Now that 2025 is ending what has been your favorite book you’ve read in the last year?
Mine is Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (audiobook is the way to go!)
Lesser known: Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle. Satire Horror. It was a fun ride.
All Sinners Bleed (mystery noir) by S.A. Cosby and My Friends by Frederik Backman are also my notable mentions
Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy:
Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and Maddaddam
Read these a few years back; they’re still a monumental achievement. I can’t buy chicken at a grocery store without thinking about the engineered chickens she describes.
Kindred by Octavia Butler
I read a lot of great books this year. But, my shortlist goes to one author: Omar El Akkad.
One Day Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This (2025) and American War (2017) were both revelations.
P.S.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020) by Rashid Khalidi. An absolutely vital history in its address of Occupied Palestine, the State of Israel, and the world’s interactions with them. In much the same way Tony Judt deepened my perspective of Europe with Postwar, and Davids Wengrow and Graeber pushed my understandings with The Dawn of Everything, Khalidi weaves family history with world events to lend a sorely lost dimension to a vilified people.
Not done yet, but “1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus” by Charles Mann is excelent. So much insight presented in an interessting and accessible way.
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon or Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. The former is an incredibly important read for understanding nationalist anticolonial wars of liberation and the latter is a deeply affecting account of slavery. Harriet Jacobs’ experience is genuinely horrifying and disturbingly common.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-game-in-yellow-hailey-piper/567aec11eab5b2e5
‘A Game In Yellow.’ It may not be the finest book I read, but it was the one that instantly sprang to mind.
“The King In Yellow” is an old play that was banned by the Vatican and every European king; every actor and audience member who has been part of a performance has gone mad. Now the play has resurfaced in New York, and an unsuspecting couple are going to be part of the next production.
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. Very enlightening.
This year my highlight was “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang.
It is a collection of (not so) short stories. I didn’t like every one, but those I liked were absolutely brilliant. The title story, “Exhalation”, was one of those. I wanted to read something by Ted Chiang specifically because I adore the movie “Arrival” (2016), and found out it was based on one of his stories (not in “Exhalation”).
Btw. I liked “Project Hail Mary” too, read it last year.
My favorite, or the one that has stuck in my head and bounced around the most, is The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (pub. 1924). The audiobook version is great!
It is not new to me, I revisited it some this year and started the audiobook with my partner though and the synchronicity with this moment in history is crazy intense especially since Mein Kampf came out within a year or so of it and yet The Magic Mountain is an intensely human experience that revels in imperfectness and sickness as a state of living, illuminating a polar opposite potential in German society than what was allowed to manifest in the following decades or what horror had transpired in the previous decade with WW1.
It wasn’t the novel I chose to live rent free in my head, I didn’t read it for large portions of the year, but there is no other way to see the future for me other than all of us entering the world Hans Canstorp travels into and through in The Magic Mountain. I think this is in large part because The Magic Mountain was bifurcated by WW1, and the centrist politics of Thomas Mann can be seen evolving throughout the course of the book as Thomas Mann’s politics radicalized throughout WW1 and in the wake of it… Thomas Mann began The Magic Mountain before WW1 but put it aside during the war to write more directly about politics and only returned to complete the novel after his worldviews had been thoroughly ground to a powder by the horror of WW1.
No other novel in 2025 gobbled up my reality harder than The Magic Mountain and I suspect 2026 will share a similar vibe.
In 2026 I am looking forward to reading Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann and trying to explore more modernist experimental literature from around the world that often slips by invisible to the “western” literature gaze fixated on white european guys being erudite in crude ways tho I love Pynchon don’t get me wrong.
Sounds amazing. I just added to my TBR pile. Thank you for sharing!
Note If you read it in English, get the John E. Woods translation not the old Lowe-Porter translation. The Lowe-Porter translation doesn’t capture the dry humor of the original German version anywhere as much as it needs to in order for the comic aspects of the novel to levitate. Also… Mann is a stunning writer and the John E. Woods translation leverages ~70 years of engagement with the novel to do the artistry of his writing justice in English.
If you listen to the audiobook by David Rintoul it also uses the John E. Woods translation.
