*This includes audiobooks because 2025 was my first foray into listening to books alongside reading them with my own eyes. As you can tell, it was a year of many adventures.

Read:

1. Animal Farm by George Orwell
2. Deeper by Dane Ortlund
3. Confronting Christianity by Rebecca McLaughlin
4. Knife Skills for Beginners by Orlando Murrin
5. I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
6. You Are Not Behind by Meghan Ryan Asbury
7. You Are Here by David Nicholls
8. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Did not finish (DNF):

1. Piglet by Lottie Hazell
2. The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf

Parked (to pick up another time):

1. The Book of Goose by Yiyun Lee
2. Orbital by Samantha Harvey

1. Animal Farm by George Orwell (Secker and Warburg, 1945)

January

‘“Comrades!” he cried. “You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege?… Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brain-workers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples. Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in that duty? Jones would come back! Yes, Jones would come back! Surely, comrades,” cried Squealer almost pleadingly, skipping from side to side and whisking his tail, “surely there is no one among you who wants to see Jones come back?”’ 

George Orwell,  Animal Farm (London: Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2021), pp. 25-26.

Influenced by the ideas of a boar named Old Major, the animals of Manor Farm are driven to rebel against the farm’s owner Mr Jones and they drive him off the farm to establish Animal Farm. The establishment of Animal Farm comes with the animals’ eschewing of all that is associated with being human (things like walking on two legs, smoking pipes, and oppressing subordinates) in favour of a system of equality named Animalism. In Animalism, there is no subjugation of ‘lesser’ animals and everybody works according to their abilities and is fairly compensated for their labour. After Jones and his men are driven off Manor Farm, Animal Farm quite quickly devolves into an oppressive regime when the pigs, led by a pig called Napoleon, establish themselves as the leaders of the other animals. 

I loved Animal Farm for its depiction of the insidiousness of coercive control and how quickly power concentrated in a few hands can become oppressive to the majority. There are so many haunting things about the book but some of the things I found most interesting were the pigs’ naturalisation of their own and Napoleon’s inerrancy, the way the pigs used language to manipulate the other animals, and Orwell’s depiction of indoctrination. He represented this through the separation of a group of puppies from their parents at birth at the beginning of the book, only for them to be ‘returned’ later on as Napoleon’s guards who he would use to enforce his rule through the threat of violence throughout the rest of the story. This made me think of the Hitler Youth, in particular how the boys in it were made to swear loyalty to Hitler and encouraged to spy and inform on all adults who were disloyal to the Nazi regime in some way, including their own parents. 

Something else I found striking was Orwell’s representation of the natural result of persistent gaslighting. Near the beginning of the story, Napoleon eliminates his rival Snowball from the farm by having the dogs he’s raised to obey him secretly chase Snowball away. He then continuously lies about Snowball to the rest of the farm and Snowball eventually becomes the scapegoat for all of the farm’s ills. Napoleon’s campaign to vilify Snowball is so potent that the narrator explains that:

‘Whenever anything went wrong, it became usual to attribute it to Snowball… when the key of the store-shed was lost, the whole farm was convinced that Snowball had thrown it down the well. Curiously, they went on believing this even after the mislaid key was found under a sack of meal.’

Animal Farm, p. 57.

I found Orwell’s use of the passive voice in the first sentence interesting because to me, it’s unclear whether Squealer’s (Napoleon’s propaganda ‘minister’) propagandising has been so successful that the animals can now convince themselves of lies independent of Napoleon’s regime, or whether Orwell is again narrating Squealer’s handiwork from the point of view of Squealer himself (“the whole farm was convinced”). This ambiguity makes the last line line, where the animals are now denying reality for themselves rather than having it denied for them, more haunting. 

As well as being a warning against totalitarian rule, Animal Farm is also a really vivid picture of bullying behaviours on a smaller scale and abusive systems on a larger scale, and how these cultures are enabled and perpetuated. It’s a really layered book that provides so much to think about (as all good literature should!) so I see why it’s as highly regarded as it is. 

2. Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners by Dane Ortlund (Crossway, 2021)

February

In Deeper, Dane Ortlund suggests that the key to growth in the Christian life is not more knowledge of the Bible or more practice of spiritual disciplines but a return to the person of Jesus himself. The entire book is an encouragement to Christians to grow by more deeply acquainting themselves with the abundance of love, grace, and mercy that is ever-found in Jesus, emphasising that the riches that led them to faith in the first place are not impotent to help them grow in that faith. Ortlund writes plainly, which makes the book easy to digest. What I loved most about while reading it was that he conveyed the depth of Jesus’ love for his own (as well as those who are not yet his) with such simplicity but the passion of Jesus’ love for us was never lost in that simplicity. 

