Crafted with a plainspoken power, “The Last Picture Show” is a moving coming-of-age story in mid-century nowhere Texas.

Based in the fading oil town of Thalia, the book introduces us to two friends, Sonny and Duane, as the pair head into their senior year of high school. Living together in a boarding house due to complicated family histories, the two teens haunt the pool hall, hang at the late-night diner and work long hours at hard-labor jobs. 

They also look for romance, although Duane is further along that trajectory due to being in the backfield on the football team. He’s dating Jacy, a convertible-driving cutie whose parents are the richest folks in Thalia. Sonny has a crush on her too, while Jacy has her eyes on a fast-moving Wichita set. 

It’s thus that Larry McMurty launches us on a year of growth and humor, loss and uncertain milestones. Thalia is a sexier place than I anticipated. There are back-door visits and steamy truck cabs and long, frustrated negotiations about what’s “too far” for high-school sweethearts. (There’s also a disturbing scene with some high-school boys and a blind heifer that I dearly hope McMurty invented. “Thank goodness I didn’t live in this time or place,” was a common thought reading the book.)

The love affairs seem amped up for effect, but the limitations of the characters’ lives feel fully realized. McMurty’s characters are earthy and real; the plainspoken dialogue is true and deeply revealing. 

Sonny and Duane do their best to exceed the constraints of the town and humble backgrounds. But they’re so acclimated to the mire created by narrow-minded bullies like their Coach Popper that they don’t realize how deep they’re sunk into it.

There are heroes too, like Sam the Lion, who manages the pool hall and the titular movie theater, but they seem outnumbered and outgunned. Sonny in particular seems made for better things than what Thalia has to offer, but there’s little indication he’ll find it. 

In part, this book reminded me of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Passenger.” They both carry a similar sense of loss, chronicling adventures that turn out to be elegies, even if there are some high times along the way.

I love seeing everyone’s year-end reading lists, and I was also fortunate to read some great books in 2025! Here are some of my favorites:

“Vera, or Faith” by Gary Shtengyart

A near-future novel, this book nails the feeling of living in the present with humor and grace. Our title character is a precocious 10-year-old who’s struggling to figure out status and socializing while the world around her is low-key falling apart. An examination of family, politics, society and more, it’s short and nails the ending.

See My Full Review

“The Piano Lesson” by August Wilson

A short play anchored in ghosts, it explores the difficult line between honoring our family pasts and casting them off to build better futures. The characters and dialogue are excellent, and it avoids settling into easy answers.

“The Bean Trees” by Barbara Kingsolver

A beautiful early novel about a young woman who heads out west and picks up a foundling baby on the way. Settling in Tucson, Arizona, she discovers herself and a deeper understanding of family in the network she creates. Set in the 80s, the book engages topics we continue to grapple with today and is anchored with easy writing in a memorable voice.

“Motherland: A Jamaican Cookbook” by Melissa Thompson

I picked this up looking to expand my vegetarian palette and loved the blend of family stories and tasty recipes. The coco wheat buns are great, and I have enjoyed many a pigeon-pea stew here.

“Hirayasumi” by Keigo Shinzo

This manga series set in Tokyo follows a 20-something slacker living with his art-student cousin. It’s warm and humane, with excellent art and gentle storytelling that reminds me of classic Archie Double Digests (but better).

“The Heart in Winter” by Kevin Barry

Funny and vulgar, this Western-era novel introduces us to a star-crossed pair of Irish immigrants who fall hard for one another and end up trying to make a run from Montana to California. The characters and voice are memorable, even if Tom and Polly seem driven to self-destruction.

See My Full Review

“Popeye” by E.C. Segar

This classic comic-strip collection is bustling with life, as Popeye trades punches and malapropisms with anyone who crosses his path. Absurdly funny, it’s a wild read.

“State of Wonder” by Ann Patchett

This novel finds a strait-laced researcher setting off into the Amazon rainforest in search of a presumed-dead colleague. It’s often contrived, but it’s also heartfelt and memorable.

“Prince Valiant” by Hal Foster

Even 12 volumes in, this series continues to pair exquisite art with lively action and knowing dialogue. It’s nowhere near as square as Val’s haircut makes it look.

Funny and heartbreaking, “Vera, or Faith,” continues author Gary Shtenyngart’s streak of reflecting our present into an unsettling near future.

Set in New York not too far down the line, this book centers on the precocious 10-year-old in the title. Vera is smart but struggling with social cues and a high-stress home life.

