Books I read in 2025

A delayed Happy New Year to everyone.

2025 was not a year for books for me. I got a dozen of books planned out, listed in an excel form with scores and rankings to decide the order of reading. Unfortunately, the year was tough, and other ways of de-stressing took up the time (including Movies and TV, which will be in the next article).

The Magic Number is 3 :(

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe

The book was bought in Jan 2024, from a period when I was obsessed to know everything Irish. It has all the elements that intrigue me: civil war, revolution, independence, betrayal, history, conflict of paths… Keeke wrote it beautifully, with stories that digged deeply into lives of all individual participants of The Troubles, no matter if voluntarily. When reading these stories I always think about what was happening at the same time in China, and I could not help but compare the scale of things, how strikingly unbalanced, but the natures of human fighting, disagreeing, betraying, struggling living… how strikingly homogeneous.

I know it have been filmed as mini-series recently, but the book led me to watch two films first:

• The Foreigner, starring Jackie Chan. The most fascinating part of the book and the story of leaders during The Troubles is how they parted for persistent believers of the cause like Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price compared to those who took another path like Gerry Adams, who was vividly depicted in this film. All emotions that people may have would be eventually pointless when time goes by, but there’s always someone in the corner reading and asking: “What if?”
• The Wind That Shakes the Barley, starring Cillian Murphy. Greatly introduced the independence history prior to the Troubles.

失落的一代: 中国的上山下乡运动1968-1980 (Génération perdue. Le mouvement d’envoi des jeunes instruits à la campagne en Chine, 1968- 1980), by Michel Bonnin

Purchased back in 2023, along with 冯骥才’s 一百个人的十年, which I finished quite early. For things as academic as this, I find materials that I can understand and helpful, which probably leads to huge bias and ignorance on my side. A obvious benefit was that I would at least start to see this and Cultural Revolution as two things that not necessarily bonded together.

A weird wave of talking about CR and its innuendos was present a few months ago, quite concerning. I quoted this sentence (that I rephrase in English) to mark the essence of the book I believe:

Chinese Society should not be like a blank white paper, on which its “Great Leaders” are free to doodle their delusional pipe-dreams.

Other River, by Peter Hessler

First heard this book out on social media, followed by several times of casually skimming in different bookstores, and finally got it during Black Friday.

I had already been impressed by some excerpts I got from skimming or social media posts, such as how many students thought they fit into the character of the donkey in Animal Farm, and their choices of idols compared to students of older generations. A fun read to get to know the time around the toughest and most controversial time period of recent China from a perspective of Peter, since I never got the first-hand experience. Mostly quite relatable and I must show sympathy. Education is the only part that I felt awkward, as I indeed had an unusual path myself which is not what’s commonly seen.