Brendan Stern

Hello, my friends.

Time passed. Elections happened. Authors accumulated. Before I knew it, 2025 was over.

Somewhere along the way, I nearly skipped my annual book review for the second year in a row.

Thankfully, I didn’t.

Writing this review reminded me why I read in the first place. It is a travel album of random, beautiful, occasionally life-changing conversations with brilliant people.

Some people take selfies to prove they were there. I write reviews.

What follows is a belated look back at five mostly non-fiction books that made the past two years more tolerable. Mostly because, for the first time, I am including a work of fiction.

(Hi, Robert. I admit it. Non-fiction does not have a monopoly on greatness.)

For each book, I offer a brief summary, a quotation that made me stare into a mysterious black dot in the bathtub grout, and a hot take worth arguing about.

Without further ado, here are some of the best books I have read in the past 734 days.

***

Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class
Rob Henderson

Henderson traces a life marked by foster care and elite institutions insulated from the consequences of their good intentions. Written without self-pity, the memoir illustrates how beliefs become dangerous when their costs are paid by someone else.

“When I told him about my life, the 87-year-old professor gently replied, ‘You were forged in a fire.’”

The most dangerous beliefs are held by those least affected by them.

Trust
Hernan Díaz

Díaz examines the nature of truth by crafting competing narratives, demonstrating how authority is constructed through storytelling.

“My job is about being right. Always. If I’m ever wrong, I must bend reality until it agrees with me.”

Power is control over story.

The Boys of Riverside: A Deaf Football Team and a Quest for Glory
Thomas Fuller

I began this book hesitant about a story about a deaf high school football team. Fuller quickly made that skepticism feel foolish. What he offers is not charity, but an insightful examination of personalities, community, and the conditions that make the pursuit of glory possible.

“Football is about muscle and speed… but the Cubs had epoxy, the common bond of deafness that gave them unity and mission.”

The Cubs’ real advantage was not deafness itself but citizenship.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Katherine Boo

With narrative depth and moral patience, Boo traces the lives of families in a Mumbai slum, revealing both the best and worst of humanity without sentimentalizing suffering or sermonizing solutions. Poverty and corruption frame the daily absurdities through which people improvise and endure.

“Much of what was said did not matter, and much of what mattered could not be said.”

Poverty and corruption turn morality from a question of virtue into a problem of navigation.

Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice
Rachel Kolb

Kolb treats language as a shared civic act, where voice and fluency function less as tools of self-expression than as markers of democratic belonging.

“Because this was exactly what I didn’t know: what it really meant for me to use my voice.”

Articulation is a civic skill. Kolb proves it by practicing it.

***

That is the list.

Time will pass. More elections will happen. More authors will accumulate. I will forget more than I should and remember just enough to argue about it later.

My favorite part of these reviews is what comes after. Readers email with recommendations. Friends raise the list over espresso to explain why my categorical opposition to fiction is wrong and possibly a moral failing. We sip and argue. Occasionally, I change my mind. Three of the books here came directly from those conversations. For that, I am grateful.

Here’s wishing you a good 2026. May it include fewer slogans, better arguments, and at least one book that changes your mind in an inconvenient way.

Thank you. And please, keep the recommendations coming.

Non-fiction or not.