Taken by Surprise in 2025
What’s your favorite part of the reading experience? Is it meeting new characters to fall in love with? Roaming around a world unlike the one you know? Getting hooked by the plot and needing to know what happens next? I’ll tell you my favorite part: Being caught off-guard by just how much fun I end up having, how clever the author is, how astounding the wordsmithing.
In 2025, I’ve read a fair number of books—141 at the time of this writing—and three of them, in particular, surprised the heck out of me in the best way possible.
1. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
We’re starting in chronological order. Meaning I read this all the way back in January, and it’s not an exaggeration to say I’ve been thinking about it all year. I picked it up for my “Classics Project” (mentioned two posts ago!), and I was not feeling it the first 200 pages.
The book wastes no time acquainting you with the main character’s troubles.Yossarian, a bombardier in the U.S. Army Air Forces, is looking for a way—any way—to get out of flying more combat missions. It’s 1942, and he’s been traumatized by the forty-four missions he’s already flown and the deaths he’s witnessed. No one wants to be flying these missions; they’re practically death sentences. However, applying to not fly because it’s crazy and that, psychologically, you’re unfit to fly actually, in the eyes of Yossarian’s superiors, demonstrates one is not crazy and, therefore, fit to fly. Add onto it that the colonel in charge continually raises the number of missions his men must complete before they can go home because he’s determined that his unit will hold the record for most missions and be seen as the best and most courageous to the higher-ranking officers. It’s like a terrible, unwinnable game to Yossarian and his friends, and they’re stuck.
Antics and flashbacks unfold, from missions to what’s happening around base to days they’re able to take leave in Rome. Some of the stuff is downright nonsensical, so you have to keep in mind it’s a satire. The timeline of the story is also not straight-forward, which was part of my issue with the first half of the book. You spend a lot of time trying to settle into the style and being jerked around and wondering what it’s all amounting to.
If I wasn’t reading it specifically for my project, I 100% would have put it down. DNF’d it. I had to keep going, though, and this was one of those times hanging on to see the full picture was surprisingly rewarding.
A flip was switched in the back half. I was more grounded in the mechanics of the story, and the absurd goofiness was working for me. Without being fully aware of the process, I’d become emotionally invested in enough of the characters to be hit square in the honey-nut-feelios as their fates unfolded. There were a handful of moments that were like gut punches. Absolutely devastating.
Took me ten days to finish this book, and it’s been on my mind every day since. I remain so impressed by the rollercoaster ride Heller takes you on, dipping into all the emotions from frustration at not understanding what’s going on to feeling like the sun’s come out and cleared things up because you do know what he’s getting at to sympathy for the characters and amusement at their schemes.
In the edition I borrowed from the library, there was an introduction that made mention of how impactful Catch-22 was for soldiers, specifically during the Vietnam War. How they’d carry a copy around with them and feel like Heller really understood their plight. It makes sense because Heller himself was a bombardier in the Air Corps and flew 60 missions. What he wrote in his book surely must have been influenced by his experiences, and it’s clear he’s doing his best to portray the absurdities and humanities of war.
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2. The Geographer’s Map to Romance by India Holton
We’re fast-forwarding to May when I got my hands on a fresh 2025 publication. The Geographer’s Map to Romance came out in April and, months earlier, I’d put the e-book on hold. India Holton is an author I tend to keep an eye out for because I, typically, have good fun with her stories. They’re goofy, humorous, and full of low-stakes adventure. All of them have strong romantic threads just as they’re all playing around, to some degree, with magic. Her very first book, which came out in 2021, is The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels and features Victorian women who also happen to be like witchy pirates, and all the books that have followed since then have expounded on the piracy or introduced fantastical scholars in historical England. You’re not supposed to take these plots too seriously. You just sit back, give yourself over to the fictional world’s logic, and enjoy. Low-stakes, high fun.
I picked up this latest of Holton’s pieces at the perfect time to be entertained, too. Right before reading this, I’d been bored and unimpressed with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain) and Angela’s Ashes (McCourt). I needed a story that would hook me and keep my interest all the way through.
Now, if I’ve read everything else of Holton’s and already knew I liked her stuff, how could I be surprised by how much I enjoyed A Geographer’s Map to Romance? The thing is the highest rating I’d given her up to this point was a 3.5-stars. Some were just a solid 3-stars. Because they’d been good fun, but I hadn’t been blown away, you know? But I gave this one 5-stars and was delightfully surprised by how much laughter it evoked and how purely pleasurable of an experience it was. It was the kind of reading experience that reminded me why I love to read, and that’s the best.
So, to orient you: This was the story of geography professors, Elodie and Gabriel, who are called upon to respond to a magical, natural disaster in the Welsh countryside. Through some miscommunication, they must work together, and that’s an issue because they’re not on the best of terms with each other, having entered into a marriage of convenience that has been anything but. Of course, who’s to say the events happening around them won’t bring them back together?
