2025 In Review (Books, Mostly)
An incredibly personal note, 20 book reviews, and more
In summary and in review, 2025 was not a very good year. To be graphic and personal, in the early months of 2025, after years of invasive procedures and money, I had a last-ditch, failed round of IVF. It’s been hard to talk about and, quite frankly, I haven’t wanted to. Even though I’m putting this in writing, in public, I still don’t.1
This made it a year of reorienting how I think of the rest of my life. I had spent many years thinking—and telling people!—I was ambivalent about having children, but there is a difference between abstraction and reality, the difference between being a “maybe” to attend a party and realizing you weren’t invited in the first place. I haven’t wanted to talk about it because it really is a lot like not getting that invite—what is there to say? I didn’t go.
When I looked for books about not having children, they were divided into two camps: fertility strategies on one side and declarations of defiance, child-free by choice on the other. There is not a lot of literature on trying and failing, on spending years of your life, countless early-morning visits, lots of money, and enough blood tests to develop scar tissue inside your vein. Failure is desperate, the type of thing we innately want to look away from. We love a winner. There’s glory in refusing to enter the race or in working hard and getting to the end on your own time, and then there’s the sucking absence of neither, of failure that carves a hole right through the middle of you and drags you to another side.
I’m writing about it at all because it felt so rare to see anyone outside of niche Reddit forums admit to waiting, wanting, and moving on.
So. That was how my year went. And all through it, life continued. I’m in good health, I saw new things and old friends, and I read a lot of really good books. Last year, I defined the best books I read as ones that felt luminous: novels that reached out from the page and struck my nervous system like a cord being plucked on a harp. I read more books that felt like that this year—maybe because I was a more tightly strung harp overall.
As of right now, I have read around 50 books.2 All of the books are tracked on Goodreads and in the back of my planner (for the stationary heads, that is a Hobonichi Weeks).
Books Published in 2025
Of those 50, 14 were freshly published this year. I liked most of them, although none of them ascended into the best of the year. I have organized them based on my friend Kara’s eternally relevant categorization of media: either interesting, compelling, or more rarely, both at once. Within each category, I have also ranked them, profoundly subjectively and without any attempt to measure their artistic merit. It was fun to revisit and reevaluate how external factors—especially how much I talked or thought about each work—impact my thoughts now.
Good - Interesting & Compelling
Flesh - David Szalay, a sparse anti-hero’s journey; masculinity, class, a total divorce between self and body. I had many interesting conversations about this book, and I think it deserved its Booker win for its singular style and cumulative effect.
Stag Dance - Torrey Peters, short stories about gender and desire. This had a 50/50 hit rate amongst friends, but Peters writes at exactly the pace of my own attention span, and she’s not afraid of discomfort in a specific voice to which I’m drawn.
Flashlight - Susan Choi, a family epic spanning continents. I said at the time that it was one of my biggest disappointments—it did not stick the landing—but Choi’s pacing, her prose, and her characters stood the test of time enough to lift it out of true disappointments.
Good - Interesting
On the Calculation of Volume III - Solvej Balle, review to come; I liked it and was intrigued by where it’s going, but I didn’t love it as much as I’d loved the first two (see below!)
The Mobius Book - Catherine Lacey, half short story, half memoir about toxic love (romantic, religious). I enjoyed the writing, but I’ve already forgotten the finer details.
Good and Evil and Other Stories - Samanta Schweblin, a short story collection that’s just on the edge of speculative fiction. Interesting ideas, and some stories have lasted longer than others. Hard to look at a button battery the same.
Cautery - Lucia Lijtmaer, another split book: 21st century womanhood juxtaposed against the 17th century, themes of plus ça change. Enjoyable and truly inventive, but the resonance dimmed over time.
Good - Compelling
Liquid - Mariam Rahmani, another book of juxtapositions: love life in LA, family bonds in Tehran. This book was elevated by reading several books with similar ideas and feeling like this did it the best.