It’s a short but rich book (only 174 pages) that’s really edifying for Christians. I think it’s a book that would also be good for non-Christians because it provides an overview of the foundational beliefs of the Christian faith. As a short piece of literature, it counters some popular misconceptions about the expectations placed on Christians by their identification with Jesus, which tend to be understood as oppressive rules and regulations that Christians must follow in order to be accepted by a very trigger-happy God. This isn’t true. This book was gifted to me by somebody I’m no longer close to, but who was a good friend to me during my time in my first church as a Christian and I’m extremely grateful to him for giving it to me because it really helped me earlier this year.

3. Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion by Rebecca McLaughlin (The Good Book Company, 2019)

March – April

Confronting Christianity is a book that I got for somebody because I hadn’t been particularly eloquent at explaining my faith to him. I outsourced this job to Rebecca McLaughlin in the hope that she would do a better job of it than me. In Confronting Christianity, McLaughlin attempts to address some of the ways that Christianity is perceived to be in conflict with modernity. With many of them, she shows that there is in fact a conflict between Christian ethics and modern sensibilities but she tries to explain in accessible terms why the Christian God’s version of morality differs from ours in these cases. Each chapter aims to address either one of these issues or a question that non-Christians tend to have about Christianity.

I think the book has many merits. It’s thorough in its engagement of contemporary cultural concerns about Christianity and on a personal level, I wholeheartedly believe that McLaughlin’s intention while writing the book was to earnestly help people better understand (or  “confront”) Christianity. I did find, however, that while each chapter was supposed to answer a common question people have about Christianity (‘Doesn’t the Bible condone slavery?’, ‘How could a loving God allow so much suffering?’), the chapters didn’t always leave the reader with an answer so the book ended up being more of a discussion of thoughts than a “confrontation” as such. I think this is largely to do with the fact that McLaughlin’s style is academic more than anything else. Her approach is exploratory and reflects an intention to provoke deeper thought after reading rather than necessarily provide the reader with solid answers, which is unsurprising being that she has a PhD in Renaissance Literature. My dreams consist almost entirely of having a PhD in Renaissance Literature so this wasn’t bothersome to me but it definitely could be for somebody without the same inclinations. 

If you’re someone who doesn’t mind reading something to mull it over while you wait for the kettle to boil for your sixth cup of tea of the day, this will be fine. If you’re someone who wants straight answers about Christianity and wants them now, this may not be the book for you. (There are books out there for people who want that, it’s just not Confronting Christianity by Rebecca McLaughlin.)

4. Knife Skills for Beginners by Orlando Murrin (Bantam, 2024)

May – June

Knife Skills for Beginners is Orlando Murrin’s debut fiction novel. It follows former chef Paul Delamere who takes up a post leading a course at a culinary school to help his friend Christian, the chef who is supposed to be running the programme. Not long after classes begin, Christian is brutally murdered and Paul finds himself embroiled in the investigation of his murder. (Yes, I chose the verb embroiled because the book is set in a cookery school.) In classic murder mystery fashion, Christian is not short of people who may have wanted to kill him so out of the dozen or so pupils who have paid good money to be taught culinary skills, Paul takes it upon himself to discover whodunnit. 

Paul is astute and well-meaning but also slightly bumbling, which made this a really amusing read. He’s also recently widowed from his husband when the book begins, which provided the book with the heart it needed for the book to not become an exercise in farce. Knife Skills is funny, the contenders for the role of Christian’s murderer are intriguing people whose inner lives you want to learn more about, and I thought the mystery element of the book was done well because I was genuinely intrigued and entertained until the big reveal. For the foodies, the chapters were also interspersed with “real” recipes from Christian’s diary, which were all very tasty-sounding so that was fun. It’s a really quick, funny, and easy read that I imagine would be fun to sink your teeth into on holiday or to read in between two books with a heavier tone or subject matter. (That’s not to say that a chef’s brutal murder isn’t heavy, but that the book is deliberately playful in tone so it doesn’t feel like you’re reading a novel about that.)

