The best books I read in 2025
KIRAN DESAI I LOVE YOU
Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth. I read this on the floor of a dusty New York sublet in a dramatic bout of ill health. Reading about the perils of ageing when your own young body is out of action is quite thrilling—for a moment there I was horny Mickey Sabbath unable to consummate my desires and boy, once I was back out on Fulton street did I appreciate being catcalled.
The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV by Helen Castor. Read mostly in a pool in Toulon, on holiday with two helicopter pilot friends who were recently divorced (from each other). And yet their lives were cheerily simple compared to Richard and Henry’s. Every time something bonkers happened, you had to remind yourself they were both literally fourteen years old. Castor is just a great prosaist—I ignored ample hot, shirtless men on French beaches to read about royal falcons.
Elizabeth Costello - JM Coetzee. I started this after I’d finished a first draft of my own novel and was genuinely astonished—how many people have written books, only to find that exact book already written, in an infinitely more perfected form, twenty years earlier? Thrilling. Even without that, this was one of those ‘you’re allowed to do that??’ books a la Nabokov, Toni Morrison, etc etc. Recc’ed by Henry Oliver.
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. Half of the sentences in this book I read twice over because they were so masterful. I’ve never read anything from the 1920s that I find genuinely funny, rather than slapstick. In the aforementioned Elizabeth Costello, Elizabeth says, “The novel, the traditional novel…is an attempt to understand human fate one case at a time.” Babbitt does this without telling you. The book gets you drunk and merry, before you quickly realise the party is over. Lewis is so loving and does justice to everyone—if we were characters, we’d choose to have him as our author.
The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle. Speaking of characters, what tyrannised me about this book is that Castle was writing with her entire self. She makes herself into a character without inhibition. It is really and truly the opposite of ‘the personal essay’—there was little to no self-consciousness about any ‘I,’ no excess of claustrophobia or agoraphobia. The writing was too interested in the real world to be solipsistic. And also too funny. It felt like I was reading what an actual essay is for the first time… At this point, I am so freaked out by essays (the internet’s obsession with them; their register of certainty; what the 2010s did to them, the fact I can’t write them, etc…) that it was deeply reassuring to read six in a row that were so pleasurable. Wherever Castle begins, assume she’s about to lead you in the opposite direction. Recc’ed by Geoff Dyer as his funniest book pick.
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo. The form of this book is someone acquiring fluency in a language and is there ANY better metaphor for writing a novel…? I, for one, have no clue what I am doing whenever I begin and yet, over time, become fluent. This was essentially a Künstlerroman.
The Stalker by Paula Bomer. This was the first proof copy I ever received in my life, so I read it like a special artefact or secret gift no one knew about. As such, I bestowed a hefty aura on this book, but it didn’t suffer from it. It was dissociative and nauseating. Bomer has an incredible way of managing pace—by the last chapter, time is moving faster than you can read. Celine Nguyen said it best for the both of us; “We both feel personally injured and outraged that this novel has not been discussed, reviewed, and praised more.” Read it!!
Sister Europe by Nell Zink. Wrote about it for Hobart; satire without bitterness, everyone is so loveable and so delusional. A book about why prosperous Europeans are so mad about their own prosperity written by an American author who clearly can’t believe how good Germans have it. Made me grateful to have been in #Berlin as a #youth feeling free without #cynicism.
Helen Castor’s slim Elizabeth I biography. Anyone with a mad or bad upbringing should read about Elizabeth I. I think she carried her childhood into her adulthood so much that she couldn’t see her own reality—how many people can relate to this!! And to be so alone and vulnerable in that world is unthinkable. I am still thinking about how her mind must have felt—to have zero trust, to feel no security ever, to never have your scary childhood resolved into a safe adulthood.
Michelle Huneven’s Bug Hollow. I’d never read this kind of book before—I think the audience is one of those mysterious ‘New England’ readers who exclusively read writers no one in Europe has ever heard of. It was an incredible act of clean, propulsive, emotionally engulfing prose. I was very upset when it ended, I didn’t want to leave the family behind. Brilliantly made.
And now for the Novel In Residence of my heart. My song of songs. All books mentioned thus far should form an orderly line behind…
THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY BY KIRAN DESAI - A novel I will reread for the rest of my life. Some books are about one or two things but this book is about everything. I felt I was reading my own life, as well as the life of my friends from Hounslow, from Krakow, my family in Ireland, old neighbours from San Diego. Everyone is in this book.
I’m always most jealous of craft (a writer’s ability to draw a character or a plot), but my jealousy here was because Desai was doing what I thought I was good at, that is, taking feeling seriously. But she was doing it at such a high level that I couldn’t find the seams in the book’s construction. Need to understand how and thus, will read forever until I do. Every sentence was a hint to decipher its internal puzzle. There was so much seriousness masquerading as moments of nonsense. So much unexplained. I am crying right now even thinking about this book—I am so grateful it exists.
In 2025, I also read ample Raymond Carver & Flannery O’Connor thanks to Tony Tulathimutte, lots of books on Judaism, a few Nicola Barkers, Andrea Long Chu, Matthew Gasda, Lamorna Ash, all good. Alexander Baron’s The Lowlife reissue, Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat, the new David Szalay, plus lots of totally-fine novels. Also more of my favourite M.F.K Fisher, novel drafts by friends (Amy X Wang and Ayden LeRoux!), and—my ongoing special treat—audiobook memoirs. I was happily subsumed into the PR machine of Spare; how does anyone survive that kind of childhood…
In 2026, I want new non-fiction from Richard Lloyd Parry (why do we not hear more about his amazing reportage? He has three utterly great books out). I respectfully YEARN FOR, more than anything, a new Elif Batuman novel. Will be reading more in French (against my will), more labyrinthine books with silly side-quests, more Russian novels (who will oust my beloved Sergei Dovlatov?), and more novel drafts from my beautiful friends.
I’m starting off the year in Georgia (the state) and the Swiss Jura, so please share recs that suit both rural swamplife and EuroFrolicking.
Now i am joining the klara feenstra school of books and reading all of these
I must admit I read part of Sabbath's Theater this year and have essentially given up on it, I found it so dreadful. All the others by Roth I liked much more. Portnoy's Complaint dealt with similar matters, but was amusing, and the protagonist somehow likeable. Not so with what I found a thoroughly loathsome figure in Sabbath.