrenching and not what you might have expected. I should add that all other features of a good novel—character development, social context, descriptive élan—are all at the highest level.
A hugely good read.
(There is a BBC series based on the book. It was limited to one season, and with good reason. Resist the temptation, at least until you have read the book.)
2. Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives (Knopf, 1984)
In academic circles, the words journalist or journalism are typically badges of derision and shame. “That’s journalism—it’s not scholarship.” How many times have I heard this phrase in its endless derivations?
This is silly. Who is to describe, analyze and evaluate the here and now, before it is “history”? Just as there is good scholarship and poor scholarship, there is good journalism and poor journalism. An example? Think of All the President’s Men, or its sequel, The Last Days. Compelling, professional, essential.
Malcolm’s book is in the same league. Moreover, unlike most scholarship, it is, too, a page turner. A very good read.
The book tracks a major upheaval in the world of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical scholarship. The Holy Shrine was Freud’s London house presided over by his daughter Anna. The Holy of Holies was the vast Freudian archive, which, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, a treasure for researchers, was kept under lock and key, with limited access to those favored by the Priests of the Shrine. The Chief Priest at the time was the revered Professor Kurt Eissler. Hollywood Central Casting could not have come up with a better name.
A single letter by Freud would sell today in the tens of thousands. However, here we are not talking of “collectors’ items” but of essential data for scholarly research. I have been using religious metaphors for a reason: though trite, but with more than a grain of truth, psychoanalysis is treated by its adherents almost as a religion—with Freud being the Jesus figure. And, not surprisingly, scholarship of psychoanalysis features the same fissures one sees within religious studies: the Christ of Faith (the theologians who focus on the content and messages to be found in Holy Scripture), and the Historical Jesus (historians who focus on the person of Jesus and try to ascertain whether, say, he was born in Nazareth (probable) or in Bethlehem). Did Jesus really say this or that, ask the historians? Focus on the message, say the theologians. And so it is, mutatis mutandis, within the psychoanalytical community. Of course, in both fields the borders between the two approaches are porous, but the divide certainly exists.
Enter Jeffrey Moussaieff Mason, the principal protagonist in Malcolm’s riveting tale. A young (at the time) and relatively unknown scholar of Sanskrit, Moussaieff Mason moved fields to psychoanalysis (and now writes wonderful books on the emotions of animals), and was selected, against all odds, to become the successor of Eissler as the custodian of the Freud Archives. And then he drops a bomb, or rather, commits a major heresy: he researches one of the most important, indeed foundational shifts, in Freud’s theory. The source of neurosis is not necessarily or even principally real sexual abuse that young people, primarily women, actually suffered in childhood, but the imaginary construction of such in their consciousness. He is not only scandalized by the theory shift in and of itself, but suggests personal “dishonest” reasons for Freud’s shift. I am of course simplifying, but this is the gist. You can imagine the upheaval. Complicating the story, in at least one way, is the personality of Moussaieff Mason, judgment over which I leave to you the reader.
“I am not particularly interested,” you are saying to yourself, “in the theological wars within the dwindling world of psychoanalysis. Why should I waste my time on this book?” Well neither am I, and yet Malcolm is so skilled and even learned in telling the story that I assure you that you will not only find this short book gripping, but you will learn much more than the immediate tale. You will learn a lot on Freudianism, on academic wars (think positivists v. crits), on clashes of egos (that of course never exists in our academia, does it?) and, more generally, how human subjectivity is inseparable from supposedly objective scholarship and science. Very, very worth your time and enjoyable to boot. Good read.
3. Karma Ben Johanan, Jacob’s Younger Brother—Christian Jewish Relations After Vatican II (Belknap Press, imprint of Harvard University Press, 2022)
Christian-Jewish relations are more important than Christian Jewish-relations. Beyond the specific vicissitudes of the last 2000 years (we are approaching the bi-millennial anniversary of the crucifixion of Christ) Christian-Jewish relations are a proxy for some of the foundational tensions that inform the very ontology of Western civilization, what used to be called Christendom. A landmark date in this relationship was the Second Vatican Council, with its Nostra Aetate Declaration on the relationship between Christianity (the Catholic Church) and other faiths, but especially Judaism.
