Reading Through the Void: A 2025 Reckoning
Fiction, philosophy, and films that I loved and hated
In retrospect, 2025 was my very own Year of Rest and Relaxation—not by choice but by corporate evisceration. After six years of tenure in a toxic tech giant I’d mistakenly believed that long hours and objectively good, consistent performance in generating revenue for their trillion dollar ad-serving Moloch had earnt me some organisational loyalty. Everyone learns this lesson at least once: corporations don’t love you back.
I’d signed my life away in NDAs and non-competes which translated to six months of gardening leave and a gentle existential crisis in a hipster suburb of Melbourne where the cafés serve oat milk cortados and everyone claims to be in a band or working on a screenplay but probably works in tech too.
This list isn’t comprehensive—my Goodreads and Letterboxd discipline leave much to be desired. I wanted neat entries per book, but I’ll group authors and themes together because the mind doesn’t actually work in discrete units, and neither does reading when you’re unemployed and unmoored.
Fiction: Souls, Psychopaths, and the Tyranny of Place
Bruce Wagner - Amputation
Someone really should write the Melbourne equivalent of Wagner’s Hollywood grotesquerie about Dan Andrews’ catastrophic management of the pandemic. The challenge is that the plague years are ones no one cares to revisit, and imagining the people who orchestrated that catastrophe meeting violent and psychosexually destructive ends would fail what we might call the Wagnerian-Bechdel test of good satire: does this skewer power or just masturbate to revenge fantasy? Wagner’s genius is that he makes you complicit in the rot—you laugh at the Hollywood apocalypse even as you recognise yourself in its narcissism. His Los Angeles is a necropolis of aspirational branding where everyone is three bad meetings away from a psychotic break.
Jack Norman - Sleep Capricorn
If there’s any reason to read, it’s to encounter another sentient being’s experience of the world. Sleep Capricorn centres on intricate descriptions of quiet (and sometimes not-so-quiet) family desperation. When faced with suboptimal family situations, there are two options: stay and bear it, or leave and hope you can forget it all for something new, elsewhere. Jack’s writing describes the choice to stay—probably the healthier choice. His prose is elegant and unrushed, immediately recalling Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel.
This is alien territory for me, but remarkably generative alien territory. Wolfe and Norman make me think of the soul as a concept—the soul being those early childhood memories one makes while establishing a sense of home, language, cultural identity, and close kin. Norman’s preferred instrument is the microscope, lovingly rendering kitchen-sink drama firmly rooted in his native far north Queensland.
I’ve suspected for a long time that I don’t have a soul—if not ontologically, at least functionally. Growing up in the back of a Volvo with a mother who instilled in me that one has no obligation to bear the quiet desperation of home life, that even close family is nothing more than a business venture to dissolve if the return on investment fails to meet defined hurdle rates, leaves me somewhat certain I aborted the fetus of my nascent soul somewhere along the Via Aurelia. My preferred instrument is the telescope: I’m always looking hopefully toward the future, and big-picture thinking in the conceptual world of philosophy. I’m often quite rightly accused of skimping on details in scenes or foregoing dialogue altogether.
Norman, whose soul was solidly installed within his ribcage in a North Queensland replicant factory probably sometime in the late 20th century, knows where home is and who his people are. He uses the love that emanates from his being to depict them, warts and all. This love is unconditional, unhurried, and doesn’t believe any detail is unworthy of depiction. The generative chord this book struck: I was so moved by how different Norman’s soul was from mine that I rapidly wrote three prose poems on this Substack in rapid succession after reading his marvellous book. Thank you, Thingol, for this book, for your detailed review of mine, and for sparking those creative juices.
Lewis Woolston - The Everlasting and Other Stories
Lewis Woolston writes working-class Australian desperation that makes you realise most literary fiction is written by people who’ve never actually been desperate. The Bukowski type was always rare and over-mythologised and is in 2026 generally understood to be extinct (at least per the traditional publishing industry). This is a collection about junkies and alcoholics, fundamentalist childhoods and heroin spirals, the specific kind of regional Australian aimlessness that comes from growing up in beach-bum towns where the future feels like a foreign country you’ll never have the fare to visit.
Woolston doesn’t aestheticise collapse, and he doesn’t launder it into uplift. He renders desperation as a kind of weather system, less an exceptional crisis than a surrounding atmosphere, so that agency remains present without becoming mid(dle) class moral theatre for Guardian readers. Bad decisions arrive not as plot points but as survival logistics, as coping mechanisms that work until they don’t.
