The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025

 

 Our annual Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening series will begin tomorrow.  It's been a difficult year for many of us. For me personally, although I didn't read less this year, I turned to many more rereads than in past years--including not only comfort reads but also a couple of door-stopper classics in translation that I last read many decades ago. War and Peace, which I hadn't read since my early adolescence, was astonishingly familiar to me (we're talking memories that are more than half a century old, here). Doctor Faustus, which I'd last read in the late 1980s, was apparently much less memorable. In my earlier readings I hadn't appreciated the attention their authors lavished on walk-on characters on the one hand, and the sharpness of the novels' political and social criticism on the other hand. Most striking, though, was how relevant I found them. What I didn't remember and couldn't have appreciated at age 12 was Tolstoy's scathing critique of the Great Man Theory of History, which I myself revolted against as a graduate student in History in the 1970s. My recent reread made me wish I'd read (or reread) War and Peace when I was a graduate student. Another reread that astonished me with its relevance was Machiavelli's Discourses. In many ways, that essay is more interesting than The Prince. But then if people were more familiar with The Discourses than with the Prince, the adjective Machiavellian would mean something entirely different than it does now. 

While 2025 has been a difficult year, it has also been a year of building resistance, both in individuals and in grassroots communities. And so, for many individuals, reading, viewing, and listening pleasures this year have been in pursuit of sustenance as well as escape. I've been saying for years that what we most lack in the US is political imagination. I've long been hoping this will change; I'd like to think that the apparent chaos of 2025 and the irrevocable rupture of "what is" may at last have stimulated the expansion of our collective political imagination. Various old guards may be longing for a return to what was, but a good many of us know that not only is that impossible, it is also actually undesirable.   

The Pleasures series always includes more than the pleasures offered by books, although books are the general focus of this blog. In past years the series has shown that reading, viewing, and listening pleasures vary widely. And that is what has made me keep this series going. I love the variety of tastes and practices it repeatedly reveals. This year's iteration will include posts by Andrea Hairston, Christopher Brown, Nisi Shawl, Sarah Tolmie, Eleanor Arnason, and others.

I hope you'll enjoy reading the pieces in this year's series as much as I do and that they'll swell the list of titles you want to read, view, and listen to yourself. We all know that the volume of books published is so tremendous that that really wonderful work often slips below one's personal radar.