the best books I read in 2025
not even gonna try to keep this one short, these lists are mostly tools for future me thinking about what to recommend to people anyways (ps it subsumes & supersedes my midyear list, ofc)
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
You Weren’t Meant To Be Human by Andrew Joseph White - dunno how to classify this viscerally upsetting queer autistic body horror forced pregnancy novel full of bugs & grubs & abuse, but I was very into it
The Bonehunter’s Revenge by David Rains - nonfiction, history of famed bitchy paleontologists Marsh and Cope
critters and bodies
Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich - While I was around 5yo in Brooklyn, attending Yeshivah & 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 & having the time of his life
The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman
The Armor Building Formula: Bodybuilding For Real People by Dan John
9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes by Dave MacLeod
historical fiction
Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel - Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, absolutely gorgeous. devoured along with the Wolf Crawl substack slow read
Milkman by Anna Burns - I typically dislike first person stream of consciousness, but here the narrator had such an interesting intense audhd-coded voice. Plot gets lost for a while, so in the middle for a bit it felt like a slog. But it was dense & beautiful & 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, death and rebirth
Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon - Hilarious, grotesque, but also strangely sincere story of some dudes encountering the horror of the defeated Athenian invaders left to starve imprisoned in a Syracusan quarry & deciding- hey let’s feed them in exchange for getting them to perform in a production of Euripides’s Medea
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 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
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
how to read
How Fiction Works by James Wood - Lots of wonderful examples and explanations of how sentence-by-sentence language constructs & evokes an experience
How To Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster - Good companion piece to the above, more about 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)
toxic (& desperately sad) masculinity
Incel by ARX-Han - Horrifying. Misogyny, racism, self-loathing. Couldn’t tear myself away. I wrote more about it here.
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte - also a whole incel thing, also both upsetting & wonderfully written.
it’s hard to think about the above without rereading the great Sorrows of Young Werther by J.W. von Goethe (Boylan translation)
Fathers and Children by Ivan Turgenev (Slater translation) - wherein Arkady brings his nihilist buddy Bazarov to his parents’ house after graduation
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?
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger - worth the reread, if you haven’t picked it up since elementary school
growing up (and coming home)
Listen To Your Sister by Neena Viel - Younger brothers are trapped in parentified big sis’s deadly ...alternate reality...?, mostly by accident. Black masculinity in America. So much love & resentment & rescuing & care between them all. I kept texting bits to my younger brothers.
Plum by Andy Anderegg - & now from the now-adult non-parentified younger sister’s retrospective pov. Abusive parents. Sees big brother as ally when very young, but then spends most of her childhood blaming him for everything while not realizing that he’s still shielding her. He gets out, long before she can. Very jarring to see from the left behind perspective instead of the survivor’s guilt one.
An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn - Professor’s memoir of when his elderly father attended a class he taught on [his translation of] the Odyssey (which is so much about fathers and sons).
The Odyssey by Homer (Mendelsohn translation)
The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay - Bangalorean girl goes to Kashmir looking for the salesman her mother had an emotional affair with. Dangerous naiveté & misunderstandings. I’d love to reread this with a book club where someone could really walk me through more of the political & cultural context.
parenting
Woodworking by Emily St. James - High school girl is trans mom to her teacher. Many forms of motherhood & 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 the ground has already cracked beneath your feet
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver - Narrator is the reluctant but devoted mother of a school shooter, fearing her dislike of her son caused him to commit his crimes. Society of course agrees, but we see what looks like an unlikeable toxic kid from birth, (though of course we’re always seeing him through her eyes). Is there such a thing as a bad kid? Is maternal ambivalence normal or dangerous? How responsible is a parent for the actions of their child?
Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt - I think I maybe liked this for the wrong reason? Older woman’s daughter is an addict so she raises her granddaughter. The grief of loving someone who tends towards unreliable & even cruel, the different mother/daughter relationships’ complexity, yes, great. But I actually spent a lot of my time while reading this trying to figure out if the narrator was reliable or pathological. I think the consensus is reliable? But honestly I’m tempted to reread and puzzle over it more.
I Am Clarence by Elaine Kraf - Mother with depression/? solo parenting her neurodivergent son, dating guys who are drawn to her / repelled by the child / and sometimes by her / want to save her / and run from her, & she’s losing herself & regretful maybe & devoted & at peace or maybe forcing herself to find peace but then getting institutionalized sometimes, a total [loving] mess
some other classics & classic-adjacents i guess
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (Maude translation) - This book was the spinal column on which I hung my year. Fucking glorious, thank you Simon Haisell
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark - “John Stuart Mill used to rise at dawn to learn Greek at the age of five, and what John Stuart Mill could do as an infant at dawn, I too can do on a Saturday afternoon in my prime.” (protagonist inspires but also manipulates/uses/misguides the girls she teaches)
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons - Young woman moves to distant relatives’ farm, manipulates them but with …good? let’s say, win/win… intent. Absolutely hilariously, tight & funny like Wodehouse.
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.
Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev by Maxim Gorky
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman
other fiction
Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman - 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 (made me want to rewatch the Artful Dodger)
Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories by Herman Melville - (reread) Melville is hilarious, if you’re into parsing through these long winding sentences (and why use a nickel word when a $20 word will do)
In The Woods by Tana French - Mystery novel with gorgeous rhythm and language, sentence by sentence. Loathsome protagonist, but the book wasn’t confused about that.
exquisite short story collections
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
The World of a Few Minutes Ago & Wanting Only To Be Heard by Jack Driscoll
honorable mentions
classics
Middlemarch by George Eliot - I loved the sentences. I loved the characters. I loved the ideas. (I did not love the story. What a weird near miss.)
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy - wonderfully wild situation
Howard’s End by E.M. Forster - characters and the class explorations
parenting
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
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 past all the boring shell story bits.
Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe - Young woman keeps accidental baby, ends up working on onlyfans, pro-wrestler dad, super cute & wholesome
Sunward by William Alexander - a planetary courier fosters baby bots. Found family, cozy but with plot
The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association by Caitlin Rozakisebook - Totally here for a middle-aged mom now parenting a newly-werewolf (via assault) kid who now has to attend magical school.
other fiction
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, which took me out of the story from time to time (that is our reality, but I want fiction to explore it more via story than lecture - this wasn’t too egregious though)
Endling by Maria Reva - a snail-breeding scientist searches for a mate for her lefty while working on Bachelor-esque tv show filmed in Ukraine during its invasion by Russia
The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Currie - Drug-dealing crime boss old lady. Lots of ego and pride and self-destructive tendencies. How we betray each other and show up for each other
The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers - first third or so felt like this was gonna be a lifetime fav classic, then it started to drag on unsatisfyingly
The Mercenary & the Mortician by Alexandra St Pierre - I dunno, I just really dug this m/m romance between an abuse survivor groomed to be a killer & a mortician who can see ghosts
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.
Total number of books read in 2025: 185
see also my annual best books lists from 2024 and earlier