5. I’m Glad My Mom Died* by Jennette McCurdy (Simon and Schuster, 2022)

(audiobook)

July

*this book contains descriptions of multiple kinds of domestic abuse and graphic descriptions of the author’s practices of bulimia

In her memoir, Jennette McCurdy gives an account of the physical, emotional/psychological, and sexual abuse she faced at the hands of her mother, who died in 2013. This abuse began in her childhood – with her mother doing things such as teaching her how to dangerously restrict her eating to look younger than her age in order to gain and maintain acting roles – and would persist into her early adult years, becoming increasingly overt and violent in nature. The title will be shocking to a lot of people and apparently (and understandably) caused some adverse reactions at the book’s publication. This I think is due in part to the culture of veneration that exists around mothers, something McCurdy herself addresses at the close of the book. Unfortunately, the ideas of nurture, unconditional love and physical and emotional safety typically conjured in our minds when we think of motherhood are not universally experienced and this book is a confrontation of that reality. 

Despite McCurdy’s matter-of-fact delivery (she narrated the audiobook herself, which I think was a great choice) and the fact that the latter part of the book details the growth in her mental health following her distance from her mother, I’m Glad My Mom Died was upsetting to read. Many of the more subtle instances of abuse and neglect, such as her mother encouraging her to keep her eating disorder secret from her peers and co-stars as a child actress, and to lie to medical professionals concerned about the lack of development in her body as a young child, were difficult to stomach and stayed with me a long time because they suggested her mother’s complete cognisance of the perversity of her ‘care’ for her daughter. 

Interspersed amongst these details are stories of McCurdy’s time as a child actress under the direction of men whose intentions towards her were not always pure, and of her attempts to navigate adulthood with the family background she had. It was sad to make the connection between the docility and acquiescence that she embodied in both her professional life and her first romantic relationships and what she had been groomed to believe were normal by her mother at a time when her mind was at its most vulnerable to parental influence. 

I really recommend listening to it because I think hearing McCurdy speak about her own experiences will help you sympathise more with her, although I think that for people who are highly sensitive, listening (rather than reading) might actually prove quite distressing. I think for a lot of people, the kinds of things detailed in McCurdy’s book are in their minds so unfathomable for a parent to subject to their own child that when they hear stories like it, they completely dismiss the possibility of these things ever taking place, which adds an additional layer of trauma onto the person sharing their experiences. I have a lot of respect for McCurdy for sharing her story in a culture that tends to disbelieve children and assume parental benevolence and I think this book would be an enlightening read or listen for those who have no point of reference for the kinds of harms that can be inflicted on children by the people meant to care for them the most.

6. You Are Not Behind: Building A Life You Love Without Everything You Want by Meghan Ryan Asbury (Harvest House Publishers, 2024)

(audiobook)

July

This was one of my favourite books of this year. When she began writing this book, Meghan Ryan Asbury was Meghan Ryan without the Asbury. She became engaged to her now-husband while writing it and by its publication, she was married to him. She explains this right at the end of the book and I thought it was so adorable because the entire time I was listening to the book I had assumed that all three names were hers from birth! 

You Are Not Behind is about the pressures associated with being in your twenties and Asbury’s goal was to teach women primarily that it is actually possible to live a fulfilled life even without the actualisation of the myriad things we may want for ourselves. Asbury is a Christian woman who wrote this book about her twenties and in some pockets of the faith, part of being a woman in your twenties is experiencing immense pressure from everybody and their mother to be married yesterday. For Asbury, who really desired marriage and was not married by the time she had wanted to be, probably the biggest “failure” of her life was that of her husband to arrive in a timely manner. Because in this book she is using her struggles and experiences of unmet desires and expectations to speak to her audience, a lot of the book’s focus is on marriage. However, the principles Asbury exhorts are applicable to unmet desires of any kind, not just the matrimonial kind, so it’s a good book even if you aren’t the kind of Christian woman who’s particularly marriage-minded. 

In the book, she talks about the balance between contentment and proactivity and resisting the pressure of a world or culture that tells you that you need to have achieved X by X time to be a whole person. I loved the part where she spoke about championing yourself and celebrating achievements like a new job or finally mastering a skill you’d been working on for a long time that are often dwarfed by the news of an engagement or a pregnancy as the ‘ultimate’ causes of celebration in a woman’s life. I found Meghan Ryan Asbury so likeable both as a writer and as a narrator and while the book has a Christian and female slant, I think men and non-Christians in their twenties (and thirties and forties I’m sure) would also be able to relate to the things she speaks of and find a lot of wisdom in the things she has to say.