Her dad, Igor (a sort-of Shtenyngart stand-in) is immature, drinks too much and is fixated on selling the magazine he runs to a “Rhodesian billionaire.” Igor’s marriage with Vera’s step-mom, Anne, is rocky. A “trad wife,” as Igor claims, Anne is struggling trying to keep the household running: she has to care for Vera, a son with Igor, and her husband too. She comes off as well-meaning but perpetually frazzled as she tries to keep Igor in line and encourage Vera to recognize status and social cues.

On top of her family drama, Vera is tasked with a big debate project at school, and she’s also preoccupied with intimations that her real mom, who she doesn’t know, might be sick. Society seems sick too, and it’s here that Shteyngart is so skillful with the near-dystopian details.

There are protests in the streets. Women traveling through red states are subject to pregnancy tracking at “Cycle Through” stations. Much of the political debate, though, centers on a proposed “five-thirds” amendment, which aims to give five-thirds of a vote to (white) Americans who can trace their ancestry to the Revolutionary War era. It’s a world of oligarchs and bad-faith political debate and a familiar sense of everything falling apart in the stupidest way possible.

Through it all, Vera is our anchor. Smart, energetic and unfiltered, she’s poised beyond her years but is still just a kid, even given the seismic issues at home and in the world beyond. It would be easy to render her a phony little super genius, but Shteyngart’s take is compulsively readable.

“Vera, or Faith” is a brief, brisk book, full of reversals and twists. AI devices play a big role, but the book steps away from tropes here too, establishing the technology as ubiquitous and flawed, just another dumb thing we all have to learn how to live with. His characters are the same, following their own interior logic as the book builds to an impeccable ending, one that makes a clear statement on who, exactly, qualifies as American.

A tale of love and binges and bounty hunters, “The Heart in Winter” is like a Cormac McCarthy novel delivered by the poet the next barstool over. 

Set in Montana mining territory in 1891, Kevin Barry’s book introduces us to Tom and Polly, two Irish immigrants who can’t say no to trouble, or each other. Seeing that Polly is a newlywed mail-order bride for a lieutenant in the mining company, this soon sees the pair on the run in the Montana wilderness, setting off with a half-assed plan to make it to California.

This journey blends humor and peril as the lovers amble on their way, mostly oblivious to the danger coming after them. Tom and Polly are likeable but also given to taking the day as it comes, without much foresight. And so they trade songs with French furriers and indulge themselves with magic mushrooms and well-stocked trapper’s cabins. You want to shout at them to hurry, to be serious, but that’s not in their nature…until circumstances oblige them to be. 

While Tom and Polly are good for a line and a laugh, they’re obviously shaped by the traumas of famine-era Ireland, old wounds that Barry mostly leaves hinted at. They’re memorable characters, and it’s wrenching to worry whether their fool’s luck can hold up.

A note if you’re starting the book and finding yourself turned off by the stream-of-consciousness binge in the first chapter: things pick up once Polly appears, so I’d give it a little more time if you’re considering quitting.

Quotes

“The deathhauntedness of the Irish brethren was frequently a complication in the working life of Sheriff Stephen Devane. Soaked in an ambience of death from the cradle, they believed themselves generally to be on the way out, and sooner rather than later, and thus could be inclined to put aside the niceties of the living realm.”

***

“Was this Jed character interferin with you, Polly?”

“So what? So now you’re jealous-minded on an old Scotch that’s dead and gone the best part of twenty years?”

“It’s the way my head turns. I’m sorry about it. It’s a sickness that I have.”

“Okay.”

“I mean try livin this bullshit from the inside out, Poll.”

***

“She lay in the darkness and sermonised against herself. If you are of the kind that throws yourself to the fates of the earth then you better watch out. If you are of the kind that takes notions in a life then you just got to accept all of that life’s capricious outcomes. If you are of the kind that throws all cares to the wind don’t go complainin when suddenly you are off your goddamn feet and spinning out forever in the crazy fucking wind. Now I have no longer the agency of my own affairs, Jesus, and that is a goddamn fact.”

Very excited to have a short story, “Are You Feeling Brave?,” published in the latest issue of Cleaver Magazine. It’s about a broke kid trying to tough his way through a situation that’s bigger than he should have to deal with.

Read the Story

The story’s an excerpt from my first novel, “Classmates.” That book’s not perfect, but I still think it has a worthwhile perspective on trying to hurdle the gap between free lunch and a stable career, whatever that means these days.