Welcome to the annual year-in-books post. I’ve changed the format a bit: I’ve felt for a while that the genre/ratings approach I used to take in previous years had run its course. In this post, I’ve taken a more fluid, thematic approach, and dispensed with the ratings system. It also means that I’ve not covered every book I read this year; for that, I now have a regular Substack newsletter, where I talk fortnightly about what I’m reading (you can subscribe here). The Substack also has a version of this post, if that’s the format you prefer. Some of these books I’ve reviewed separately on this blog, and I’ve linked to those reviews below.

I began 2025 with two books at the intersection of poetry, history, politics, and revolution. Samuel Hodgkin’s Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism told the story of how Persian poetry constituted a glue that bound together a number of decolonisation projects in the mid-20th Century, in central and South Asia. From Iran to India to the USSR to the central Asian republics, Persian poetry provided a cultural vocabulary and a grammar that diverse peoples could use to talk to each other – a grammar that was eclipsed as the USSR eventually turned it into a top-down, State-led project. Eric Calderwood’s On Earth or in Poems: the Many Lives of al-Andalus movingly chronicled how, centuries after the fall of the Kingdom of Granada, al-Andalus has lived on in history, memory, legend, and as an anchor for radical political projects, including in Palestine. Al-Andalus has fascinated me ever since I came across it as a teenager in a fantasy novel by Guy Gavriel Kay, and I loved reading this book. In summer, I would re-read the book wandering through Andalusia, in the squares of Granada, in a tea-house in Cordoba, and by the corniche in Cadiz.

In July, I read Michael Craig Hillman’s part-biography, part-literary analysis in A Lonely Woman: Forough Forroukhzad and her Poetry. I had previously read Forroukhzad’s poems in a scattered way, but this book did a wonderful job not only of setting them in context, but also in illuminating Forroukhzad’s own poetic and personal development through these poems, in the context of mid-20th century Iran under the rule of the Shah. The book is a window into what rebellion through poetry might mean in a society where other modes of rebellion are closed off, and it forever altered my reading of the beautiful – and unsettling – Conquest of the Garden.

On a similar theme, the month after, I read Whitney Chadwick’s The Militant Muse: Love, War and the Women of Surrealism, my annual find at Budapest’s matchless National Gallery Bookshop. This book chronicles the intense relationships between women surrealist artists in the mid-20th century, who confronted both the travails of World War II as well as the patriarchal art world. I discovered new things about the lives and loves of artists like Frida Kahlo, and I discovered new artists entirely, such as Claude Cahun (“True poetry, the kind that keeps its secret … is like the paving stone … that can be used by the revolutionaries rather than the police.”) The fictional complement to this book was Lucy Steeds’ The Artist, which is one of the best novels I read this year: the story of a young woman in early-20th-century Provence, who dreams of being an impressionist artist, and struggles against the strictures imposed by her reclusive uncle, whom she lives with, and who actually is a famous artist. Rarely have I come across a novel with as narratively perfect an ending as this one.

On the topic of art and the novel, and hopping from France to Italy: the dazzlingly unpredictable Laurent Binet’s latest novel, Perspectives, is set in renaissance Italy with Michelangelo as a character, and is a historical-detective novel that moves through the world of renaissance art. Binet is as virtuoso as ever as a novelist, with shades of The Name of the Rose in this novel (long-time Binet readers will be unsurprised, given that Umberto Eco himself is a character in The Seventh Function of Language). I was told by someone with impeccable taste that they found the ending a let-down; I’m not so sure!

Still on the same theme, and back to non-fiction, in February, at the World Book Fair in Delhi, I chanced upon Jacopo Galimberti’s Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia, and the Visual Arts – a dense, complex, and ultimately rewarding book about how the the post-war, militant left-wing political movements in Italy gave rise to an entire genre of art, from the visual to the aural to the architectural, and how these artists struggled to craft a vision of what it means to be – and to make – radical art within the constraints of a capitalist world. Set in the same era, Luigi Pintor’s Memories from the Twentieth Century: A Kind of Trilogy is a set of political montages and reflections of radical movements and their limits. These books fortified my view that Italy from the end of the War to the conclusion of the Years of Lead is one of the most fascinating places to read about, if you’re interested in radical politics and art.

anenduringromantic

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