Clayton's Notes

Books of 2025

It’s that time of year again: the chance to opine on what I liked and what I didn’t, with inept & perhaps even cliché micro-expositions on why. I am however, upping my quote game this year. I’m going to give you lots of quotes from two books that I really loved, and perhaps in the absence of my ability to actually describe them, those quotes will convey why I loved them. (Can you tell that writing about books frustrates me?)

Girl, Woman, Other - Bernadine Evaristo This was my favorite book of 2025, and by a substantial margin. It is a series of tales of various English women whose lives intertwine over roughly a hundred-year period. I don’t want to say more of the contents to give away the Whoa, Cool, moments of the book, so instead I will talk about her writing. It is some of my favorite that I have ever read, full stop. Evocative and transportative, you go right into the lives of these women. The last time I was so skeptical on entry, and then so surprised once I got into it, was All The Boys in the Boat. Why on earth would I care about a rowing team from ~80 years ago? And then… you are so skillfully delivered into their lives and loves and losses and dramas that it unfurls like a movie in your mind.

Evaristo delights and enchants with this work, a novel that makes you remember why novels exist, the depth of human existence they can take you to. She made me believe in novels again, in a way I haven’t in several years.

All About Love - bell hooks
A friend left this with me when she came to visit last year when I was in Mexico, and it was exactly the book I needed at that time. I’d just started dating a woman whom I was very in love with, and while I knew what I felt towards her when I said “I Love You”, I didn’t understand what it would mean as a verb, to love her and love her well. To live that out. I was scared that I would fuck it up.

It took me months to get through this book. I didn’t truly finish it until the spring of 2025. I’d read a chapter, then read it two more times, then re-read a previous chapter, then return to the original again, then maybe take a shot at the next chapter. Her writing is clear and scalpel-sharp as she lays out what she believes love is and how to go about knowing it, finding it, practicing it.

One probably has to be in a certain headspace to want to read a book about love, and I’d guess that most men specifically (love is, as Hooks alludes to several times, a domain that is by common cultural agreement, only acceptable to study by women) will never be curious enough about love to take studying it seriously. That’s tremendously unfortunate, because I think a better understanding of love would lead anyone to deeper and more fulfilling relationships in their life, across every kind of relationship, not just romantic ones.

I’m not a good enough writer to summarize what took her 237 pages to articulate. I’ll leave you with some quotes, instead, and an unconditional recommendation to all human beings.

Love is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.

Spiritual…that dimension of our core reality where mind, body, and spirit are one… An animating principle in the self – a life force (some of us call it soul) that when nurtured, enhances our capacity to be more fully self-actualized and able to engage in communion with the world around us.

Love is as love does. Love is an act of will – namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.

Using a working definition of love tells us that it is the action we take on behalf of our own or another’s spiritual growth provides us with a beginning blueprint for working on the issue of self-love. When we see love as a combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility, we can work on developing these qualities or, if they are already a part of who we are, we can learn to extend them to ourselves.

When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect with them; that is, we invest feeling or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called ‘Cathexis’. In his book, Peck rightly emphasizes that most of us “confuse cathecting with loving”.

Many of us choose relationships of affection & care that will never become loving because they feel safer. The demands are not as intense as loving requires. The risk is not as great. So many of us long for love but lack the courage to take risks.

The Fall of Hyperion
Endymion
The Rise of Endymion
I first read Hyperion in high school, and I still loved it on re-reading it at the end of 2024, so I read the other 3 books in the Hyperion Cantos in 2024.

The Fall of Hyperion was also excellent. Endymion and The Rise of Endymion are fun, but ultimately, frustrating. I found their story to be inconsistent with the premises set up in the first two books, and complicated without a benefit to that complexity.

Taiko - Eiji Yoshikawa
I read Musashi by this same author in 2022, and it became one of my favorite novels. Taiko is another meganovel set in Japan’s feudal era, and it was as thoroughly enjoyable as Musashi. As I’m sure I’ve said elsewhere, my favorite thing about reading translated literature is seeing things that could never be written by a native English speaker, thoughts and observations that simply do not exist in my tongue. Here are a few (or rather few²) of the ones I underlined in Taiko.

“You were born a human being in a world in chaos. The most shameful things are vanity in clothing, vanity in eating, and oppressing ordinary, peaceable people. The so-called great provincial clans do these things, and so do the ronin. The family of Hachisuka Koroku is not like them, and I believe I’ve already cautioned you about this.”

The official had been in charge of the difficult project of cutting five hundred yards through a mountain. Ninety yards remained that morning, thus he had not met his deadline. Taking responsibility for the failure, the man had taken his own life.

