Listen (11:23 )
December 29, 2025
Part 4 in reading order from July 1st to December 29, 2025
84. The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan
McEwan’s early, fast-paced, dark novella introduces a young English couple, Colin and Mary, on vacation in an unnamed city (presumed to be Venice), who encounter a mysterious local couple, Robert and Caroline, leading to a chilling, menacing unraveling of their relationship and safety.
85. Post Office by Charles Bukowski
Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's alter ego, goes through a disillusioning, monotonous fourteen-year journey working various jobs in the postal service, marked by oppressive supervisors, difficult coworkers, and chaotic personal relationships, all portrayed with a cynical, gritty tone.
86. The History of the Town and Borough of Penzance by P.A.S. Pool
This meticulously compiled historical account, detailing the end of Penzance's existence as a Borough in 1974 after 360 years, covers the town's development, charters, and civic evolution.
87. Cove by Cynan Jones
Jones offers a genre-bending novel about an unnamed man who is struck by lightning while kayaking out at sea, suffering injuries and amnesia, and struggling to survive as he tries to find his way back to the woman and child he vaguely remembers waiting for him on shore.
88. Echo’s Bones by Samuel Beckett
This is Beckett’s original version of the story of Belacqua, who, after death, experiences a liminal, shadowy existence where he confronts mundane absurdities, struggles with unfinished business, and faces the futility of life and death in a disjointed, surreal narrative.
89. One Moonlit Night by Caradog Prichard
Prichard’s coming-of-age novel is narrated by a ten-year-old boy, depicting the harsh realities, joys, and tragedies of life in a small Welsh slate quarrying village during and after World War I, as he experiences the struggles of poverty, mental illness, and the impacts of war on his community while seeing the world through the eyes of childhood innocence and curiosity.
90. The Color of Milk by Nell Leyshon
A historical novel narrated by fifteen-year-old Mary, a sharp-tongued, illiterate farm girl in 1830 England, who is sold by her father to work as a maid for a vicar's invalid wife, where she experiences harsh realities of life, learns to read and write, and faces tragic consequences as she urgently records her story.
91. Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan
A melding of contemporary life and ancient folklore, Keegan’s story presents a priest officiating a wedding who reflects on the poignant and painful realities beneath the surface of the ceremony, revealing themes of loneliness, lost faith, and the complexities of human relationships within a rural Irish setting.
92. Multitudes by Lucy Caldwell
This is a taut collection of short stories that explores the intense, often painful transitions of adolescence and young womanhood, particularly set against the backdrop of Belfast, and captures themes of identity, love, trauma, and the yearning for escape.
93. Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes
Barnes tells a curious story of one man's enduring intellectual and personal fascination with an enigmatic, rigorous teacher, which leads him to explore her life, ideas, and a controversial interpretation of history, revealing the difficulties of truly understanding another person and the power of influence and memory.
94. Cairn by Kathleen Jamie
Jamie offers a wonderful collection of prose poems, micro-essays, and personal notes arranged like a cairn of stones, reflecting on the natural world, environmental crises, the passage of life, and the fragile future we are handing on to the next generation.
95. Last Orders by Graham Swift
Set in 1989, Swift writes limpidly about four men on a road trip to scatter the ashes of their friend Jack, revealing their complex pasts, regrets, and the nature of friendship in working-class postwar England through their shared memories and reflections along the way.
96. The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie
Rushdie proffers a rare collection of five short pieces exploring themes of mortality, unfinished business, revenge, and the magical power of music across settings in India, America, and England.
97. Black Bell by Alison C Rollins
This is a powerful, vibrant poetry collection that explores the relationship between sound, Blackness, and performance as means of resistance and liberation, weaving historical and futuristic elements to investigate themes of fugitivity and Black survival.
98. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
Catton keeps the reader on her toes in this ecological thriller about a New Zealand guerrilla gardening collective whose partnership with a secretive billionaire on an isolated farm spirals into a dangerous clash of ideals, surveillance, and environmental crime.
