Merry Christmas/Hanukkah/whatever annual excuse you and your family make to set aside your differences and gorge yourselves with sweets.
If you’re attentive, you will have noticed I didn’t send out a blog last month. I can only hope you’ll find it in your good holiday spirits to forgive me. I was busy writing the thing I’m most proud of writing this year: an essay called Kurt Vonnegut, Saudi Arabia, and the Tyranny of Efficiency. In this essay, I use an anti-utopic book written in 1953 to make sense of Saudi Arabia’s baffling, spectacularly failed mega-project, The Line.
When I first saw the proposal for The Line, I couldn’t stop asking myself: how did such a delusional project gain traction at all? If major global financial players and consulting firms are eternally wedded to efficiency and rationality, why would they ever help a dictator construct a project that feels like it came out of a deleted Phineas and Ferb episode? I believe the great Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, holds some answers.
So this holiday season, when you get fed up with spending your precious, fleeting time on Earth with the ones you love most, lock yourself in the bathroom with a bottle of Baileys and find out what a prophetic dead author can tell us about machine replacement, mathematically-perfected society, and the seduction of violent revolution.
In 2025, my New Year’s Resolution was to read 24 books—one every two weeks. Like most New Year’s Resolutions, I didn’t do it, but luckily, the point of resolutions is just to do more than you would have otherwise. In the end, I made it through 20 books, so I’ll put it down as a success. As 2025 winds down, I decided to revisit the ten best books of the lot. I have grouped them into the Three Divine, Original & Indivisible Categories of Book: Novel, Travel, and Nonfiction.
Novel
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
“As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands… [The city] does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”
The best book I read this year was Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Reading it feels like walking through the final dream of a salt-of-the-earth traveler as he lies under a tree, his head tilted back, his soul somewhere between this world and the next. One by one, his memories teleport him to the ends of the Earth he’s walked. With each yarn, he fixates on a particular feature, pattern, experience of a place he visited—or did he only imagine it? Does the difference matter?
Not at all. Calvino turns the Earth into a handheld orb that, whenever you look into it, reveals an unexplored universe. Cities contain worlds; single brains, cities. Each one with its own fingerprint, but all made of the same human ingredients: signs, names, eyes, desire, memory… The reader’s journey is spiraling and kaleidescopic. Even the chapter numbers invite us to marvel at the gyrating mathematics of aesthetics—1, 2, 1, 3, 2, 1, 4, 3, 2, 1…
Invisible Cities gives you the feeling that you don’t fully understand it, but it doesn’t make you want to figure it out, either. I savored whatever magic Calvino was weaving before my eyes, without any desire to find out what analysis or literary reception the book had been subject to. In fact, I was halfway through the book when I read the back cover, and I was extremely disappointed when I did. Calvino’s biography described him as a “fabulist,” which popped the bubble of unnamable alchemy I was experiencing.
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
“What have you got against machines?” said Buck.
“They’re slaves.”
“Well, what the heck,” said Buck. “I mean, they aren’t people. They don’t suffer. They don’t mind working.”
“No. But they compete with people.”
“That’s a pretty good thing, isn’t it – considering what a sloppy job most people do of anything?”
“Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave,” said Harrison thickly,
and he left.
When I doubt the absolute goodness of technological innovation, I sometimes feel like a Luddite yelling at cars from the freeway shoulder. But even for the hardcore futurist, it’s surely refreshing to read a 70-year-old book that foresees the impacts of “machines that devalue human thinking” and glorifies violent anti-machine revolution. Set in a techno-utopia where all political decisions are made by a supercomputer, Player Piano poses big questions about a supposedly free-thinking society that demands absolute, quasi-religious loyalty to technological progress. Though it was written in 1953, Player Pianois a more sober portrait of 2025 than almost anything you’ll find in the news. With delightful satire, Vonnegut rejects the “divine right of machines, efficiency, and organization, just as men of another age [rejected] the divine right of kings.”
