One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2025 was to read more
nonfiction—SciFi and Fantasy is my usual beat, but I wanted to branch out by
going in the opposite direction. I didn’t get to read as many as I wanted, but
the ones I did I really enjoyed! Before I look for more nonfiction in 2026, I
thought I’d share some of 2025’s highlights:
The Art Thief by Michael Finkel details the crimes of
Stéphane Breitwieser, regarded as one of the greatest art thieves of all time,
who stole almost 250 works of art from 172 museums in France and Switzerland. I
was fascinated by the sheer boldness of Breitwieser’s heists—he often stole in
broad daylight, and even returned to some museums more than once. He also
didn’t sell what he stole, keeping it all in his attic bedroom. He claims to be
an art lover and romanticizes his exploits, but the book balances this
perspective with the real harm he does to the museums, the artwork, and his
mother and girlfriend who try to help him.
Brave the Wild River is an account of a 1930s scientific
expedition down the Colorado River, when botanists Elzada Clover and Lois
Jotter sought to catalogue the plant life of the Grand Canyon. By doing so they
also became the first women to survive the dangerous rapids, and Melissa
Sevigny’s matter-of-fact narration doesn’t undercut the dramatic challenges
they faced. There’s plenty of botanical name-dropping for plant enthusiasts,
but this survival thriller also manages to weave in the complex history of the
region, from Native American legends to the Dust Bowl.
Walter Isaacson’s biography of
Leonardo da Vinci was
a bit of an intimidating book to look at—even without its many pictures and
diagrams, it’s a hefty tome. As it turns out, you need all those pages to
describe a person as complex as Leonardo. Drawing from his frantic scribbling
across many journals, this book paints the artist and inventor as an eccentric
but obsessively driven student of the natural world. The way his scientific
curiosity informed his artistic sensibilities was just inspiring.
Pirate Hunters reads like an adventure movie in
Robert Kurson’s accessible style. He chronicles the efforts of divers John
Chatterson and John Mattera to find the wreck of a pirate ship off the coast of
the Dominican Republic. The divers’ search involves high-tech equipment and
historical research into the Golden Age of piracy and the ship’s captain,
Joseph Bannister, but the explanations feel like an organic part of the story.
All three men emerge as fascinating personalities reckoning with the costs of
pursuing greatness.
The Mythmakers was particularly fun for me as a comic
enthusiast, as well as a fan of its two subjects, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S.
Lewis. John Hendrix’s vibrant fantastical illustrations provide a vehicle for
the lives of these two fantasy greats and their lifelong friendship. In the
back of the book I found mini-chapters called “Portals” where concepts from
earlier chapters were expanded on with fully illustrated scenes. I know graphic
novels aren’t to everyone’s taste, but I thought this was a great example of
how the medium can combine art and language to tell a unique story.
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