best books I read in the first half of 2025
totally jumping on the midyear reading update trend (doing this now will make my life easier in january, so that’s nice)
toxic relationships
A Good Happy Girl by Marissa Higgins - Disturbing great story of a [romance?] between the daughter of criminally neglectful parents and an [abusive?kinky?] pair of wives
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey - An artist whose art is pretending to be someone else and developing deep emotional relationships with people she's conned for the sake of her art. Her widow, slowly discovering and understanding. I kept thinking I didn't love it while reading it, but then it really stuck with me afterwards and I’ve been craving a reread already.
critters and bodies
Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich - While I was around 5yo in Brooklyn, attending Yeshivah and watching casts of horseshoe crabs pile atop each other out by Sheepshead Bay, Bernd Heinrich was pissing on meat in the mountains so the coyotes wouldn't eat it before the ravens could get at it for him to study and having the time of his life
The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman
The Armor Building Formula: Bodybuilding For Real People by Dan John - I really just like the simplicity of his ABC program
historical fiction
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel - Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, absolutely gorgeous. I’ve been loving going through the trilogy with the Wolf Crawl substack slow read this year SO MUCH!
Milkman by Anna Burns - I typically dislike first person stream of consciousness, but here the narrator had such an interesting intense audhd-coded voice (so many asides and references and distractions, bad at identifying emotions and body feelings, bad at understanding social signals, others complain that her face conveys nothing and she's peculiar and reads while walking in her own little world, struggles to handle social interactions, feels strongly about reading literature only from the 19th century). Plot gets lost for a while, so in the middle for a bit it felt like a slog. But it was dense and beautiful and made me think, and I enjoyed being slow to understand the bias of her perceptions
Diamond Hill by Kit Fan - Gorgeous, gorgeous novel about the leadup to Hong Kong transition. Tons of religious references to Buddhism and the Old Testament, great depth of allusions while still having real characters, all about death and rebirth
big swooping prideful non-fiction
There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib Gorgeous memoir about basketball but also about thriving and making it and pride and the moment you feel you're suspended breathlessly in midair, poetic gorgeous swooping language
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe - space race, but also a certain kind of egotistical masculinity but also pride and an exploration of where control lived
the repercussions of trauma
Open City by Teju Cole - Midway through, I couldn't tell if I loved it or was bored. By the end, I felt it was one of the greatest works of literature I've ever read. It captures the way genocide cuts you off from yourself, your history, everything, and what it is to walk around the world while unable to really live in or connect with it.
Meshugah by Isaac Bashevis Singer - Holocaust survivors in poly relationships, the atrocities some committed in order to survive, what we do to survive, frankly unclear whether they even did survive, how to live with ourselves afterwards (we basically don't), so much lying, so much hating ourselves and each others, they killed us all after all maybe
just beautiful writing
In The Woods by Tana French - Mystery novel, but I loved it for its gorgeous rhythm and language, sentence by sentence. Loathsome protagonist, but the book wasn't confused about that.
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley - Exquisite short stories
The River Why by David James Duncan - Beautiful lyrical prose, wonderful voice, great intense depth of character and fishing details. More spiritual than religious, but it did get increasingly Christian-feeling in a way that started to bug me a bit by the end. (I also didn’t like the tacked-on-feeling romance subplot.) Made me nostalgic for Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
how to read
How Fiction Works by James Wood Lots of wonderful examples and explanations of how the language constructs and evokes the experience
How To Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster Good companion piece to How Fiction Works - that one was about the language, this one was about the allusions and intertextuality
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders Analysis and writing class based on a bunch of classic Russian short stories (included in the text)
growing up (troubled masculinity edition)
The Long Walk by Stephen King
The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana - Two [young men? boys?] get in a car and drive off, buy a gun, egg each other on, struggle with cultural and biological pressure around masculinity and oncoming adulthood
Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin - Religious awakening contextualized, sure, but I mostly read it also about how masculinity reacts when our animal freedom is curtailed. Do we try to control others out of fear, do we act out, do we rage, do we destroy ourselves, do we hide in meekness, do we hide in false strength, what?
growing up (and coming home)
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver - Parenting a found child, identity and finding home, interesting voices. Protagonist just does what she feels has to be done, somewhat from naivete, but mostly I think from a strong sense of self that carries her through one foot after the other as a person rooted in living in this aching world.
Listen To Your Sister by Neena Viel - Oldest sister, parentified, two younger brothers. They're trapped in her deadly ...alternate reality...? mostly by accident. Themes of Black masculinity in America, but also sibling love and resentment and care generally. So much love and rescuing between them all, too. I kept texting bits to my brothers.
An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn - Memoir of a professor of when his elderly father attended a class he was teaching on [his translation of] the Odyssey. Really lovely exploration of themes between their lives together and the epic.
The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn
parenting
Woodworking by Emily St. James - High school girl is trans mom to her teacher. [spoilers redacted] but also so many other layers about motherhood and living one's truth.
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver - Coming to terms with not having a safe shelter, and how to live and raise a child without anything solid to rely on. Gorgeous, heartbreaking. Like your adult child slowly and patiently explaining to you how to the ground has cracked beneath your feet.
other fiction
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman - Really fun series, feels like a cross between The Martian, Hitchhiker's Guide, and Battle of the Linguist Mages
Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein - obviously Oliver Twist fanfic, but just done tremendously well (also it made me want to rewatch the recent Artful Dodger show)
The Mercenary & the Mortician by Alexandra St Pierre - Look, I don’t know what to tell you, I just really dug this m/m romance between an abuse survivor groomed to be a killer and a mortician who can see ghosts
Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories by Herman Melville - (reread) Melville is always just so funny! You gotta parse through these long winding sentences (and why use a nickel word when a $20 word will do), but then I’m cracking up all the way through
honorable mentions
The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell - Protagonist donates genetic material to create clones for others to raise, ends up keeping and parenting one herself, and it's really all about how we struggle and fail as parents, super painful and relatable. But I had to skim over the boring shell story intro bits.
Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe - Young woman keeps accidental baby, ends up working on onlyfans, pro-wrestler dad, super cute and wholesome
The Mars House by Natasha Pulley - Started slow, but then there was a ton of linguistic deep nerdery that I absolutely loved. Bit heavy-handed with the multiple forms of power disparity, but not too much really
A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr - Absolutely rich and gorgeous. Recovery after the trauma of the war. Layers of misdirection - what we're looking for is not what we seem to be looking for, and it turns out we're looking for the same thing anyway, and it's a safe moment we can live in forever, but that moment can't possibly last, we have to let it help release us and then we release it. do we even know that we're dying? the old hell of god and demons, the modern hell of modern war. And also it's so funny! What a wry calm gentle narrator, I loved the voice.
How To Love Your Daughter by Hila Blum (translated by Daniella Zamir) - Protagonist was cut off by her daughter, and she doesn't get to meet her grandchildren. Clear portrait of the sort of subtle abuse of constant criticism and control by cutting your child down and limiting their sense of their own horizons
Lion by Sonya Walger - Daughter with a loving but often absent father who gives her many half-sisters, who brings her along but is never really just present with her. He clearly loves her as best he can, but his best isn't good enough, he's always wildly adrift. This one hurt to read - it’s easy to feel both a bit him, but also a bit her.
Total number of books read in 2025H1: 104
see also my annual best books lists from 2024 and earlier