nathan5's 3 favorite reads in 2025

Traumatic but beautiful, highlighting the countless personal stories behind institutional poverty and systemic issues in America. I thought Demon's narration was engaging and easy to read (though I found the book so heart wrenching at points that it was hard to continue reading sometimes!).
I felt a bit let down by the ending and I can't really put my finger on why - I think it felt like Demon went from his darkest to his most mature too quickly and without much struggle? It just seems a bit too neat. But I also don't think it could have ended any other way? I think the book worked best for me through the lens of the societal issues and how that affects people, rather than as a character driven book in itself.

An incredible look into Einstein's life, the physics he worked on, and the science of the early 20th century, including how science was treated before, after and during the war.

I knew exactly nothing about the Spanish Civil War before reading this. It's an odd book - a memoir of a period of time in his life where he didn't exactly do much - stood in a trench for a few months, didn't shoot anyone in Barcelona, then got shot in the throat. Still, the explanations of the war and the politics of it all were surprisingly interesting, even if I don't think it was the clearest. Orwell does an exceptional job of describing the reality of the war and how it changed him, and I think that's the most interesting takeaway - war was (and is) tragic, unfair, disgusting, lousy, muddy, exhausting, and yet, both pointless and inevitable. And at the centre of it all, are humans.

In the closing remarks of the book, Orwell is travelling back to England.
"Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, ... and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London ... all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs."
I think partially it just makes me homesick, but it's hard not be moved - how easy it is to sleep the deep, deep sleep of the comfortable places we (or at least, I) live. And the roar of bombs may not be here, but it doesn't take much to hear them.