99. Every Last Fish by Rose George
This book explores what fish do for humans and how the global legal and illegal fishing industries, combined with environmental pressures, are rapidly depleting ocean life, raising urgent questions about how we eat and where our food will come from in the future.
100. Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
A burned-out writer retreats to a friend’s isolated cabin in Big Sur seeking peace, only to be overwhelmed by alcoholism, mental breakdown, and the realization that he cannot escape himself.
101. Hagstone by Sinead Gleeson
Gleeson’s debut novel is a haunting story about an Irish artist, Nell, whose commission to document a secretive all-women commune pulls her into uncanny island forces and reveals unsettling truths about faith, power, and her own artistic calling.
102. The Pursuit of Liberty by Jeffrey Rosen
This brilliantly researched book explores the enduring and defining clash between Alexander Hamilton's vision of a strong federal government and a powerful executive, and Thomas Jefferson's advocacy for states' rights and individual liberties, a debate that has shaped American political history and continues to influence constitutional battles today.
103. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Vuong’s debut epistolary novel in the form of a letter from a young Vietnamese American son, Little Dog, to his illiterate mother, explores themes of trauma, identity, race, queerness, love, and family across generations, shaped by war and migration.
104. Native Nations by Kathleen DuVal
This compelling Pulitzer Prize-winning history focuses on the power and sovereignty of Indigenous North American nations, tracing their complex civilizations, diplomacy, and resilience from ancient urban centers a millennium ago through centuries of interaction with Europeans to their ongoing fight for sovereignty today.
105. Helm by Sarah Hall
Hall delivers an epic, sweeping novel in which an anthropomorphized Cumbrian wind observes humans across millennia, revealing how awe, exploitation, love, and climate damage shape the fraught relationship between people and the natural world.
106. Other Worlds by André Alexis
This is a masterful genre-blending story collection where characters cross between lives, places, and realities to confront bewilderment, migration, guilt, and the search for belonging.
107. Flesh by David Szalay
Szalay chronicles the life of a Hungarian man, István, from a sexually exploitative teenage affair through decades of drifting work, sex, and sudden tragedy, tracing how unresolved trauma and desire quietly deform his life.
108. Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake
This is a paired collection of illustrated poems that contrasts the trusting vision of childhood with the harsh, corrupt realities of the adult social and religious world, showing how both perspectives are partial and intertwined.
109. The Zorg by Siddharth Kara
The Zorg offers a narrative history of an ill-fated 1780–1781 slave ship whose captain, running low on supplies after navigational blunders, orders over a hundred enslaved Africans thrown overboard, and whose subsequent insurance trial helps ignite the British abolitionist movement.
110. The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Issaacson
Isaacson offers a concise historical and moral meditation on the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, unpacking how its layered ideas of equality, rights, and common values were crafted and how they can still guide American democracy today.
111. Analog Days by Damion Searls
This diaristic, Gen‑X‑voiced novella follows friends moving through the noisy political and digital upheavals of 2016, searching in film, memory, and camaraderie for analog moments of meaning amid a relentlessly online world.
112. Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola
Zoccola's debut poetry collection is a sharp, Appalachian portrait of Helen of Troy recast as a dissatisfied 1990s Tennessee housewife, using vivid, narrative poems to explore beauty, confinement, rage, and a woman’s struggle for agency in a small town.
113. The Intentions of Thunder by Patricia Smith
This collection of Smith's new and selected poems is a sweeping, decades‑spanning testament to Black American life that moves between grief and joy as it bears witness to history, personal loss, resilience, and the enduring power of the poetic voice.
114. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter
This is a Pulitzer‑winning collection of finely crafted tales in which Porter uses precise, symbolic prose to chart love, memory, class, and mortality across Mexico and the American South, revealing the quiet devastation and stubborn resilience of ordinary lives.