I’m not someone who gravitates to romance novels, though I do appreciate a well-done romance, so I’m not super well-versed on that genre. Yet, I will say the dynamic explored here between Elodie and Gabriel was very sweet. I liked them as a couple, and, perhaps more importantly, I liked them as individual characters. I have beef with romances that have static characters outside of their relationship, and I don’t enjoy when relationship drama is the only thing the plot revolves around. Give us some other, real-world situation the characters are navigating, too, so we can get a fuller story and a better look at who they are.
The situation presented here was, yes, absolutely made-up based on the magical, fantastical elements of the storyworld, but that didn’t keep me from being invested and curious to see how—or if—our professors would be able to resolve it. If anything, the problem being so entirely fictional was good for my brain, a nice break from the more realistic things I tend to read.
If I could have more reads like this in 2026, that’d be great because this was refreshing and a reminder of what it’s like to have nothing but fun with a story.
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3. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
A large part of why I was surprised by this book was because I had abysmal expectations. If you’re not already aware, Atlas Shrugged is chunky—my edition clocked in at 1,168 pages—and has the reputation of being densely political and philosophical. Also, I had to read Rand’s Anthem in school and have no fond recollections of that story. But my darn “Classics Project” demanded I get around to Atlas Shrugged at some point.
The book’s synopsis didn’t do anything, either, to inspire or encourage me. It’s incredibly vague. Frustratingly vague, even. I started reading with the thought, “Well, I guess we’ll see what the big deal is with this thing” in the most resigned way.
From the jump, we’re acquainted with the transportation company that is Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, which was founded a while ago by a Taggart and is still owned and operated by one. Specifically, that’s Dagny Taggart. Despite not being the top boss in the company—that would be her useless brother—she is responsible for continuing to keep the company going through the economic depression America is in. These economic troubles run deep and have a wide reach, and it seems every business in the country is struggling—except for Rearden Steel.
Hank Rearden, a self-made man, has developed an amazing new steel alloy (called Rearden Metal) that’s set him ahead. Because Dagny and Hank are no-nonsense, savvy people, it seems they’ll be able to keep their respective companies afloat. If only they weren’t surrounded by idiots and fools who are simultaneously expecting Dagny and Hank to save the economy and passing legislation that makes recovery impossible. And, in the midst of the country’s woes, the supposedly mythical figure of John Galt is spoken of as the one person who can make things right. But does he even exist, and, if he does, is he willing to save a nation that’s governed by inept and corrupt authorities?
They should have asked me to write their synopsis. It’s not difficult at all to not be vague. Just sayin’.
Anyway, I picked this up beginning of August, and then August proceeded to be a really long, hard month, health-wise. I started the month sick with tonsillitis and ended the month with no tonsils at all thanks to a quickly scheduled surgery. As you can imagine, recovery was brutal, and it took longer than anticipated because a week in I had to have a second, emergency surgery.
So, that was August, and all through it, keeping me company, is this beast of a book, Atlas Shrugged. And do you know what? Not only did it read faster than I thought it would, I found myself really enjoying it.
Was it dense? Yes. Did it really get in the weeds with philosophy? Also yes. I completely understand why some readers don’t like this one or lend it their patience. I mean, at one point, Rand has a character give a 70-page monologue over a radio broadcast. Brevity was not in her interest, that’s for sure.
Something I like, though, and that you get with big books is that you’re asked to dwell. You must take your time. There’s much to sit with. Fortunately, I was a good audience for most of what was being conveyed in this piece. Where lighter, shorter books could be viewed as a snack or a quick meal, Atlas Shrugged was a mental feast. Every time I concluded a reading session, it felt like my brain had just been nourished with so much food for thought. So many ideas, whether I agreed with Rand’s take on them or otherwise, to mull over and draw my own conclusions from. So many elements and concepts that I so easily applied to life/society today. It served as an excellent prompt in the exercise of taking fiction and seeing how it reflects the real world back at you.
I fully expected this one to be a slog, a real chore. For some readers, I know it has been and will be. For me, however, it was a good companion as I convalesced throughout August. What speaks most to how much I enjoyed myself is that I’ve already decided Atlas Shrugged needs to be on my re-read list, and next time I’m annotating. Next time I’m going to see about recruiting a buddy because I know I’ll appreciate even more, if I can talk about it with someone.
I think the takeaway from this last surprise is this encouragement I’ll pass along to you: Don’t let the big books intimidate you. You just never know what you’ll find in their many pages, and maybe it’ll be a success story. Maybe you’ll thoroughly enjoy yourself.
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A beautiful thing about reading is that there’s so many books out there to be surprised and delighted by, and I’d love to know which 2025 reads have taken you by surprise. Let me know in the comments, and I’ll catch ya back here next week!