20 books you should read

Luke O'Neil

21 Dec 2025 • 15 min read

My friend Aaron thinks he's better than me because he "reads books" and "knows how to read." That's fine. I've looked at so many posts. Today he writes about the 20 best (new and old) he read this year. Did you know books continue to exist outside of their release window? Crazy but true.

He's starting a new political newsletter called Heartland Signal that I suspect you will like. It's about "the things going on in this country that the mainstream media ignores," he says. So check it out here.

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Stick around after for a roundup of all the excerpts and author interviews I ran this year in Hell World.

The best books I read this year

by Aaron Kleinman

Everywhere I look there’s slop. There’s slop on my TV, there’s slop when I go online, there’s slop on my phone. I’m drowning in slop.

But books are (mostly) immune to slop. Physical, audio, electronic, they’re the form of entertainment that’s hardest for them to algorithmically optimize to dull our senses and make us buy things. So if you’re sick of slop, then pick up a book, my friends.

(Editor’s note: Luke’s new book in particular!)

Since I’m blessed to live in a borough with the nation’s best library system I’ve gone through 150 of them this year and these are my ten favorite nonfiction and fiction ones. Some are new and some I’ve been meaning to read for years and am glad I finally did. Break the slop cycle and pick one up today.

Oh, and I also have a newsletter starting up soon. So sign up for it here. It’ll be 100% slop free. Like these books.

FICTION

10. The Damned Utd by David Peace

This is the best sports book I’ve ever read, and I’m not just saying that because I’m a Leeds United fan. You’ll never get as clear a look at the single-minded obsessives who end up coaching pro teams and what it means to suddenly switch sides to your rival. The Nixonian paranoia and chip on Brian Clough’s shoulder don’t just make this a gripping book, but a darkly comic one as well.

9. Milkman by Anna Burns

Reading this feels like jumping over 20 school buses on a motorcycle. The build up might take a lot out of you because of the author’s dense style, but the payoff really is worth it as the prose eventually gets you to viscerally inhabit Northern Ireland during The Troubles. When you’re done you’ll get that stuntman rush of endorphins except you won’t have to leave your couch to do it.

8. Limonov by Emmanuel Carrère

How did Dimes Square happen? How did all of our favorite downtown coke addicts become fascists? Well we can learn from history (kinda) through this picaresque biography (which isn’t a biography) of how a Russian art punk became a right wing politician. It makes losing yourself in being transgressive seem like so much fun, except for that time he has to work as a male escort.

7. Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

Make Bulgaria Great Again is the concept here. A small experiment for dementia patients becomes an immersive experience with whole countries deciding to live in previous decades. It’s an exploration of history and memory and nostalgia that will embed itself in your mind well after you’re done reading it.

6. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

Then you have the complete opposite concept, wherein the authoritarian regime takes away the ideas of things like hats and birds – you’re not even allowed to think of them – until the population is basically bereft. Considering we’re seeing people we know lose the concept of “reading” and “doing your own work” it feels like a dagger in your heart.

5. The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

I love a book that takes place at the edge of civilization because it tends to make people act strangely, like they’re about to tip into barbarism at any moment. Such is the case with this book about a sad sack who ends up moving with his aunt to a tiny town in Newfoundland filled with some of the oddest balls you’ll come across in literature. Their struggles to barely keep it together are hysterical. You gotta get it.

4. Compass by Matthias Enard

This is the story of an academic’s sleepless night thinking about all the mistakes he’s made and…wait, where are you going? Seriously, it turns into a brilliant meditation on what western civilization even is without eastern civilization. It’ll blow your mind.

3. Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann

Vivid. That’s the word I’d use here. Kehlmann creates a story that so deeply inhabits Germany during the Thirty Years War that you feel like you’re actually there. On top of that there’s a propulsive plot about an impish trickster who uses his wiles to escape his dreary small town life. This book is time travel.

2. White Teeth by Zadie Smith

I’ve never lived in London, but I feel like I have after reading White Teeth. Smith can create indelible characters in just a sentence or two and the book is jam-packed with them. And they keep finding ways to drive the book forward in unpredictable directions, until an ending that had me laughing out loud.

1. The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

How do you make sense of a world defined by conspiracies? That’s the question here as the author grapples with a series of assassinations and the muddled stories around each of them spanning a century of Colombian history. But solving the conspiracies isn’t the point, it’s figuring out how you live knowing that you have to do so with the same people behind these malevolent forces. That they can be everywhere and nowhere all at once. It’s the madness that underlies the current American berserk.

NONFICTION

10. A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

I read a lot of boring political books for work, and let me tell you this isn’t one of them. Sure, it’s about what happens when libertarians take over a small town (of course one of them is a big time pedophile) and the policy fallout from gutting a local government. But it also gets to the core of what inspires libertarianism, the lonely, alienated and conspiratorially minded to enter the movement, and the everyday people who end up fighting back against them. We’re all living in Grafton, New Hampshire now, might as well figure out what to do about it.

9. Little Bosses Everywhere by Bridget Read

Pyramid schemes are well-known to be big funders of right wing American politics, but what this book gets into is just how deep the philosophy of pyramid schemes is ingrained in the Republican Party. It basically makes the case that there’s no president Trump without the gospel of multilevel marketing and the various kooks and charlatans who brought it from the fringes of society to the mainstream. But it never loses sight of just how fringe and bizarre the MLM people are. The country’s run by people who don’t even use normal toothpaste.

8. Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze

It’s chilling how often reading about the economy of Nazi Germany you think to yourself “huh, sounds like what they’re doing now.” And it gets even more chilling when you realize how the Holocaust wasn’t some ideological side project but an outcome related to the regime’s economic goals. It actually better helps you understand classics of Holocaust literature like Fatelessness and Night. I know this sounds really grim but perhaps there’s a bit of hope to be found in the fact that the volkish autarky imposed by any fascist regime is doomed to collapse in on itself, as long as its opponents aren’t as feckless as Hitler’s were before 1939.

7. Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales

This isn’t just about surviving a disaster, it’s philosophy. Gonzales surveys the people who’ve beaten impossible odds and their lessons seem to apply to everyday life: forming a checklist around keeping cool, figuring out what’s going on, ignoring distractions, having a plan but being flexible about it, and never losing hope. That advice may sound sort of vague, but when put in the context of surviving a plane shot down over Germany it comes to life. It’s for sure better than whatever is in the self-help section at the library.

6. The Siren’s Call by Chris Hayes

You’ll still see the world differently once you understand it through the prism of attention, not labor, being the most valuable thing that we produce. And how the current struggle is about getting those little bits of attention from the most disengaged people in order to somehow change their minds. Usually when a work is this important it’s boring as hell, but Hayes is a talented enough showman to keep it brisk and light.

5. The File by Timothy Garton Ash

You need to read more about East Germany. Their snitch state was a precursor to our current right wing regime’s use of surveillance technology and pitting neighbors against each other to implement their agenda. Since reunification the government has allowed people to look at their old secret police files. That’s what Ash does here, then tries to catch up with the various people who informed on him and the agents who handled them. He ends up with incredible insights into who would do so and why. So now that we live in a combination of past Germanies, it’s worth checking out.

4. The Barn by Wright Thompson

This book on the lynching of Emmitt Till isn’t true crime as a linear narrative. It’s true crime as an exploded bomb, drawing concentric circles around the blast. It’s ingenious, and the audiobook is narrated by Thompson himself. Anyone who watched ESPN in the 2010s knows what a treat that is.

3. Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane

Is Macfarlane the best nonfiction writer working today? At the very least, he’s the best stylist I’ve come across. Mountains of the Mind transports you to Everest and then rockets you to other peaks around the world as he ponders why the hell we’re so obsessed with these things. And when you’re done with it you’ll want to add everything else he’s ever written to your reading list.

2. Material World by Ed Conway

What even is the global economy? Hell if I know, I was a liberal arts major. But Conway deftly breaks down how it relies on six different commodities (sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium) and you’ll never see it the same way again. When you’re done you can read about how the people who sell them run the world (The World For Sale by Jack Farchy and Javier Blas), the laws used to capture the wealth from the trade (The Hidden Globe by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian) and what happens to all this shit when we’re done with it (Waste Wars by Alexander Clapp) for a masters course on How The World Works. And you can see the outcome of our need for raw material in my favorite book of the year.

1. Murderland by Caroline Fraser

Like James Joyce’s Dublin or Luke O’Neil’s Boston, sometimes the best writing comes from an author who knows exactly how fucked up their hometown is. Such is the case with Caroline Fraser and the Seattle suburbs, where a thriving community of outcasts stuck between the Cascades and Puget Sound have generated Sub Pop records, the Legion of Boom and some of the country’s most notorious serial killers. Why? The answer may lie in the since shuttered smelter in Tacoma that belched noxious fumes throughout the region, including lots of lead. Right over young Ted Bundy’s house. It’s not unlike the smelter near Richard Ramirez’s childhood home in El Paso. Or the leaded fuel fumes that rained over John Wayne Gacy’s house in the O’Hare flight path. Or the smoke that blew by Dennis Rader’s hometown in Kansas’s lead belt. But let’s get back to the Pacific Northwest, where Fraser’s encyclopedic knowledge of every local scandal and mistake paints a gruesome picture of a region, a nation and generation haunted by lead. I couldn’t put it down. Best book of the year.

Aaron works for Heartland Media, where he tries to cover the people working for and against this country meeting its promise. Before that he went to a bunch of schools and had a bunch of jobs and posted a lot online. Also he won the 1996 Connecticut Geography Bee.

Check out my new book We Had It Coming please. It's very good I promise.

Every now and again I think I should really get back into reading comics. As luck would have it I remembered that Sam Thielman is an expert. I asked him to put together a list of must-reads for me and for you.

Read an excerpt from A Clean Hell: Anarchy and Abolition in America’s Most Notorious Dungeon by Eric King. It's a harrowing but steadfast look inside one of the most notorious prisons in America one of the most punitive and carceral countries in the world.

Here's a funny and moving new anthology edited by Niko Stratis and Tuck Woodstock featuring dozens of great LGBTQ+ writers on the HBO classic series Sex and the City.

A fun talk between me and Hell World's own Rax King about her moving and hilarious book Sloppy Or: Doing It All Wrong.

An excerpt from the The Manifesto of Herman Melville by Barry Sanders. "Moby Dick is America’s first manifesto, a tocsin sounded to warn us about the encroaching end of nature."

This was a fun one too. Me and Niko Stratis talk about her brilliant and touching book The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman.

The great Kim Kelly interviewed Eric Blanc about his book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big.

An excerpt from Eoin Higgins' Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left.

And here are some interviews I did and mentions of We Had It Coming in the media you may have missed and may want to read if you enjoyed the book. Feel free to tell all your friends about it if you did. Hell you could even write an article about it in a publication large or small.

Literary Hub
Bookshop.org
Oakland Review of Books
Reactor
Arts Fuse
Zero Cred
Unpaid Bills
Typebar Magazine

And a few excerpts published in a number of fine publications.