I have had my fair share of interfaith meetings in general and the so-called Christian–Jewish Dialog in particular. They are often characterized by mind-numbing, polite good will. We are all the children of the Almighty, we are brothers (and more recently sisters are mentioned too) with differences tending to be papered over as family disagreements. In the post-holocaust epoch, and given the long history of Christian antisemitism, there is oftentimes a, more or less disguised, accuser–defendant subtext to the “dialog”, albeit with a reversal of roles: the Jewish part in the role of accusers and the Christians displaying apologetic sentiments. The truth is often the victim.
One theme that emerges very clearly in Ben Johanan’s erudite, meticulously researched, elegantly written and judicious text, is the asymmetry in the current post-Vatican II dialog between the parties—the Christian side earnestly interested in repairing relations, the Jewish side (or part of the Jewish side) less receptive to such, and at times hostile. On the Christian side, the author focuses mainly on the approaches adopted by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. On the Jewish side, it is mostly various streams in so-called Orthodox Judaism. (In this respect, Judaism is more similar to Protestant Christianity with its multiple denominations).
Good scholarship of this kind consists, as I endlessly preach, in finding a balance between the synthetic and the analytic. In this case, one should not underestimate Ben Johanan’s impressive synthetic achievement—reducing a hugely complex, and at times contradictory, reality into a coherent and eminently readable narrative. Likewise, one should not underestimate the courage involved. She brings to light, with absolutely no sensationalism, positions and attitudes that are often kept behind closed doors and are discomfiting for both parties.
If you are even mildly interested in the overall theme, this is not only an indispensable read, but a hugely good one.
4. Dag Solstad, Shyness and Dignity (Transl. Sverre Lyngstad, Harvill Secker, 2006)
This is the first and only book I have read by this hugely profound and sensitive (to judge by this one novel) Norwegian author. The story line is dramatically simple (the contradiction is intended). Not much happens externally: a frustrating day in the life of a high school literature teacher, whose true commitment to his profession is met with the indifference of his palpably bored pupils, probably busy with their cellphones. The novel was published in pre-smart phone days, 1994, but you get the point. Maybe you’ve even experienced it.
Simple as the external story line may be, the inner world of the protagonist, Elias Rukla, is complex in a way that cannot but evoke empathy. And his slow unravelling (no spoilers) cannot but evoke deep sympathy. Only the heartless will consider him pathetic.
In reality this is a novella—a mere 160 pages in the standard English paperback edition—with one principal protagonist. You may surely add him to that glorious roster of great European novella artists—Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Thomas Mann, Anita Bruckner (of Hotel du Lac fame) to mention but a few. Its relative brevity underscores the beauty of the genre—economic profundity—and Solstad’s mastery of it. Shyness and Dignity, another veritable page turner, is proof, if one is needed, that the novel of “modernity”—exploring the loneliness of modern existence—albeit in “traditional” form (eschewing the narcissism of post-modernism) is as viable today as it was when first explored a hundred years ago. It is a wonderful and profoundly good read.
5. Friedo Lampe, The Edge of the Night (Transl. Simon Beattie, Hesperus Classics, 2019)
The best way I can describe this truly distinct novel is—lyrical. You may have watched Robert Altman’s masterpiece Short Cuts (1993), in which the lives of disparate characters slowly intersect and transform into a coherent whole. Such is Lampe’s equally distinct novel. I mention Altman since The Edge of the Night is oftentimes, I later discovered when reading about the book, rightly described as cinematic and, indeed, foreshadows the subsequent Altmanesque genre.
Why then lyrical? Here, too, as in Shyness and Dignity, little “happens” in the single dusk-to-dawn framework. We learn about the various characters through brief snippets. The intersections among them are fleeting. They are together, yet separate. It is an atmospheric novel, to resort to a cliché, in this case accurate (sometimes clichés are accurate). It is a mood novel, where there is a slow build of tension, at times even an expectation of a sudden cataclysm … which never happens (I hope this is not a spoiler). Lampe is spare with his language. Like Szymborska poetry, so much is said with so little. And the characters, everyday people in this German seafront city (Bremen, where Lampe lived for a while?), are both specific to time and place and yet universal. Lyrical? Atmospheric? So little happens? What kind of good read is this? I assure you: Lampe’s descriptive power of life, time, space, the very human condition, is such that you wish the novel will not end. Don’t rush through this short work of art—a mere 123 pages in the English translation. Take it slowly, like a well-aged whiskey or cognac.