The title novella sits at the collection’s heart, and like the Manic Street Preachers song it references, will probably haunt you long after reading it. Luke escapes the suffocating grip of Jehovah’s Witness parents in dusty Merredin only to run headlong into heroin’s welcoming arms, a classic outcome for second-generation cult escapees. He doesn’t editorialise about cult life or recovery culture; he simply shows the lived reality of NA meetings, relapse, white-knuckled attempts at normality, and the exhausted achievement of making it through an ordinary day.
There’s a particular Australian masculinity in his prose: laconic, self-deprecating, uncomfortable with feelings but unable to escape them, which reminds me why I love this country’s strange and inadvertently poetic inhabitants. Reading Woolston together with Norman is instructive: both write about staying in difficult circumstances, but where Norman writes from inside a soul that knows where home is, Woolston writes from the perspective of people who never had a home to begin with, just increasingly unstable situations they’re trying to escape or endure. It’s the telescope versus microscope distinction again, except Woolston’s telescope is pointed at a horizon that keeps receding.
Audrey Szasz - Teleplasm
Almost every year, Audrey Szasz releases a new novel. Every year, I buy a pricey hardcover expecting her schtick to get repetitive. Every year, I’m impressed. She’s built a perverse edifice and keeps adding rooms and subterranean passages—a mythos that accretes rather than dilutes. A common complaint I have with many indie authors and presses is length. I believe every chapter in a novel needs to earn its place or be cut during editing; no one enjoys the feeling of reading through filler. I’ve completely lost interest in some indie authors over this (B.R. Yeager, more on him later). Szasz has the discipline to be both prolific and ruthlessly edited, which is the rarest combination in contemporary fiction.
Evelyn Waugh & Philip Roth
What do a Catholic aristocrat and an American Jew have in common? To me, they’re both comfort reads—not in the Hallmark movie sense, but in the way certain books feel like coming home to a dysfunctional family you understand. The hypersexual, hypereducated, extremely Jewish Roth appeals to my Italian side. There’s an isomorphism between Jewish and Italian family dynamics that makes me view Jewish culture as something different yet adjacent: overbearing hypochondriac maternal figures, worries about virility and status, an extended family always too opinionated about their kin and too quick to offer unwanted advice, the supreme importance of everyday comedy in the form of the bit or the wisecrack.
What about Waugh? There’s something deeply appealing about being born aristocratic, having some kind of income as a given, and a whole class of your peers just spending time hanging out at each other’s men’s clubs. Even World War II for these people was mostly about finding a “cool” posting that entailed a bit of bravery but also good accommodation, aged sherry, and a smoking room. Waugh’s characters treat global catastrophe as an inconvenience to their social calendar, which is either deeply offensive or deeply honest depending on your class position.
Gary Shipley - Bright Stupid Confetti, So Beautiful and Elastic, Terminal Park, Stabfrenzy
I obsessively consumed most of Shipley’s catalog this year, and it’s a pleasure to watch a writer develop style and themes across forms—philosophy book one year, novel the next, then prose poetry. I deeply respect someone who refuses to stay in their lane, who treats genre boundaries as bureaucratic obstacles rather than sacred divisions.
I absolutely hated the snobbery of Terminal Park—any story premised on anxiety over overpopulation invariably reeks of misanthropic pessimism about the state of the world—until I spent New Year’s Eve in Koh Samui with drunk British lumpenproles, a night so ridiculous I wrote a vicious short story on it in the early hours of 2026. I had to grudgingly grant that Shipley has a point about mass tourism or the lumpen masses.
I continue to pull out Stabfrenzy to read random chapters. It’s an artist’s bible, especially if continental philosophy is your jam (if it isn’t yet, you have some reading to do), and a useful corrective to the ever-present tendency to veer into excessive sentimentality. In my mind, there’s a dialectical synthesis happening between Richard Siken and Shipley. In Siken: personal biography, catastrophes in families, loves, and health that reorient and define a life. In Shipley: a harsher, colder philosopher’s appraisal of not just personal tragedy but the tragedy of history, time, and death—and Shipley’s drive to go beyond the personal via acts of creation.