O Sinners! - Nicole Cuffy, a journalist infiltrates a cult. A disjointed book that was improved by the fact that it made for a lot of interesting conversation among friends.
Heart the Lover - Lily King (review to come), young love’s first blush and long shadow, with a very Gilmore Girls-ian tone to it, meant both complimentary and derogatory.
Best Woman - Rose Dommu, a trans woman woos her childhood crush at her brother’s wedding. Fun shenanigans, modest stakes.
Ruins - Amy Taylor, a couple’s Greek vacation and relationship goes wrong, a beach read that goes down easy but doesn’t leave a strong taste.
Disappointments
Audition - Katie Kitamura, an actress in play rehearsals negotiates changing interpersonal relationships. High expectations made this my most disappointing of the year—it’s by no means bad, but it just did not come together.
Pick a Colour - Souvankham Thammavongsa, a day in the life of a nail salon owner. In a weird way, the diametric opposite of Flesh (above), minimalism without the same cumulation.
Best Reads of the Year
I read a lot of books that I would highly recommend, but since I must be selective (and I must!), I have narrowed it down to a top five: my favourite books of the year felt luminous and indelible, scratching the subjective itch between formal artistry and personal interest.
Discovery of classics:
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
What else could I possibly add? This book is astonishing from the first page to the last. Easily my favourite book of the year, maybe decade. More thoughts on why back in May. It is everything I’m drawn to in a novel: it is fast and weird, told in that conversational modernist style that starts at a brisk walk and keeps going at a sprinter’s pace through a full marathon of meandering misanthropic journey. Recommended if you like stylish, ambitious satire. All praise for this book is exactly correct.
The Dispossessed - Ursula K Le Guin
I liked The Left Hand of Darkness so much that I read four more books by Le Guin, moved every time by her earnest compassion and humanity. This ranks at the top. I recommended it for people in grad school, people who want to admire a well-executed political allegory, readers who are skeptical about hard science fiction (we’ve got new planets and space ships) but brave enough to try.
As I said back in April, nobody cares about Flaubert as much as people care about Le Guin. She speaks directly to the softest, most earnest part of my heart.
Contemporary Fiction is Also Good!
Loved and Missed - Susie Boyt
There may be some recency bias, as I only read this a month ago. Every other book in this top five is in some way big, sweeping and ambitious. This is much smaller: a character study and emotional journey that manages to be very tender without getting too sweet. It’s the story of a woman raising her granddaughter and committing to love in a way that feels underrepresented because it is a profound love that is not romantic and sometimes unbalanced. It’s told precisely and frankly, filled with beautiful metaphors and laugh-out-loud observations.
Perhaps because it is a smaller book, this is honestly the book I find myself recommending the most often compared out of this whole list. It’s a special and affirming book despite being very sad. I’d recommend it if you like mother-daughter stories and stories that treat obligation as a reward.
On the Calculation of Volume I & II - Solvej Balle
The slow-building literary phenomenon of one day stretched over seven books. Tara Selter is trapped in November 18th. One of the (many!!) novel things about this series is that while some serialized literary fiction reads as though it is one novel divided into parts, each volume of this series has felt stylistically distinct. The first is a love story, the second a travelogue, and the third—well, I can’t say without spoilers.
These are harder to recommend. They are definitively literary fiction in style and content, there is a plot, and even with the same day repeating 1,000+ times, events do in fact occur! But it moves at the pace of philosophical thought: weaving and caveated, with asides. If you like gentle, style-driven books that is driven by close observations about what makes up a life—voiced by someone trapped outside of this life—this series is worth a try. The closest comparison I have is The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, in my honourable mentions below.
The Books of Jacob - Olga Tokarczuk
The albatross of my reading year that took me several months to finish and rewarded me over and over again for my dedication. Tokarczuk is a genius. Here are 2,500 words about why. I loved it, and reading it made the world feel a little more beautiful and effortful during a year when both of those feelings were in short supply.