The history of the book is a novel in and of itself. Published in early 1933 (by Rowohlt) it was almost instantly banned with the rise of National Socialism. They hated its homosexual themes and what they considered its decadent “modernist” style and moral ambiguities. Lampe passed the war in Berlin, under surveillance, and in one of those ironies of life and absurdities of war, he was shot in 1944 by suspicious but mistaken Soviet soldiers, following their maxim, the only good German is a dead German. He died shortly after the end of the War. Aged forty-four.
He, and the book, were largely forgotten for decades. The reprint in the 1950s was partially censored by the publisher, ironically or outrageously, largely because of its homosexual themes and its eroticism, homo and hetero—the very reasons the Nazis banned the book. Incredibly, it was only in the 1980s that the full edition was republished and only in the 1990s and early 2000 was it recognized as the masterpiece it clearly is. Translations into most European languages followed. English readers had to wait until 2019, almost nine decades after the original publication (did I say aged whiskey or cognac?) —most decidedly a case of better late than never. There is no poetry recommendation this year, but Lampe can count for one.
6. Renee Nault, adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (graphic novel) (Nan A. Talese, 2019)
Good read? How is one to describe the act of reading … looking at … a graphic novel? Language requires a new word to describe this.
For the lovers of graphic novels (one or two a year is my dose) I recommend, as I have in the past, an adaptation of a truly fine (and famous) novel: this year, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It is hard to imagine many readers who have not read the novel or seen one of its cinematic or TV adaptations. Although the true aficionados of graphic novels scoff, I find the adaptation genre the most interesting since it best brings out the specific characteristics of a graphic novel and, I believe, it is the most challenging. The graphic artist has not only to adapt the text into the constricted form of text bubbles, but must also create a set of still visuals which go alongside. S/he needs to “prove” or convince us of the added value of the endeavor. “I read the novel,” one might legitimately be thinking. “Why should I bother with a reductive cartoon of the book?” It is not, then, the known story line that will capture our attention. Yet, when well done, it is thrilling to discover this added value, which is so much more difficult to achieve than the challenge facing a movie or TV adaptation of a novel.
It goes without saying that it is utterly useless to pick up this type of graphic novel without having read the novel on which it is based. In part at least, the graphic novel is a running commentary on its source. At its best, when well done, a graphic novel is not just an adaptation, it is a recreation.
Nault does all this in a hugely creditable manner: in her choice of text bubbles, facial expressions, different styles of “graphics” (not exactly rare but commendable) and coloration.
I cannot resist mentioning one instance of the reverse process—the move from an original graphic novel to cinematic form—and I do not have in mind the blockbuster Marvel industry. Rather, David Cronenberg’s History of Violence, with an unforgettable performance by Viggo Mortensen (as well as Maria Bello and Ed Harris). This is a case where the remarkably rich, subtle and simultaneously jarring movie is infinitely better than its thin, forgettable graphic source.
Many graphic novels have a cheap feel to them. Not this one. For true book lovers, this is a book, with its lavish high-quality production, that you will love to hold in your hands—the way books should be.
7. Ilenia Ruggiu, The Roots of Patriarchy—A legal and Genealogical Approach (Routledge, 2024)
Democratic slide in; Neo-colonialism of; The impact of AI on …; Intersectionality and…; Populism … Oy Vey. And the list goes on. What is the common thread among these disparate concepts? Our mailboxes. Both journals one might happen to edit, but also our private email inboxes, are flooded with articles that pick up these themes. Though one typically identifies with the normative commitment or pre-commitment informing most of these pieces, all too often it is déjà vu of déjà vu, with very little significant added value to that which one already knows. And, since all of us are always behind in our reading commitments or desires, one moves on.
You could easily add the word Patriarchy to this list. But when this book landed on my desk I recalled an earlier work by Ruggiu, Culture and the Judiciary: The Anthropologist Judge. It was a remarkable book and was in fact one of my ten good reads of 2020. So I dived into her Patriarchy. If you are familiar with the term (and who is not?), but a novice to the scholarship, this would be a wonderful intro. But even if, like me, you are not quite a novice, her genealogical approach illuminates it in fresh ways, going back to its roots in antiquity, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the civilization that followed.