Siken is a kind mommy who gives you space to feel and describe your pain. Shipley is a disciplinarian daddy who says toughen up buttercup, suffering is universal and eternal—it’s what you create despite it that counts. Coldness isn’t the absence of feeling so much as the desire to bring discipline to the chaos of emotions.
So Beautiful and Elastic is Shipley’s most traditional novel so far, breathing life into flesh-and-blood characters while balancing plot elements with the philosophical preoccupations he continues to obsess over. It’s proof that experimental writers can write “straight” fiction when they choose to—they just usually find it boring.
Richard Siken - I Do Know Some Things
Siken broke everyone’s heart with Crush, and continues to do so with this one. More lyrical essay than prose poetry, Siken continues to hit the mark as the most ferocious writer on the implications of falling in love. Here’s a passage from “True Love”:
I don’t know how to say it, so I’ll say this: Something bright, then holes. Beauty pours in. Open your heart then. And if you find yourself caught under the sycamore trees in a sudden rain, drenched and thunderstruck—which would be fine—made breathless by the simplest thing, say yes. Yes, anything you. Love, love. It isn’t a word, it’s the sound a pebble makes. Some swerve to pass, some drink to win, some watch while the man strays, singing, into the ditch. Be glad that you have something to say, someone to say it to, and that you can say it until you are all worn out.
Reading Siken is like pressing on a bruise: you know it will hurt but you can’t stop yourself.
Udith Dematagoda - Agonist
Good writers transcend online political factionalism. For third-culture kids and writers from multiethnic backgrounds, seeing the not the relativity of truth, but the truth of relativity comes as naturally as breathing. I don’t know anything about Udith Dematagoda’s background, but if I was to point to a contemporary example of this kind of writing, I’d immediately go running for my dog-eared and twice-reread copy of Agonist. In an era where everyone is expected to perform their politics like a TikTok dance, Dematagoda writes characters trapped in their algorithmic echo chambers who contradict themselves without the author stepping in to adjudicate who’s right. It’s novelistic intelligence at its finest.
Kieran Saint Leonard - A Muse
This is my favourite book of 2025 by Kieran Saint Leonard. It takes time to get into for two reasons: first, you can immediately tell the author is an insufferably affected goth muso snob or aspires to be one; second, the quality of prose improves over the course of the book, which is actually delightful to witness. My view is that if you’re going to be a snob, you’d better produce high-quality work befitting your affectations. Saint Leonard (God, what a fucking name) takes some time get over his showman affectations and “random thesaurus word” addiction, but once he gets into his groove, he does this magisterially.
Maybe he isn’t just pretentious—perhaps he also takes his craft extremely seriously, which makes me take him seriously. I very much enjoyed everything about the book, especially the sense of place across multiple locations and of course the muses that the main character seems adroitly skilled at ensnaring while his ball-and-chain fiancée languishes at home, referred to solely as “the fiancée”—unnamed, unvoiced, a ghost haunting the narrative. It’s hardly a spoiler that this mysterious individual ceases to be his ball and chain once he falls under the spell of a rich West Coast girl with a penchant for magic mushrooms and theatrical productions. This is a story about the occult that doesn’t suck, it sings, it dances, it cavorts, it worships at the altar of beautiful women, women you would do anything for because being in control is a foreclosed path in the presence of such beauty.
One bit of mildly nitpicky feedback to Mr. Leonard: daughters of West Coast old money don’t wear Chanel all the time. That’s (mostly Asian) new money signalling. Old money wears things you’ve never heard of or ratty sweaters from 1987 that cost more than a month’s rent.
Ottessa Moshfegh - My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Just when you thought the genre of disaffected NYC trust-fund babies was done to death, a book comes around with a Hermès-branded defibrillator and injects a few more months of life into this well-established genre. Why are we all so enamoured with New York? How can we steal the elements of this metropolis’s self-mythologising and build new literary hubs elsewhere? Melbourne could do this, but we’re too busy arguing about café culture and real estate prices and chasing tail and we’re too goddam Canadian-tier of insipid, mildly catty, and oh so passively aggressively ‘nice’.
The novel’s protagonist attempts to sleep through a year of her life using an increasingly dangerous cocktail of prescription medications, and somehow Ottessa Moshfegh makes this compelling rather than merely depressing. The book is funny in that particularly cruel way where you’re laughing at someone’s descent while recognising your own capacity for the same self-destruction.