…You’ve always said that we should take the broad view… You destroy one to save many. If we burn one mountain but make the Buddhist Law shine brightly on another 5 mountains and a hundred peaks, then I think that the killings we samurai commit cannot be called murders.

Day and night, the snow fell on wintry Echizen, leaving no opening through which a man could free his heart.

In the Sixth Month of the previous summer, just before his forced march to Yamazaki and his great victory to avenge Nobunaga, he had stood at that same gate and wondered whether he would come back alive. His last orders to his retainers had been clear: “If you hear that I have been defeated, kill my entire family and burn the castle to the ground.”

For sure, me too. If I’m ever defeated, murder everyone who loved me and raze my home to the foundation. Anything else would dishonor me for a thousand millennia.

The custom of that time was to hold frequent tea ceremonies in camp. Everything, of course, was prepared with simplicity – the tea room was only a temporary shelter with rough plaster walls, reed mats, and a vase containing wild flowers. The purpose of the tea ceremony was to cultivate the inner strength needed to endure the fatigue of a long campaign.

It’s often said that victory and defeat are the stuff of a warrior’s life. If you consider today’s disaster in terms of human destiny, you know that to be proud of victory is the first step toward the day of destruction, and to be completely defeated is the first step toward the day of victory. The eternal cycle of man’s rise and fall is not just a matter of temporary joy and sorrow.

Workers were levied from every clan; when a lord was negligent in sending his quota, he was severely punished, regardless of his status. There was a line of command of sub-contractors, foremen, and sub-foremen for every trade at each work station. Responsibilities were clearly defined for those in charge. If anyone was found lacking, he was immediately beheaded. The samurai from each clan who served as inspectors did not wait for punishment but committed seppuku on the spot.

Ieyasu, for his part, kept his eye on Gifugadake more than on any other area, aware that the spirit in Nagayoshi’s ranks was high. When a scout informed him about the way Nagayoshi was dressed that day, he issued a warning to the men around him. “Nagayoshi appears to be dressed in his death outfit today, and there’s nothing more intimidating than an enemy determined to die. Don’t make light of him and be taken in by the god of death.”

Good god do I ever hope I have a death outfit, when it comes time.

Fourth Wing (The Empyrean Book 1) - Rebecca Yarros
Iron Flame (The Empyrean Book 2) - Rebecca Yarros
Dog water, as the kids say. I read them right after a breakup in which all I wanted to do was not be in my head. They got me through those 5 or 7 days, and then I regained my self-respect, and didn’t finish the trilogy. I humbly request that my closest friends or family honor-kill me if I ever read the third one. You don’t have to murder my entire family too, nor raze my castle, but do not hesitate to murk me individually, without mercy. I thank you.

The Mercy of Gods (The Captive’s War Book 1) - James S.A. Corey
James S.A. Corey started a sci-fi book series called The Expanse some 10 or 15 years ago that I really enjoyed, so I decided to pick up this unrelated novel by them (this is a grammatically correct & non-gender-anomalous use of the word “them”: James S.A. Corey is the pen name of two guys who write novels collaboratively).

This book did nothing for me. It had a couple of fun ideas, but tired and dried-out writing, and I won’t read further entries in the series.

I still recommend The Expanse to sci-fi enjoyers.

Embracing Vocation - Dianne C. Luce
This book is a study of the early period of Cormac McCarthy’s writing years, up through Suttree. The material is mostly taken from the McCarthy archives, as well as interviews with friends and former wives. Cormac is one of my favorite authors, and it was fascinating to get a closer look at his writing process and life.

Unfortunately, I became very frustrated with this book, and didn’t finish as it was suffocatingly academic. Too, the author continually made claims about McCarthy’s writing that I felt should have been labeled as wildly speculative hypotheses, and not presented as fact.

This book did radically expand my understanding of one thing: methods of portraying interiority in written form.

Interiority is the internal landscape of a character, their thoughts and feelings and internal dialogue. The inside-the-thoughts-and-feelings conveyal of interiority is something writing can do that no other art form can. A carving or a painting or an opera cannot spell out for you what someone is thinking and feeling. They can evoke strong feelings in you (I think every art form can lay claim to its own unique sets of things that it can evoke in a viewer), but they cannot truly get you inside the head of another human being.

McCarthy typically eschews the traditional devices of literary interiority, the “he thought to himself: …” or “she observed that …” omitted from most of his works. The notable partial exception is his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, which as I noted in my review last year, does have a limited quantity of explicit interiority. After that first one though, nada. Zilch. If you want to know the interior of a character in a McCarthy novel, you must speculate and hypothesize purely based on what they say and do, the same way you might do while watching a movie.

