NOTABLE READS OF 2025 - NON-FICTION
In non-fiction in 2025, I enveloped myself in darkness. Why? I want to know everything. And these were my most notable reads. Weirdly, they all felt esoterically connected as I stacked them, as if they were warnings about a vast spider web of evil that the world has blithely walked through, only to feel a sticky coating on its face. The devil is winning. But the game isn't over.
A lot of true crime here that I'd had sitting and gathering dust in the second row of a shelf. My research/secondary reading when writing 'No One Gets Out Alive' in 2012/13 was enormous, but I never got around to these books then. Some I've had on my shelves for 14 years. So glad I kept them. Much like Columbo, I weave around but get to everything eventually. Of these, the Gordon Burn and Ed Sanders were superb. Out of print, but Master's biography of Dahmer is extraordinary. Parts were hard to read.
Instead of mountains of the usual military history, I read a lot of politics and current affairs last year, with some new angles on the epochal ideological battle of our times. Politics is back on the streets everywhere and I found Andy Ngo's 'Unmasked' startling. I detest cancel culture and am relieved that Douglas Murray survived it. He's mental circuit training. Robert Greene and Machiavelli make it all make sense.
My favourite overall was probably Randall Sullivan's 'The Devil's Best Trick'. Couldn't put the damn book down and anything that got in my way of reading it was glared at.
The only light here comes in the form of the Stoics and Carlos Castenada's cosmic and trippy 'The Teachings of Don Juan'. Apparently, he made almost the entire memoir up; but that didn't prevent my enjoyment of the story at all.