Tom Wolfe - The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
This was a hate-read and research read. I have real reasons for hating the counterculture: I hate that the Vietnam War farce legitimised this self-indulgent subculture of spoiled rich kids and now seventy years later this “counterculture” has unsurprisingly become today’s progressive orthodoxy as well as has birthed California Ideology as a model of ‘innovation’ (would you like luxury beliefs with your Chinese-manufactured tech gadgetry?).
I won’t go full soapbox here, but keep in mind that neither the hedonic hippies nor the ones yowling about equality and justice (the hipster left) are the good guys if you look just a little closer. You can read this and follow it up with the Facebook exposé (Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, reviewed below) and see the continuity: from Ken Kesey’s bus full of acid-heads to Mark Zuckerberg’s platform full of dopamine addicts, it’s the same Californian conviction that consciousness alteration equals liberation, it’s the same extremely privileged Careless People whose ambition and entertainment cares nothing about the trail of destruction left in its wake
B.R. Yeager - Negative Space
I tried to like this author, but I don’t like his themes, and Negative Space felt like a very mid horror grind to read. Neglected teenagers having sex and taking drugs, interspersed with inexplicable deaths and internet forums isn’t enough to keep me interested even with the promise of a dark occult payoff.
I find the trope of the damned teenager voyeuristic and conservative in the wrong kind of way (Kids, Euphoria, etc.). The only thing worse than this topic for me are incels online, which is why I could barely read two pages of Amygdalatropolis. There’s a very political reason why there’s too much focus on Western boys getting deranged and radicalised online while failing to point out that everyone is getting radicalised and isolated due to the internet. People of other genders, religions, and political orientations are getting radicalised in all directions of the political spectrum, and everyone’s lonely. Picking one gender and one online political faction immediately bores me—it’s a failure of the imagination disguised as social commentary, a way being ‘edgy’ that’s within the safe Overton window of acceptable transgression. Udith Dematagoda does it right; see above.
Marquis de Sade - Gothic Tales
I really hated this. You can tell aristocrats had too much time on their hands, and sadly Instagram, private jets, and the infinite scroll hadn’t yet been invented for them to spend their time in equally masturbatory pursuits. Give me Bataille’s theoretical perversion over de Sade’s aristocratic sadism any day.
Films: Reactionaries, Rivalries, and Road Movies
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
I love weird, original conservatives and reactionaries. They’re much more interesting than your dime-a-dozen garden-variety urban hipster performative “I support the current thing” types. I’ll be honest: I find Mishima’s life much more interesting than his books, and this film does him justice by fusing his public, private, and literary personas into something that feels coherent even though the man was clearly insane (or maybe saner than most of us). Mishima’s aestheticised suicide—seppuku performed after a failed coup attempt—is the kind of commitment to the bit that you have to respect even if you find the politics a bit monomaniacal.
Luca Guadagnino - A Bigger Splash
Simply Guadagnino’s best film. Period. Everyone talks about Call Me By Your Name, but A Bigger Splash is where his talents for depicting beautiful people destroying each other in beautiful locations reaches its apex. Tilda Swinton plays a rock star who’s recovering from throat surgery and can’t speak, Ralph Fiennes plays her ex-lover who shows up uninvited with his daughter, and everything unravels with the slow inevitability of a Greek tragedy set to a Stones soundtrack. It’s about what happens when you let the past back into your carefully curated present, and it never makes the mistake of being sympathetic to anyone.
Thomas Vinterberg - The Celebration
A Dogme 95 film about a family dynasty and the denouement of the father’s sex crimes against his children, shot all in one fateful night. The handheld camera work and natural lighting give everything a documentary immediacy that makes the horror hit harder. It has a hilarious final line that you will never forget, precisely because it arrives after two hours of sustained psychological brutality. This is what cinema can do that novels can’t: trap you in real-time with people as their social masks disintegrate.
Emir Kusturica - Arizona Dream
I rediscovered this gem, a genre I love: non-Americans making films set in America. The aesthetic and characters don’t make perfect sense, which is exactly the point—Kusturica sees America as a fever dream, and he’s not wrong. There’s a spectacular mother-daughter-Johnny Depp love triangle that of course ends disastrously (when don’t they?). Depp plays an Inuit who works tagging fish in New York and gets dragged to Arizona by his uncle to sell Cadillacs. The film is pure magical realism dropped into the American Southwest, and it works precisely because Kusturica doesn’t try to make it make sense.
