Holidays are nothing but traditions, and traditions should not be broken or changed lightly. Since before this magazine took its current form and name, it has been a tradition of the Life & Arts section to publish a special Christmas Books issue each December, decked with readerly riches that, along with being edifying reviews, might also serve as Christmas gift recommendations. And usually, the tradition has been to include a symposium from the staff collecting book recommendations from the year gone by. Last year, however, I broke the thread, opting instead as editor to seize the space for myself to recommend just one. I had been stopped in my tracks by a short, astonishingly beautiful novel put out by a small publisher, Whole by Derek Updegraff. It was not done lightly, but it’s not often a book is better than merely very good. And at a time when the books that do get our shrinking shares of attention are the ones that large publishers are able to use marketing and online algorithms to promote, one of the values of a magazine is that it can connect readers with things of lasting value they wouldn’t otherwise have learned about.
Which is all preface to excuse why, this year, I am doing it once again. Let me explain. Some months ago, I became aware of a small, strange publisher based out of upstate New York called Tivoli Books. Tivoli started its operations earlier this year with just a few thousand dollars and specializes in releasing out-of-print literary titles that its editors deem to deserve classic status, though it releases original titles as well. It seemed iconoclastic, if a little arrogant, but I ordered one completely at random.
Reader, it deserved classic status. Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon is easily and by far the best thing to have been published in 2025. This may be, sad to say, because it was originally published in 1991, but no matter. On the surface, the book is a nonfiction, first-person narrative about author Jim Paul getting the random urge to construct a catapult and convincing his old friend Harry to help him scam a local San Francisco arts foundation into funding the two of them as they collect the materials necessary to actually carry out the lark. Under that layer, in chapters braided throughout the narrative, it is a history of the development of human technology as driven by the machines of war, featuring the mythohistory of Archimedes, an explanation of how steel smelting was discovered, a description of why America is so uniquely defensible, and the story of the making of the atom bomb. And beneath that layer is a meditation on the different ways to be a man, and on purpose in life, and on friendship itself, and on the most overlooked of the deep virtues, fun. With all that, you might think it gets tangled, or overserious, or overly intellectual. But it’s written in a stately, Hemingway-esque comic prose that is as clear as the view from a battlement on a sunny winter’s day.
I have now read the whole catalogue of Tivoli, and these are people to watch. They have made no bad editorial choices. But it’s Catapult that I now have a dozen copies of, sitting in a box beside me as I type this, ready to individually wrap and send to 12 people in my life. I can’t wait until after Christmas, when friends start calling, asking how they’d never heard of this woozy, warm, and weird masterpiece.
Nicholas Clairmont is the editor of the Life & Arts section of the Washington Examiner magazine.
