BODWELL’S BAKER’S DOZEN 2025
Why a “baker’s dozen” of books rather than the conventional “Top Ten” list? It’s simple: back in 2009 I couldn’t manage to cut three books I really admired from my list—or to be more precise, I didn’t want to cut three books just to fit some arbitrary constraint.
In addition, I immediately decided that even though most year-end roundups focus on titles published during the year the list was written, my lists would be less didactic and more of an authentic representation of a real reading life: We are both always behind and always discovering. Before 2016, for instance, I’d never read Penelope Fitzgerald’s perfect short novel The Bookshop. Even though the book was first published in 1978, I had to include it on my 2016 list. It was, after all, new to me.
Finally, my aim was never to synopsize or review the books on my list, as is often the norm for annual lists, but to contextualize the books within my life, to note how I’d come to read the book or why I’d been moved to include it on my list.
(PHOTO: The author of Bodwell’s Baker’s Dozen on book tour in Milan, Italy with Joan Baez.)
LET ME FINISH
Roger Angell
Longtime New Yorker fiction editor and bard of baseball Roger Angell has a gift for charming the reader in this wonderfully loose-limbed memoir. The son of Katharine White and the stepson of E. B. White, Angell admits his has been “a life sheltered by privilege and engrossing work, and shot through with good luck.” Yet, rather hold this truth jealously against him, we’re enamored. Angell, who died in 2022 at the age of 101, found his longevity gifted him complex years of reflection: “We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter.”
“If Andy White could be with us today he would not be with us today.”
(remarks at E.B. White’s funeral)
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006)
THE UNCOMMON READER
Alan Bennett
One doesn’t want to feel one is being hyperbolic, but one can’t resist calling this novella utterly captivating and the sort of thing that makes one smile and giggle a bit as one reads. What begins with the Queen of England chasing her errant corgis and stumbling upon a bookmobile parked near the kitchen delivery doors of Buckingham Palace turns into a mediation on the reading lifeas well as power, loneliness, expectations, assumptions, misperceptions, and…well, life in general. Bennett’s pointed wit is not barbed, but it is laser sharp.
“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”
(Faber & Faber and Profile Books, 2007)