Wim Wenders - Paris, Texas
On the theme of non-Americans shooting films in America. From this film I discovered the cat-man archetype: Harry Dean Stanton’s character as an elusive cat-man. “Capturing” this cat-man by his canine-coded brother was a feat at the beginning of the film. I thought the film would be a surrealist road trip featuring Cat-man, the coy taciturn man who runs places without a reason to do so. It didn’t turn out that way, but let me enjoy my illusions. The film is actually about a man trying to reconstruct a family he destroyed, and it’s almost unbearably sad. I wrote a prose poem featuring a cat-man titled “Orgy at the Pachinko Parlour,” which you can read in my book Like You Have a Choice.
Philosophy/Non-Fiction: Pop, Pessimism, and Platform Capitalism
Agnes Gayraud - Dialectic of Pop
What exactly defines pop music? Does pop music count as art? How does one evaluate its artistic merits? Hilariously, can Adorno’s work on art—and his infamous hatred of pop or almost any kind of easy-consumption art with popular appeal—be leveraged in this task? Adorno was so fucking tedious, but Gayraud takes his theoretical framework and uses it against him, showing how pop music’s very accessibility contains its own critical intelligence.
I’m neither a poptimist nor a dour Frankfurt School Marxist. I love pop while also being an incurable snob about anything that gets too popular or uses too much Auto-Tune, so this book was perfect. Gayraud argues that the tension between art and commerce in pop music isn’t a corruption of artistic purity but the condition of possibility for pop’s specific aesthetic achievements. She’s right, and it’s refreshing to read someone who takes pop seriously without either celebrating it uncritically or dismissing it as cultural degradation.
Gary J. Shipley - On the Verge of Nothing: Pessimism’s Impossible Beyond
An invigorating tour through philosophical pessimism and the question it refuses to drop: how to keep living without smuggling optimism back in through a side door. Shipley largely takes pessimism’s core premise as given—suffering as ineradicable, nonexistence as “better” in the abstract—then asks what kinds of practices can inhabit that bleak clarity without collapsing into either sentimentality or melodrama.
The book’s engine is its search for what Shipley calls “post-pessimism”: not a refutation of pessimism but a way of moving through its dead end. In the introduction, he takes care to separate pessimism from nihilism and to treat suicide as a non-obligatory response—pessimism can be “true” without becoming a moral ultimatum. This is crucial: most pessimistic philosophy either collapses into aesthetic posturing or becomes an argument for antinatalism and self-erasure. Shipley is after something more difficult—how to live with clear eyes about the horror of existence without pretending that clarity provides an exit strategy.
Sarah Wynn-Williams - Careless People
Big tech isn’t nefarious; it’s just careless, which is probably worse. You will find few big-tech exposés because they pay their employees so well, make them sign NDAs and non-competes and employment contracts with non-disparagement clauses, and have virtually infinite legal resources, so even the most disgruntled former employee knows better than to go public. Sarah Wynn Williams was courageous enough to write this, and it’s a damning indictment of Meta
Remember at the height of corporate DEI inanity in the mid-2010s there shone Sheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In? Read this and realise that corporate sociopathy, workplace sexual harassment, and entitled careless incompetence aren’t limited to any single gender. Sandberg’s feminism was always just a more efficient way to do capitalism—the point wasn’t to liberate women but to create a more diverse executive class that could exploit workers with equal opportunity.
The through line from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to Careless People is clear: California’s tech aristocracy is just the counterculture that won, replacing “tune in, drop out” with “move fast and break things”. Same solipsism, same conviction that consciousness alteration (pharmacological or digital) equals liberation, same indifference to collateral damage. Zuckerberg’s metaverse is Ken Kesey’s bus with better funding.
Coda
This wasn’t the year I planned, but it was the year I needed. Unemployment is a kind of death—of routine, of identity, of the comforting lie that your labor matters to anyone but yourself. Reading through it felt less like escape and more like stockpiling weapons for whatever comes next. Every book here taught me something about how to survive the void: Norman showed me what it looks like to have a correctly-installed soul unit and how not write every kitchen sink family drama as Italian sex comedy; Shipley how to think without hope; Siken how to feel without flinching; Saint Leonard how to turn affectation and horniness into art. I’ve read my way through the crisis, and that’s not nothing.