Honourable mentions:
I read so many tremendous books this year. It was hard to narrow this down, so here are some unranked honourable mentions. These are all five-star, indelible reads I’ll be thinking about for a long time: :
The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead
The Wall - Marlen Haushofer
Boulder - Eva Baltasar
H is for Hawk - Helen Macdonald3
The Most Secret Memory of Men - Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
The Last Samurai - Helen DeWitt
Other items of 2025
If you put your heart and mind into it, you can be a snob about anything. I have limited capacity and stay focused in my snobbery lane4 on books. What’s more, I have fairly mainstream tastes in music and even worse opinions about movies, but that’s never stopped me.
Music
The three best albums of the year were Bad Bunny - DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, Rosalia - LUX, and Geese - Getting Killed.
Lady Gaga was great, but not cohesive enough to transcend. Lorde makes music for people who take selfies of themselves crying, so it was a profound relief that Virgin was a return to form. CMAT put on the best concert of the year, and Euro Country was excellent. Oklou - choke enough and Snocaps (self-titled) are perfect albums to make a weekend morning better; Eusexua (FKA Twigs) for later that night.
Movies
A theme of this post is the powerful draw of categorization. The three categories of Movies I Liked: transcendentally stupid (Hundreds of Beavers, Naked Gun, Now You See Me), big and loud (One Battle After Another, Sinners), quiet and actually good (Universal Language, All We Imagine as Light).
Keeping Your Hands Busy
This was the year I started needlework. If you like the sound of a hobby with a paint-by-numbers skill level and the potential for weird rabbit holes and dusty history, cross-stitching is the way to go. What’s more, if you’re someone who secretly finds data entry meditative, there is the additional layer of designing your own patterns, pixel by pixel.
I did not take very good photos of these projects, and the iPhone is committed to HDR-ing them to death. The total failure of digitally documenting or capturing what they look like feels very thematically appropriate. The components (the letters, animals, flowers) are all from computer scans of 19th-century (and older) books and brought together with hundreds of little stitches. They’re objects that exist in real life, and I gave them all away.
That was my year—how was yours?
What was your favourite thing you read this year, maybe not the ‘best,’ but the book you loved the most?
What books felt sweeping, ambitious, and memorable?
What music made your weekends a little better?
If we know each other in real life, this post is all I have to say. It’s miserable; it’s boring; text me about a book instead!!!
Plus or minus about a half dozen romance/YA that I don’t track because I’m very annoying.
[Editor’s note: the inimitable editor of this newsletter, Alanna, named this one her favourite of the year, and also happened to be the one to place this in my lap. She remains as talented and good-looking as ever, and wishes you all a splendid new year.]
Laurel’s Note: I delete a comment like this from every newsletter. I’m leaving this one.
A lie.
The intimacy, honesty, and directness with which you've always written about books and your emotions surrounding them (and in the moments, too, when you write about life) has always been so admirable to me, warm, true, open. Wishing you the best in 2026, laurel-- in your reading life (and, of course, your Life life, too)!
Also- please let your friend kara know i think she's a genius, I'm loving the interesting and/or compelling dynamic and am already sorting my reads into those categories in my mind (please share with alanna, too, that her editor's note made me smile). The Gilmore girls-ian tone of Heart the Lover is spot-on, and i felt much the same way as you re: Audition (despite the fact, or perhaps because, I loved Intimacies just so much). last thing: your tocarczuk essay was one of my favorites this year, nothing better than a niche deep dive into a translated tome
Oh the way you are approaching this heartbreak lets me know that you have got what it takes to move forward wisely and tenderly and with your beloved snobbery fully intact. You inspire me to keep holding the candle for Jacob’s Room. I also count Loved and Missed among my best reads this year, the only one I would give my arm to have written. I got totally sucked into Heart the Lover (first half was so compelling to me if not interesting) but a few months later, I resent emotional manipulation… good riddance 2025! See you next year.