The topic is normatively, even emotionally charged. I found the tone of the book appealing: terse but not hectoring; serene, letting the facts speak for themselves; wonderfully erudite, with frequent and judicious quotes from the sources. And I found the theses persuasive—at times compelling. Large synthetic scholarship is increasingly scarce and, at times, scandalously underrated. Ruggiu’s intellectual historical synthesis is as impressive as her pointed analyses. You go from tree to tree, but never lose sight of the forest. Maybe it is simply my own proclivity for this style of scholarship that informs my enthusiasm.
And to top it all, Ruggiu manages all this without losing us the readers along the way. A good read. (I will sneak in another recommendation in the same field: Gila Stopler’s recently published Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism and the Chimera of Rights. A very different kind of book, as the title and subtitle reveal, patriarchy in the here and now—a bracing read).
8. Volker Weidermann, Ostend (Transl. Carol Brown Janeway, Pantheon, 2016) (and Dreamers, When the Writers Took Power Germany 1918, Transl. Ruth Martin, Pushkin Press, 2018)
It is hard to classify the genre of these two compelling books. To say history fictionalized risks giving the wrong impression. Better, then, history, so well told it reads like a novel. Of the two, pressed to choose, I elected Ostend, but that is because I am somewhat more interested in the world of letters than in political history. Ostend tells the story of a famous week spent in Ostend in the years between the Wars, by some of the major figures of German language authors—mostly Austrian and German—with a focus on the relationship between Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth. (Of the two, my somewhat contrarian position is that Roth is the greater.) The relationship was complex. Zweig was immensely successful, also in translation, enjoyed worldwide recognition and was, consequently, financially secure, to put it mildly. Roth, with some exceptions in his life, was far less well known outside the German-speaking world, and for long periods suffered economic difficulties. An alcoholic, he died in penury in Paris. Zweig both respected and liked Roth. A true friend, he continuously helped Roth financially. But you can imagine the complexity of the relationship; Roth believing that he was no less a talent than Zweig, and having to send him repeatedly requests for money (even for train tickets). You will not be surprised that Roth, in his correspondence with Zweig, offered some of the harshest critiques of Zweig’s oeuvre.
The week in Ostend, Zweig in a luxury hotel, Roth in somewhat more modest arrangements, brings out the human complexity of this asymmetric relationship to the full, and Weidermann’s genius is in turning this into a book that is hard to put down. If you have read Zweig (and who reading my 10 good reads will not have read something by Zweig?) and Roth, rush to get the book. But even if you have not, there is so much more to the narrative than the relationship. It is a snapshot of the intellectual classes, living in some kind of denial—the last days of Pompeii.
Dreamers is the story of the short-lived “Communist” takeover of governance in Munich in the wake of WWI. I knew of this as a data point in that “between the Wars history,” but was oblivious to the details—the word “fascinating” hardly captures that fleeting historical episode. Weidermann’s huge skills are just as evident here. Some of the intellectual heroes of the time, for example, Thomas Mann, feature in the story, with behavior and attitudes that might surprise you. Both books easily qualify as good reads and much more.
9. Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes (Chatto and Windus, 2011)
The author, himself an English master potter (yes), discovers, almost accidently, a collection of exquisite Japanese miniature netsuke which his family inherited. (Google now: netsuke.) De Waal is a descendant of the Ephrussi family and by trying to trace the origins of the collection he traces the history of the family.
Who are the Ephrussis you are now asking, if you are not Austrian? Well, think of the Rothschilds. In some ways the Ephrussis are carbon copies, even if somewhat less famous. Originating in that magical city Odessa, becoming fabulously rich through corn trade, the second, third and fourth generations became cultural icons. Charles Ephrussi was the major inspiration for Proust’s Charles Swann! Now I have caught your attention. So yes, this is in part a story of the rise and fall of a rich Jewish family—cultured, erudite and all the rest (an antisemite’s wet dream). But it is, too, or even principally, a story of Europe in the early 20th century and in between the Wars, moving between Paris and Vienna.
In our collective Western memory, the in-between-the-wars period is typically dominated by the political: the story of the rise of fascism, the collective blindness, willed or otherwise, towards it and all that. For us, lawyers, it is the story of the colossal failure of the Versailles legal framework. This is at best a very partial vision. In Poland, for example, it is the golden period of renewed independence. In de Waal’s narrative you will discover episodes such as Vienna in the immediate post-WWI and the suffering of the civilian population, which, I am reasonably confident, even Austrians will find fresh. But the focal point of de Waal is not the political: it is social and cultural. And, stunningly (no less) not a history of art, but of art collection.