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
“… why should smoke possess only the name ‘smoke,’ when from minute to minute, second to second, the amalgam of hundreds of odors mixed iridescently into ever new and changing unities as the smoke rose from the fire… All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by smell and the poverty of language were enough for the lad Grenouille to doubt if language made any sense at all…”
It is often said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. If that’s true, writing about scent is like programming about jazz. In other words, it’s bloody hard because our tools are hopelessly insufficient for the task. Luckily, people like Patrick Suskind are around to try, and do an absolutely beautiful job of it.
The protagonist of Perfume throws out expertly crafted recipes for perfume, using pure instinct to distill, mix, and finesse the most powerful scents known to man. Suskind similarly tosses aside formulaic descriptions of smells, dancing through metaphors to immerse readers in the world through a single sense. The plot is satisfyingly simple; each scene is a simple dough with which Suskind bakes an indulgent, vicarious literary pie. Its scent wafts to you from the bookshelf… If you want to see a human put the dictionary to use describing one of the deepest, most primal senses that we rarely give a second thought, Perfume is your next read.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
“Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.”
Catch-22—the book which coined the expression—is a morbid, satirical look at the insanity of war. The above quote is one such paradox: the only way for pilots to get out of flying their missions is if the doctor deems them crazy. However, by asking to be grounded, pilots demonstrate a desire to get out of war, and thereby prove that they are sane.
Throughout the book, logic and humanity are inverted in similar ways. Reality and hallucinations are completely interchangeable—even the dead live. Heller paints especially comical and depressing caricatures of the generals, whose egos add an astonishing web of bureaucracy to the business of death. For those who enjoy laughing out loud while being dragged into a deep depression, Catch-22 will show you the brainless, unremarkable ability of war to turn “vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice.”
Travel
The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
“Richard Lee calculated that a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4,900 miles before he begins to walk on his own. Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet.”
The Songlines refer to the ancient songs that Aboriginal Australians use to navigate the bush. In this novel, Chatwin tries to uncover exactly what the Songlines are, how they relate to Australia’s landscape, and what their legacy is today. Chatwin’s narration is winding, spanning from embellished fireside tales to a conflicted Aboriginal artist who sells his works to a white gallery owner.
Near the end of the novel, Chatwin corroborates his insights about the Songlines with some linguists. He arrives at the tenuous but lovely idea that human language originated as song. The theory may not be falsifiable, but one should never miss an opportunity to entertain humans as beings born of Evolution’s arc towards creativity, beauty, and poetry. As Chartwin quotes from Martin Heidegger: “Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode of every day language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer.”
The Oblivion Seekers by Isabella Eberhardt
“The healthy wayfarer sitting beside the road scanning the horizon open before him, is he not the absolute master of the earth, the waters, and even the sky? What housedweller can vie with him in power and wealth? His estate has no limits, his empire no law.”
The Oblivion Seekers is a collection of short stories often featuring vagrants who, called by solitude and freedom, find strange, simple comfort in faraway lands. However, not all oblivion seekers are journeyers: in one story, the protagonist describes a Moroccan kif den, where locals smoke to “reach the magic horizon where they are free to build their dream-palaces of delight.” Both the sedentary dreamers and restless adventurers seek open skies in their own ways.
The descriptions of desert landscapes are taken from Eberhardt’s own adventures in North Africa, where, dressed as a man, she found home in rural Arab communities. Her (real-life) adventures included joining a secretive Sufi brotherhood, narrowly escaping an assassin because his sword bounced off a wire, and eventually dying, alongside her lover, in a flash flood. Eberhardt’s stories are tragic, romantic portraits of her belief that “vagrancy is deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom.”
Nonfiction
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
“Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data… What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.”
One wonderful thing about this book is that, although thousands of PhD students have debated its theses, it remains accessible to a relatively broad audience. Kuhn is a philosopher who originally coined the term “paradigm” as we use it today. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he uses the term to describe how scientific ways of thinking coalesce around certain values, institutions, and groups of professionals, which are all subject to historical change. One of his main arguments is that, when paradigms come into crisis, they are not replaced simply on the basis of scientific reason. Rather, new paradigms are evaluated by scientists partly based on their simplicity, aesthetics, and ability to answer acute questions that precipitated the crisis.
