Favorite 2025 Reads
Well, that’s a wrap for 2025. I hope you’ve all had a great year and are recharging ahead of the new one. It’s been a less than happy one, as far as the news covered by this Substack goes, but I hope that this subscription has proven helpful to the now more than 400 of you who have so kindly added it to your lives. Hopefully the news I cover next year will be happier!
Since people often ask me what I’m reading, I thought I’d share a quick list of my favorite reads from 2025. Many (most?) were not published this year, so this is not a ‘what’s new‘ list so much as it is a ‘what I read and thought interesting‘ list. For the full list you can see my reading challenge list on GoodReads here and can follow my account on there if you want to see what I’m worming my way through on any given day. I also periodically write short reviews with my thoughts on each book, though that’s only when I feel like I have something helpful to say.
Let’s start with a couple of non-academic books, just to keep things light. I really loved Werner Herzog’s memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All, both because it’s so bizarre and fascinating and because Herzog is such a unique figure. It was a lot of fun to see into his life and inner world. Likewise, I think Anthony Hopkin’s memoir We did OK, Kid was a really powerful read, if a much more somber one than Herzog’s. I also, well enjoyed might be too strong of a word, but I found interesting Jenette McCurdy’s I’m Glad my Mom Died, as an interesting look into the life of a child star whose toxic mother made her life immeasurably harder than it needed to be. Finally, and more germane to what this Substack is all about, is Juan Reinaldo Sánchez’s memoir The Double Life of Fidel Castro. The book is by a former bodyguard of Fidel and one of the highest level defectors in the past three decades. I don’t think every claim in the book should be treated as gospel, but the man is who he says he is so I think his look into the private life of Fidel and his inner circle is a useful - if imperfect - source for those interested in high level Cuban politics behind the scenes.
Jumping off the topic of memoirs, it seems like autobiographies are an obvious next group block. WaPo journalist David Hoffman’s biography of Oswaldo Payá is, I think, an obligatory read for people trying to actually understand the Cuban dissident movement of the 90s-2000s. Payá’s sudden death in the early 2010s, which may or may not have been an accident, remains an important touchstone for the dissident movement even today, and his absence an important gap in the generational leadership of the movement from those days. The deeply reported biography is especially important for Leftists to read as the dissident movement is often caricatured as simply being ‘mercenaries‘ or ‘arch reactionaries‘ rather than understood on their own terms. Less germane to the Substack, I also learned a lot from Frank Costigliola’s biography Kennan, whose politics and ideas were far more bizarre than would have thought from the main thing most people know him for; the ‘long telegram‘.
The next block of books are mostly works of journalists on various topics that don’t fall under the genre of biography. I was pleasantly surprised this year while reading Andrés Oppenheimer’s Castro’s Final Hour, published in the early 1990s as the USSR collapsed. The book has quite a negative reputation in the circles that I grew up with, being reduced to a joke about how off its title was (published in 1992, Castro would survive in power to 2008, and only die in the 2010s). The book itself, however, is a very deeply reported look at the crisis facing the Cuban government as its Cold War supply lines and subsidies dried up and the future went from assured to uncertain. While the author clearly believed that Castro’s ‘final hour‘ was nigh (why else would he have chosen that unfortunate title?), the substance of his journalistic work holds up and is a very helpful place to start for those - like me - trying to understand why the system did not collapse like so many predicted it did. Two great books on Communist states that did collapse which I really enjoyed this year are Anna Funder’s Stasiland, obviously on the GDR, and Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, on the USSR. The former is a really powerful series of interviews with former East German citizens in the 90s about their lives during and since the GDR, and hopefully serves to inoculate some against the rising (and to me quite bizarre) tide of Ostalgie in some Very Online leftist circles. Secondhand Time, however, is the obligatory read of the two, as Alexievich (an oral history specialist) compiles dozens if not hundreds of interviews with former citizens of the USSR to look back at their lives and all that has happened since. This won the Pulitzer and rightfully so; probably one of the best books that I’ve ever read, if also a very difficult read at times for how depressing it was at various points. It will, no doubt, be helpful for future historians attempting to reconstruct the social, cultural, and ideological shifts of that era. Finally, and admittedly on a lower tier than the previous books, is the still quite helpful The Burning Shores, journalist Frederic Wehrey’s late 2010s look at the fall of Qadhafi and the Civil War that continued to bleed the country. Given that Libya is invoked quite often in political discourse, almost always quite superficially, it seemed like an important read to actually understand the 2010s Libyan crisis on its own terms, not just as a rhetorical football.