7. You Are Here by David Nicholls (Sceptre, 2025)

September – October

You Are Here is about two people who unexpectedly end up taking a long walk across England together and have a whale of a time doing it. It’s a very Bridget Jones-esque love story and really fun and easy to read. I’ve kept it brief here because I’ve written a full review of it here for your reading pleasure if you’re interested.

8. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (Smith, Elder & Co, 1847)

November – December

*Spoilers included but the book has literally been around for 178 years so if you don’t know about the big secret towards the end of the book by now that’s honestly your own fault at this point.*

**The first part of the book features child abuse

‘Most true is it that ‘beauty is in the eye of the gazer.’ My master’s colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth, — all energy, decision, will, — were not beautiful, according to rule; but they were more than beautiful to me: they were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me, that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his. I had not intended to love him: the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously revived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.’

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, (Heron Books, 1979), p. 209.

This was my favourite read of this year by a mile. The last time I read Jane Eyre I was around twelve or thirteen and I read it because I had to (school). I disliked the book passionately because I was so offended by the callous, cavalier way that Rochester’s first wife Bertha was dealt with, so much so that I vowed that I wouldn’t go near the book again on principle.¹ Wives being used and abused in books isn’t novel so it wasn’t Bertha’s mistreatment alone that was so off-putting to me. What I found really off-putting about Jane Eyre at the time was the fact that as a black girl in a mostly white class, I was reading a book in which a Creole woman (who was likely not white, although not necessarily) had been taken from her home by a white Englishman who had then confined her to an attic for fifteen years when he discovered that she was mentally ill and had personal qualities that were undesirable to him.

This woman had been figured as subhuman as if to justify her relegation to an attic alone for nearly two decades, and once a suitable, non-lunatic (in the language of the novel) white woman had emerged, the madwoman in the attic could be dispensed with by way of a brutal death so that Rochester could marry Jane with no damage to either of their reputations. (Had Jane and Rochester married while Bertha was alive but still hidden in the attic, Jane’s reputation would have been damaged by becoming a gentleman’s mistress and Rochester’s by being known as a bigamist if Bertha were ever discovered.) I was genuinely disturbed by the idea that we were supposed to jump for joy that Jane had got her happy ending while the memory of another woman, who had been presented to us as Jane’s opposite and inferior in every way, had become as disposable as her life was to the world she lived in. I found it completely unconscionable – I had very strong feelings at twelve/thirteen – and refused to have anything to do with the book for literally just over a decade. 

Having re-read it, my feelings have definitely mellowed. The book still relies on racist tropes, the language around mental illness has not aged well, and it’s less than ideal to lock your first wife (or any after her, really) in an attic for nearly twenty years so I won’t pretend those things aren’t still troubling parts of the book. But this time around, Rochester was not the villain I’d found him to be as a child because I saw that his actions could not be viewed in the straightforward way I had viewed them when I was younger. Although it’s implied he harboured some unpleasant attitudes about people from the colonies in general, his choice to keep Bertha in his attic was not motivated by malice and I was surprised to see how much of the book was given to his interiority, where he was shown to grapple deeply with the choices he made as a young man that led him to his current life. I was also able to appreciate the story as a narrative of Jane’s life as a whole, which I hadn’t been able to when I was younger because of my anger on Bertha’s behalf. I was also able to appreciate the story as a narrative of Jane’s life as a whole, which my incense on Bertha’s behalf when I was younger had prevented me from doing.

Jane Eyre is first and foremost the story of an orphan’s coming of age from a background of adverse childhood experiences. It’s also a story about hope, penance, and redemption. As a child, Jane is raised by her uncle’s wife who resents her and turns a blind eye to her son’s physical and emotional abuse of her. She is then sent to a school for orphans that is headed by an overly pious and draconian treasurer/manager who makes a public spectacle of her and at eighteen, she leaves the school, where she has been a teacher for two years at this point, to become a governess for a young girl who is the ward of a man called Mr Rochester. This time around I was shocked at how vividly John’s violence to Jane was depicted, and how early it came in the narrative. I also felt the enormity of Jane’s anguish as a child and her isolation from the rest of her family (and all humanity really) to my core, probably because of lines like 

I was bewildered by the terror he [John] inspired, because I had no appeal whatsoever against either his menaces or his inflictions; the servants did not like to offend their young master by taking my part against him, and Mrs Reed was blind and deaf on the subject: she never saw him strike or heard him abuse me, though he did both now and then in her very presence, more frequently, however, behind her back. 

Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 5.

Back to Mr Rochester: it’s generally not a good thing to lock a woman in an attic for an indefinite period of time so I don’t love Edward Rochester for that but I think he’s a much more complex character than I could appreciate at twelve. He’s strange, aloof, ugly (Brontë takes pain to make sure we know this about him), sometimes really ill-mannered for a supposed gentleman, and predatory in some really big ways but he’s also pensive, well-meaning, and most importantly for both Brontë and Jane, extremely penitent. His relationship with Jane is an interesting one because they have an age gap that I and many other readers consider uncomfortable, which he takes advantage of constantly by continually reminding Jane how much more he knows about the world and using this as reason for her to succumb to his whims. 

What makes their relationship interesting and not as concerning as it maybe should be is that Jane is the ingénue that he wants her to be, but she is also shrewd, confident, and world-wise for someone who has seen little of the world. There are times in the book where she behaves exactly as an eighteen/nineteen year old would, but there are also times where she displays a level of self-possession in the face of extreme circumstances that exceeds that of the older adults experiencing the same things, which I think can only come from her early exposure to abuse and the supernatural experiences she has in her childhood.

I consider myself someone who it takes a lot to annoy so let it be an indiciation of St John’s character when I say that I think anyone would be extremely hard pressed to find in the canon of classic literature a man as irritating and slappable as St John Rivers. When Jane refuses to marry him, following a proposal that is almost as unromantic as Mr Darcy’s first proposal to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice (if you know, you know), St John, who is a parson, first becomes forceful, then sullen, then petulant, then insulting, and finally, spiritually abusive.² He delivers pointed comments about Jane burning in the fiery lake reserved for the fearful and unbelieving and concludes that she cannot be one of God’s chosen as he had previously thought – all because Jane isn’t enthused by his offer of a loveless marriage in which her sole value to her husband would be to support his endeavours as a missionary. Jane Eyre could very comfortably be called Young Orphan Woman Has Multiple Run-Ins With Significantly Older Men Who Can’t Take No For An Answer because Rochester also doesn’t take to the word ‘no’ very well the first time, which for the sake of not being accused of imposing modern sensibililties onto an old text, I won’t get into. 

It can’t be denied that Jane Eyre is a novel that is pretty casual in its xenophobia. This isn’t limited to non-white and non-European people, as, with absolutely no irony, it is said that in time, “an English education” would correct the “French defects” of Mr Rochester’s ward Adele. There are some uncomfortable suggestions made about non-whiteness and the influence of non-white people of any origin, from the inhabitants of Jamaica where Rochester is tricked into marriage with Bertha, whose characterisation relies on what are very clear anti-Black stereotypes (even if she is not explicitly described as being of mixed heritage), to the Indian women who must be Christianised – and it is implied, civilised – by Jane’s Christian identity, which in the world of the novel is not separate from her being white. In the last portion of the book, the apparently self-evident fact of the murderousness of Indian people relative to other groups is magnified to provide a natural justification for Jane’s aversion to becoming a missionary in India. 

Jane Eyre is all of the above, and without apology. But it’s also a book with some of the most spell-binding writing I’ve ever read, with an incredible level of depth and character development for its heroine, and with a sensitivity to various issues that I found astounding for a novel of its time, which maybe reveals my own prejudices. I found Jane immensely admirable for her tenacity,  her strong will, and her dedication to her moral compass. If you can read it as the product of its time that it is and primarily as the story of a woman whose life begins terribly and thankfully does not end that way, it’s an amazing book and I completely see why it’s such a beloved classic. 

1. Re Bertha’s “callous and cavalier” treatment, this was my perception at the time. I actually don’t think Brontë’s treatment of the Bertha situation can be described as either of those words now because I think her presentation of Bertha’s illness, the behaviour resulting from it, and her death is more nuanced than it first seems.  
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2.  Because I can’t resist: if you don’t know about Mr Darcy’s first proposal to Elizabeth, he tells her that he is proposing to her against his better judgement because of her family’s social and cultural inferiority to his.
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