Here, too, it is difficult to define the genre of the book. Novelistic history? Memoir? There is a touch of genius in the ways de Waal combines a personal, if appropriately light, account of his search with the rich account of the family and social history he is searching.
This is decidedly a book with which you can curl up on the sofa and get lost in that gemuetlichkeit sense of well-being. But, caveat lector! It is as captivating as the best of literary fiction. You may miss a meal or two.
10. Richard Bradford, Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires, The Life of Patricia Highsmith (Bloomsbury, 2021)
I am a huge fan of Patricia Highsmith, she of Ripley fame. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, was made famous by the Hitchcock movie and was a harbinger of her particular genre of “crime” novels, for want of a better name. It was the opposite of a classical whodunit—the narrative perspective is from, or of, the perpetrators. And the tension is whether they will be caught, but above all, there is the subtle entry into the mind of the perpetrator. The Ripley trilogy (of which the first is by a long mile the best) brings the genre to its height. Her talent as a compelling storyteller is evident by the numerous movie adaptations, sometimes of the same novel—no less than sixteen by my count. I’ll mention but one, Wenders’, The American Friend (which combines two Ripley novels). Worth watching.
Her second novel, The Price of Salt, was a breakthrough as an audacious queer novel. I am not aware of an earlier novel so openly gay in the English language (outside cultish Victorian pornography). Published in 1952, Highsmith, understandably, used a pseudonym, though the identity of the author was known among the literati class. It created, as expected, a storm. You might know the novel, or at least the wonderful movie on which it was based (with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in the title roles), by the name Carol, re-published in 1990 with Highsmith as the acknowledged author.
There are two notable biographies of Highsmith, by Andrew Wilson (2003) and Joan Schenkar (2009), which both allude to some of the dark sides of her life. Bradford, who cites Wilson and Schenkar generously and respectfully, lifts the veil completely.
She was, there is no other way to describe it, a horrible human being. A vile racist, an extreme antisemite (one of her choice quotes (paraphrased): It should not be called the Holocaust but the Semicaust, because [regrettably] they only killed half the Jewish population of the world). And this is the least of it.
Why, then, bother reading a biography of this person? Well, first because Bradford’s account is so well written, and in this somewhat perverse way it is a very good read. But it is the contradictions of and in her personality that are compelling and well documented. Antisemitic as she was, two of her principal loves were Jewesses. Her sexual life (Don Juan would say “chapeau”—sono 1004!) was predatory and oftentimes exploitative. Her obsessions—her preferred pets were snails—were legion. These contradictions are reflected in her novels and explain, in part, their draw.
Highsmith is yet another proof, if one is needed, that vile people can be master artists—the list of these is endless. Having read the Bradford biography, I explored the critical reactions and reappraisals of her oeuvre. Once her diaries (in places as obnoxious as Carl Schmitt’s posthumous Glossarium) and the biographies were published, not surprisingly, the critics tied themselves in knots. What do you do, especially in the current polarized reality in which we live, with someone lionized for decades as an early and audacious pioneer of the queer novel, someone hugely innovative and original in the crime literary genre, who is discovered to be the purveyor of the most repulsive statements about, say, blacks in the United States? As expected, the critics tie themselves in knots, ranging from the “cancelling” (removal from reading lists), and “triggering” crowds down to the “it shouldn’t matter” apologists.
Having read the biography, am I still a huge fan of Patricia Highsmith? I remain a huge fan of Patricia Highsmith’s novels. Vivre la difference.
Honorable mentions
If I were not restricted to 10 recommendations, I would easily include in the list the following good reads (yes, it was a bumper year!):
J.M. Coetzee, The Pole —which must go into that pantheon of amore mancato love stories such as Remains of the Day.
Michael Cunningham, Day. Said to be a Covid novel—it is so much more, if it is that at all. A profound examination of the vicissitudes of family life, with an ingenious play on time.
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer. To my astonishment and shame, Percy was under my radar till this year. One of the great American novelists of the mid-20th century, in the same class as, say, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike.
Eric Nelson, The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God. A fresh look at the great John Rawls.
H.L. Mencken, Selected Prejudices. A collector’s item, but still readily available. The ultimate bathroom book: open it at random and read any two or three pages.