Ok, I have held off on academic books for as long as I could. Here are my favorite monographs for the year:
To make the World Safe for Revolution - Jorge Domínguez. Still the obligatory starting point to understand Cuban foreign policy during the Cold War, even though it was written in the late 1980s. You can definitely read each chapter in isolation, but I think anyone writing on this topic should ideally read it cover to cover before starting, so as to form the beginnings of a holistic understanding of their own more niche research project. As a nota bene: as the author fell into disgrace, for reasons you can find via Google search, I recommend buying this second hand if and where possible. The reasons for the fall from grace are not related to the quality of the work itself, which remains stellar.
Piracy and the making of the Spanish pacific world - Kristie Flannery. A really great read that came out late last year on Spain’s colonization and rule over the Philippines from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Despite how important the Philippines became to the Spanish Empire, being the main point of trade between Mexican silver and Chinese exports like tea or manufactures, it often gets siloed off into its own little world, at least as far as Latin Americanists go. This book was super helpful in understanding not just what the hell was happening there for three centuries but how a very different colonial model developed there, with the threat of piracy playing a key role in cohering the colonial project together.
Red Globalization - Oscar Sánchez-Sibony. Great read on how the USSR, contrary to what you might assume, was increasingly integrated into the global economy throughout the Cold War and especially from the 1960s. While it is true that the regime was quite isolationist in the 1930s, this was far from an ideal situation for the Soviets, being instead a strategic response to the rise of protectionism and chronic balance of payment issues in its trade with the West. As both this book and others show, socialist-capitalist trade was not some weird anomaly or policy choice but was more or less the ‘normal‘ state of things throughout the Cold War. With the rise of the USSR as a petrostate in the 1970s, the chronic shortage of foreign currency was for a time resolved, facilitating even further economic integration with the West. Important read.
Summer of Fire and Blood - Lyndal Roper. Read this book on the Peasant’s War (1525) because I happened to be living in one of the main areas where it was bloodiest when it broke out. It’s a super helpful and accessibly written book on the uprising, how it has been used/abused for political ends since, and the insanely bloody cost of it for those who lived through it. One misconception that Roper talks about is how it is often framed purely as a popular peasant uprising, when reality is more complex. While often translated as ‘Peasant’s War‘, a more accurate translation of Bauernkrieg would be ‘Farmer’s War‘; many of those who rose up were not the poorest of the poor, from the most backwards regions, held in feudal bondage, but rather those with some means, in often fairly prosperous areas, with surprising levels of support from some urban middle classes. Definitely recommend it as a read.
Seeing Like a State - James C. Scott. Very late to this one, but yes, this is a good book and worth reading. I do not think that it’s something you should treat as gospel or anything, but I think it’s a helpful tool to get you thinking through the extent and limits of state perception of what happens on the ground level in the countries that states try to rule. It shapes policy more often than you’d think. One of the author’s core arguments is that many catastrophic policy disasters are often downstream of very powerful states that are simultaneously - and at times paradoxically - blind to the impact of their policies. These states, especially revolutionary ones that don’t have more typical checks and balances, then create catastrophes that would have been far more obvious to those living at a local level.
Both because it’s purely a fun read and because it doesn’t fit the previous groupings, I leave the Lay of the Nibelungs to last. It’s a German epic poem written in the Middle Ages and set largely in the Southwest, where I have been living. It’s definitely closer to other Medieval Romance poems like El Mío Cid than it is to classics like the Iliad, but at the same time I think the latter also clearly served as an influence somewhere down the line. It’s a fun romp that I can see gifting to young adults as they look for fun literature that takes them beyond stuff that’s just for little kids and more adult themes. It was also just fun to hear the names of places that I’d recently visited, and therefore could use as reference points to where the story was happening, in a text that’s at least three times as old as my country.
Well, with that I say adieu to 2025 and hello to 2026. I look forward to sharing many more stories and more from my research in the new year, as well as finally changing my byline from PhD Candidate to PhD (circa summer 2026). Ciao, auf Wiedersehen, and see you next year.