The 2025 Public Discourse Book List 

For our last Bookshelf column of the year, we ask our editorial team and Witherspoon Institute staff to share about the best books they’ve read. Here are their picks for 2025. Happy reading! 

Alexandra Davis 

Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt is a novel I haven’t read since high school and something made me want to pick it up again. I think in many ways our digital age is reminiscent of the post-Industrial era, at least in terms of how much new technological advancements are disrupting our very understanding of ourselves and the world. Babbitt is a cutting satire of the post-Industrial middle-class American life told from the perspective of George Babbitt, a successful real estate broker whose personal life is, to put it mildly, empty and frankly a bit depressing (even though from the outside, and at first glance, it looks, well, pretty great). It was fun to read the novel again as an adult myself (it definitely hit harder as an adult than it did as a high school student and made me grateful for my own life) and to think about how one hundred years later, we’re facing our own pressing questions about what makes life worth living. What really makes a good life? Is it just a fancy home, a good job, and an impressive social circle? Do the many things (industrialization for Babbitt, AI and tech tools for us) that make our lives easier and better actually end up hurting us, hollowing us out, and, ultimately, destroying us?  

John F. Doherty 

This year, after different friends of mine had praised Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed so highly, I decided I had to read the book myself. I now understand why so many Italians regard it as their country’s greatest novel. A tale of a young, engaged couple living in the Duchy of Milan around 1630, it is thoroughly Italian. The prose, at least in the translation I read (reviewed at Public Discourse), is delightful. The narrator depicts his characters frankly but mercifully, showing their flaws to be the result of, not only their own sins, but also ordinary human frailty. Renzo, the male co-protagonist, embodies the lively passions of Italian youth: once he oscillates in the space of a few sentences from carefree, to enraged to the point of murder, to recoiling in horror at himself as he remembers his beloved and the Virgin Mary. Catholicism suffuses the story, which explores the mysterious working of providence in men’s lives.  

And yet this non-Italian reader could not but think that Manzoni’s view of providence is slightly off. Grace sees his characters through their trials, but the characters don’t really learn from their mistakes and change. If they do become better, it is only by a dramatic divine intervention, without the hard, gradual work of growing in virtue. The world never really improves: horrible things happen, and God gets everyone through, somehow. And some of the plot’s digressions (such as the depictions of the plague in Milan) are unnecessarily long and, therefore, tiring.  

The Betrothed is not among my favorite novels, but I am glad I read it. After all, there is wisdom in the belief that our capacity to change is less, and our need for God is greater, than we tend to think. 

Matthew J. Franck 

Like John Doherty, I too read Manzoni’s The Betrothed this year, and also  Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (whose title is really The Serval, but who would read that?). Lampedusa’s only novel depicts a dying aristocracy during the Risorgimento that unified Italy in the nineteenth century, and captures some of the insights that Tocqueville expresses about the passage from an aristocratic society to a democratic one. 

The encounter of democracy with aristocracy can also be seen in Henry James’s early novel The American, in which the wealthy title figure—aptly named Newman—moves to Paris and falls in love with a young widow whose brother is a marquis. The fate of the bewildered protagonist is not a happy one, and—not for this reason—the novel is not entirely a successful one. I think I must try some of James’s later work. A final work of fiction worth mentioning: George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which may not be (as many of my friends say) the best novel ever, but I am hard pressed to name a better one. 

Among numerous nonfiction books I read this year, the most profitable was Leon Kass’s The Beginning of Wisdom, whose subtitle, Reading Genesis, modestly understates the achievement of its more than six hundred pages of philosophical close reading of the first book of the Bible. That such a book can be a page-turner is a feat that perhaps only Kass could have pulled off. 

Finally, there may be some readers who wish to take up my “Shakespeare in a Year” reading plan, newly updated here for 2026. I like to highlight suitable commentaries as well, and one that I’ve just discovered is W. H. Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare, given at the New School in the 1946–47 and painstakingly reconstructed decades later by Arthur Kirsch from notes taken by students in attendance.

Devorah Goldman 

What can we do, Vasya? A son is a piece of you that’s cut free. Like a falcon—he wanted to come, so he flew here to us, and he wanted to go, so he flew away; and you and I are like mushrooms on a tree stump, we sit here side by side and don’t go anywhere. But I’ll stay the same for you, now and forever, as you will for me.

Fathers and Sons, the short and bracing 1862 work by Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, is about family gatherings and dispersals; the creeping and inevitable unease between generations; the yearning for and instinctive rejection of the past. This drafty Russian novel—I like to read at least one each year—complements a wintry mood, the old year making way for the new. It is funny, poking at those who don’t know themselves especially well—in other words, all of us. It is also a deeply religious book, concluding with small and hopeful tributes to family life and “life everlasting.” The translation by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater is superb. 

Nathaniel Peters 

Years ago I bought a used set of Kristin Lavransdatter, the medieval epic by Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset, but whenever I tried to read it I couldn’t get past the faux-medieval prose. A friend told me that Tiina Nunnally’s new translation was more faithful to the original and thus urged me to try it. I finally did this year. The opening pages painted a gorgeous picture of Norway. Then the plot took off and kept me engrossed for the next thousand pages. I had thought that Kristin was a novel best suited to Catholic women. But for its powerful insights into human nature and the action of grace, not to mention its beautiful prose, I would rank it as one of the greatest books I’ve ever read, right up with Tolstoy.  

Jane Scharl 

I gravitate toward fiction, so it was a surprise to find that two of my three favorite reads this year were non-fiction. Joanne Paul’s Thomas More: A Life was a real joy and surprise. Paul resists the temptation to add a contemporary gloss to More’s life, and instead gives us an artful, highly readable account of More’s formation into the singular man we know today. It’s not a flawless book, but it’s well worth reading.   

Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry, from poet, critic, and former National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia, is a sparkling survey of the art of the libretto, specifically, the libretto’s relationship with the often far more famous music written to accompany it. Opera lovers will revel in Gioia’s assertion that the poetry, not the music, of an opera is primary, while those less familiar with the Queen of the Arts will find a first-class treatment of the history of opera along with practical tips on how to engage with opera.  

I finally read Anatoly Rybakov’s perfectly titled novel Fear, the second in his chilling Arbat Trilogy, which documents Stalin’s Great Purge in the 1930s. Fear follows the (mis)fortunes of characters from Children of the Arbat, but it is a stand-alone novel. The style is more Solzhenitsyn than Dostoevsky; psychological terror and confusion is the name of the Stalinist game, and Rybakov depicts this by simply describing events, brutal and gruesome as they are, with very little explanation or justification until we, the readers, experience for ourselves the moral bewilderment that defined those terrible days. 

R. J. Snell

This semester I taught a seminar at Princeton on Central and Eastern European dissidents writing against the Nazis and the Soviets. Most of the readings concerned intellectuals formed somewhat in the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl. The outlier to that trajectory among the assigned readings was Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. I assigned the excellent collection edited by Edward Ericson and Daniel Mahoney, The Solzhenitsyn Reader, a text I’ve used previously. 

Solzhenitsyn is a complicated figure, of course, and students did not unanimously approve of his writings, but all agreed on the power of his reflections. Of course, The Gulag Archipelago is especially intense, but this time I was myself quite moved and enthralled by Cancer Ward, and recalled my first reading of that text, some years ago in the 1974 Penguin version. (A more recent edition is available.) In many ways Cancer Ward is less political than much of Solzhenitsyn’s other work, but the exploration of human experience and psyche under conditions of totalitarianism is riveting, particularly of hope and fear. This isn’t light and cheery reading, but it’s well worth the effort. 

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