Lo! A Literary Email!

Ben's Books of the Year Part One

Merry Christmas team Lo!

Thanks for coming with us this year. 2025 has felt like (and there’s no more articulate way to put this) a year. How many days can we fit into these things? I feel like I’ve been receiving days with the absurd, wild urgency one of those machines that packages and spits out frankfurters. And yet here we are, still alive. Still, crucially, receiving emails.

With that in mind: it’s December, so I realise you don’t need another promotional email in your inbox. These days I seem to get automatically subscribed to the newsletters of businesses simply because I glimpse their logo on a building through the window of the bus. Unsubscribing from things feels like treating yourself for scabies. So, for once, I come to you NOT trying to sell you tickets!

Book Nook

Instead, I’ve put together some reading recommendations for Christmas. I know I said I wouldn’t recommend you things here. But I am a man of my word. And that word is: PSYCH!

I’m currently reading Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell - a biography of the Elizabethan poet John Donne - which is absolutely knocking me clean out. There is something so juicy and pleasurable about reading someone passionately go off about their favourite thing, and Rundell is obviously a Donne obsessive, and you can see the lyrical images of Donne’s writing leaking into her own. I consider winter prime time for historical fiction/non-fiction (not to plagiarise my therapist, but Ben does simply love to escape into the past) and this is pushing all my buttons.

I also just got back from Japan where I was on holiday, and I was keen to milk the trip for all it was worth, culturally-speaking. So in preparation for going I read a few bits of Japanese-adjacent literature - both fiction and non-fiction - which you can find here. I’ll be doing a more in-depth breakdown of those over on my Instagram in the next week or so, but the stand-out was definitely Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton - a essay collection/memoir about Barton’s life as a Japanese translator. It’s full of beautiful writing and perspicacious observations about how you can live between and try to bridge the gap between cultures, and how much meaning gets lost down the back of the socio-linguistic sofa. I also learnt that there’s a specific Japanese word for ‘post-nut clarity’ - kenjaitamu - that translates literally as ‘wise man time’. Fun.

Ben’s Books of the Year - Part 1

Ok I’m trialling something new here. Please forgive me if it seems miserly. But whilst you are all very welcome to a handful of my gift ideas, if you want the actual juice - my full list of the best books I read this year - you’re going to have to part with hard cash for it. You’ll notice the flaming paywall hovering below. It’s smoking hot to the touch.

As way of introduction, so that you have some idea what you’re getting into: it’s a list of about 17 books - split between this email and another one you can expect in a week or two - all of which I recommend extremely highly. There’s a few titles that I loved that I’ve left out: either I’ve rhapsodised about them already or, frankly, they’ve had quite enough attention thank you very much. Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico arrived early this year and I was impressed: a keenly-whittled shiv of a book, perfectly fashioned to fit right between your middle-class ribs, but it’s also everywhere now, in a way that feels very divorced from (or somehow ironic given) the content of the book - often being brandished in the bemittened hands of negroni-scented Hackney creatives, some of whom I’m sure haven’t quite realised it’s about them yet. I’ve already written you a lengthy and pretentious email about On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle - which I was quietly bowled over by. And in fact I was really very taken with Intermezzo by Sally Rooney - a real, proper novel from Roon (whose previous work I’ve been fond of, but a bit guiltily) with some rounded characters and a warm heart at its centre. I’ve got a lot respect for Roon - it’s rare for wildly famous people to have both a brain and a spine.

All of this is to say: I’ve tried to make my Books of the Year a bit more off-the-beaten-track. They are also not all new releases. One of my resolutions for 2025 was to actually read some of the aging books in my flat - because until you read them and convert them into something you enjoy and care about, books really are just a pile of dead tree you keep around your house for no reason. What a process of discovery that was! Some things were as great as I hoped and some things were, I don’t mind saying, achingly shit. (How galling to realise I’ve been peopling my room with shit, boring books all this time!) The great ones have made the list.

So - without further ado - cough up and dive in…