Lawrence Grobel's 3 favorite reads in 2025

• 2024
• 2025

I got this novel for my wife, but once I read her the beginning, she had to wait until I finished it before she could read it. It’s one of those books. It won a lot of awards when it was published and it became a Broadway play, and I can see why. Christopher Boone is on the spectrum, a teenager who doesn’t understand lies, emotions, and dislikes being touched. He does understand numbers, including prime numbers into the thousands, and knows all the countries and their capitals. He lives with his father, and when a neighbor’s dog is murdered, he sets out to investigate who did it. It’s not a simple story, but it’s told in a simple way that is easy to read, and a true page-turner. I like to find books that make you want to forgo television and this is one of them. I told my wife I couldn’t put it down, and then she got to have the same experience. Hats off to Mark Haddon.

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were strikng thirteen.” So begins one of the most perceptive and terrifying books of the 20th Century, a book that should be read as a primer of what to expect if the man in the White House continues on the path he and those who control his thinking keep going. I read 1984 in 1964 and by then, maybe a third of the predictions in the book had come to pass. Twenty years later, and closer to 80% are no longer speculative. I reread it this year with sadness and continue to marvel at Orwell’s genius. He wrote of the Thought Police, we’re experiencing ICE agents; he had Big Brother, we have Donald Trump. They burned books, we ban books. “WAR is PEACE, FREEDOM is SLAVERY, IGNORANCE is STRENGTH” is what the people are told. And today, our Defense Department is now the Department of War; our freedoms are challenged at every turn; and our government’s ignorance is their strength. We should all be rereading 1984….and be doing something to keep it from becoming totally nonfiction.

I didn’t think I’d read Michael Cohen’s book when it came out because I watched his Congressional testimony and believed what he had to say. But I picked it up on a trip and couldn’t put it down. I didn’t know about Cohen’s teenage connection to mobsters and how he got to understand the mind of the gangster, and how he was able to understand how Donald Trump thought and behaved like a Mob boss. It made perfect sense. “My insatiable desire to please Trump…that led to my ruination, was a Faustian bargain,” Cohen writes about his becoming Trump’s Roy Cohn, “I would do anything to accumulate, wield, maintain, exert, exploit power. In this way, Donald Trump and I were the most alike; in this naked lust for power,the President and I were soul mates.” Cohen gives example after example of how “Trump viewed anything that could hurt his brand or name as a mortal threat….The task…was to bury the truth [or] to distort it beyond recognition, to sow doubt and confusion and even fear.” Cohen’s went to prison because he was loyal to Trump; he came out loyal to our country. I hope some of the other Trump cronies follow suit…..before it’s too late.