Or must you?

Luce contends that there is interiority in the gothic period of McCarthy – his early novels, which are set in the American Southeast, as opposed to his Southwestern novels that began with Blood Meridian – the interiority is simply shown in atypical fashion. The internal torment of a character over their regrettable past actions appears as spectral figures haunting the character, ghosts whose embodiment you are never quite sure of: are they real, or are they fake? Their appearance and actions and words viewable as a film or drama of the internal world of a real character, acted out on the larger stage of the novel. Dreams are a similar canvas for an author to paint a stylized version of the inside world of the dreamer, without ever truly entering it.

I had never thought about this before, that you could depict interiority by projecting it out onto the world of the story, as the spirits, ghosts, and nightmares that follow a character.

While this theory is interesting and has made me think a tremendous amount about how a writer can convey interiority, I have come to reject that that is what McCarthy is doing in these early works of his. The phantasmagorical trio that haunts the protagonists of Outer Dark (the most prominent example of this that she puts forth) is fairly indisputably real: they interact with and murder several people over the course of the story. To interpret them as projections in the mind of the protagonist, you would also have to assume unreliability of the narrator for all other characters who interacts with this triune, and that is a claim that requires far more substantiation than Luce provides.

This is petty of me to continue to harp on this, but the abstract and abstruse claims go so far in this book that I cannot help it: She claims that the triune in Outer Dark is a version of the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, and that those witches too are but projections of Macbeth’s mind. This seems so ridiculous to me that it makes me want to throw the book across the room: witches were a very real concept in Shakespeare’s era, and I’ve never seen anyone claim that they are mere projections of his psyche. They exist and act on the world in scenes that do not contain Macbeth at all, much like the triune in Outer Dark.

There is so much of this wildly speculative interpretation that it chokes out any sincere and fact-based assessment of his writing. As I said, I could not finish it. On that basis, I do not recommend this book.

Red Rising 1-3 - Pierce Brown These books are the novelistic equivalent of a Marvel movie: fun, fast-moving, about people who don’t even remotely make you feel kinship with them as a fellow human, and which are almost instantly forgettable.

Blast through them if your soul needs another world to exist in for a few weeks, otherwise, I think you can miss them.

Warlock - Oakley Hall This is a Western, but a far cry from Lonesome Dove or the more pulpy entries by Louis L’Amour or Zane Grey. I very much enjoyed it, but I and one other friend were the only ones in our book club of ~13 people to get past page 30. I think anyone who devotedly reads literary fiction but also likes a L’Amour novel might enjoy this book.

Shadows Upon Time - Christopher Ruoccio The conclusion to the Suneater series, whose writing in the first 6 books frustrated me so completely in 2024. The writing was still maddening, but this final volume wraps up the story in a fitting and satisfactory way. To me. But then again, I thought the ending to Game of Thrones was fitting and satisfactory, and apparently I’m the only one on planet earth to have liked the GoT ending, so who knows.

Recommend to fantasy/sci-fi readers who can hack their way through onionskin-grade characters and truly insubstantial writing for an epic tale. The story really is fun.

Re-reads

The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi I thought this book was wildly inventive when I first read it, the world it painted so vivid and plausible. I don’t know if I have changed or if the book simply seems dated now, but I didn’t get that sense this time around. I still enjoyed it, but as a re-read, it did not entrance me the way a re-read of Hyperion did, or that my yearly re-reads of The Witcher series do. Speaking of…

The Witcher, Books 1-7 - Andrej Sapkowski I loved these as passionately as I always have.

Epilogue

Last year, I concluded my review of books by talking about a loss of faith as it were, in books in general. I am finishing this year with a bit of that faith restored. But only a bit.

(When I speak of books here, I’m speaking of fiction. Non-fiction has its own job to do, but what that is is a very different thing than fiction, and I am not going to talk about it here. The thoughts that follow are novel-centric.)

There is a quote that says, roughly speaking, that 90% of everything is crap. That is certainly true of books, and I continue to get more picky with what I find life-giving in books, and less patient for anything that doesn’t match that standard. I still read quite a few things that I thought weren’t really any good, but my irritation continues to build. I don’t know how to reliably find novels that have soul, humanity, life, within their pages. Or, barring that, that do enough fun things stylistically to keep me engaged.

As I write this, I think I am coming to a murky amorphous idea of what I want, no, what I need, out of a novel. Or a list of murky amorphous things, where if I can see at least one of them in a book, I will probably not hate it.

As a nice change from last year, this year I didn’t read any books that I didn’t actually want to read. I stand by this decision. I will continue to not read things that I dislike & do not find valuable or insightful.

Until next year.