One of my favorite aspects of the book is that Kuhn challenges us to think about science as a narrowing of scope. Scientists must focus on what questions are worth asking and what variables are worth measuring, which always blinds us to other questions and variables. The result is that science, while accurate, does not cumulatively advance towards absolute truth. Instead, the significance and appeal of certain theories depend on the time, society, and professional community within which they are evaluated. This is not to say that truth is relative, but rather that, in a world of infinite variables, the ones that get measured depend on the subjective concerns, resources, and values of a given society. Kuhn’s book is great if you want a socially critical view of science that still preserves its findings as real and valid.
Who Owes Who?: 50 Questions About World Debt by Damien Millet and Eric Toussaint
“Somewhere between ‘giving fish to the hungry’, the prerogative of charity, and ‘teaching them to fish’, the cornerstone of development, the practice of ‘leasing them costly and fragile fishing-rods’ seems to have slipped in, translating the new creed of the World Bank and the Monetary Fund.”
– Yves Tavernier, French MP, 2000
If you think about it, it’s odd that the richest countries in the world, which mostly got rich by colonizing, enslaving, and stealing from today’s poorest countries, demand that those poor countries owe them money. Today, creditors are becoming more multipolar, but in general, debt is still used as a political tool to keep small economies open to competition from powerful, industrialized nations. Ironically, the free-market economic policies prescribed by creditor nations are rarely followed by wealthy countries themselves, who use the full power of government to subsidize, protect, and bail out their largest industries.
Millet and Toussaint explain the general history and trends of global debt through statistics, answering questions like: “What impact does the external debt have on human development?”; “What does the IMF do?”; and “If the creditors decided to cancel the debt, would it cause a global financial crisis?” If you hate keeping up with the news but want to better understand the dynamics underlying many current international conflicts, this book is a good place to start.
The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives by Carole Hillenbrand
I downloaded this book it before crossing the Atlantic because it looked dense and I wanted something to keep my brain from smoothing over at sea. To my great surprise, it is a fascinating—dare I say page-turning—work of history. The Crusades were a series of religious… well, crusades, that have been told and retold thousands of times by Western scholars. In fact, as Hillebrand (herself a Western scholar…) points out, the Crusades are much better documented by Western sources because the Arabs considered the Crusaders—or Francs, as they called them—a relatively fringe and culturally primitive group of invaders.
Hillenbrand does a wonderful job of contextualizing the Islamic sources, addressing how they are affected by their social context and the authors’ worldview. For example, she examines the use of jihad in public documents over several centuries to demonstrate how the idea of a people’s “holy war,” long absent from Islamic sources, resurged following the Crusades, partially as a response to perceived religious threats by outsiders. She concludes that jihad, while partially a sentiment of the masses, was also mobilized by political, military, and religious elites to benefit their own aspirations.
If you want to understand how a landmark event in Western history was perceived by the people on the other side of the conflict, Hillebrand’s work is the most gripping academic work you’re going to get.
Burning Diagrams in Anthropology by Tristan Partridge
“The desire to comprehend action leads to the attempt to contain it, as if actions could be either containable and comprehensible within any one moment or representation. The implication being not only that such actions can be traced but also that, in their traceability, such actions are predictable and replicable.”
The practice of diagramming human relations is deeply ingrained in the history of anthropology. Perhaps due precisely to their relative antiquity in the discipline, diagrams are often treated as artefacts; inert representations of a mode of thought. In Burning Diagrams in Anthropology, Partridge asks us to re-examine the idea of diagrams as simple historical legacies, and to instead see them as living artefacts that continually influence human relations. We are impelled to reflect on the power of diagrams in actively structuring relationships, as well as the intricacies they evict by attempting to capture humans in two dimensions.
Though the book’s academic bibliography is extensive, many of Partridge’s ideas are encapsulated in succinct, splintered thoughts that border stream-of-consciousness: “Diagrams, beheld. Colonial relics refashioned. Reprogrammed for contemporary ends. Unwelcome reminders. Evocative shorthand, reductive gloss. Two dimensions, perhaps two too many?” The rhizomatic prose complements Partridge’s invitation for us to experience the inertia, activity, and movement of life in two dimensions.
Enjoy your holiday season, and cheers to another year of biting off more than we can chew. May your heroic bite, dribbling oil down your chin and leaving your extended family aghast, taste delightful.
Until next time,
Lucas