Novel Readings

2025 was a less chaotic year for me—literally and psychologically—than 2024. I wish I could say that this meant I read more and better, but instead both my memory and my records show that it was a pretty uneven reading year, with a lot of slumps. The summer especially, which used to be a rich reading season for me, had almost no highlights: the best books I read in 2025 were at the very beginning and the very end of the year.

Best of 2025

Three books I read this year were truly extraordinary experiences. One was Anne de Marcken’s astonishing and heartbreaking zombie novel (yes, you read that right) It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. I have thought about this novel over and over since I finished it. How much can we lose, it asks, before we lose ourselves? In a world characterized by loss, what makes us keep on moving? If you are sure, as I was, that a novel about zombies is not for you, maybe think again.

A wind comes up to me in the empty morning like someone I’ve met before or seen before but don’t know, and a feeling comes over me. It is sadness. Not a sadness, but sadness. All of it. The whole history of sadness. Everything in me is sad and everything around me is a part of it. The cracked pavement, the moon, the abandoned cars, the gravity that holds them to the road. It is total. I am taken, or taken down. I drop to my knees.

Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book could hardly be more different in topic, style, or tone, but it too is about loss and death and persistence. It is a historical novel but also a time-travel novel; mostly I find the illogic of time travel too much of an impediment to emotional commitment, but in this case the framing added layers of historical and philosophical ideas that added to rather than distracted from the immersive storytelling of the 14th-century sections. Reading it reminded me of Raymond Chandler’s remark that once a detective novel is as good as The Maltese Falcon, it is foolish to say it can’t be even better: speculative fiction is not a go-to genre for me, but Willis showed me that it’s not the genre itself that’s the barrier. (That said, I stalled out in my subsequent attempt to read her novels about the Blitz, which I started to find tedious—they are staying on my shelves, though, so that I can give them another chance at some point.)

I read both of these books in January; although I read some other good books over the year, the third really exceptional one was Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, which I finished in December. I suppose it too is a kind of speculative fiction, an eerie “what if” scenario that leads to a novel that if I were a drunk publicist I would pitch as “May Sarton’s existential wilderness adventure.” Once again a key theme is persistence: in this case, literal and physical—she has to feed herself and take care of animals and stay warm—but also metaphysical, as inevitably she asks questions about why she should do any of that, and about the value of everything people do. It is hard to describe this book in a way that captures why it is engrossing and exhilarating rather than dreary but it is.

Also Very Good

My ‘also rans’ list is strong this year, if not that long.

Non-Fiction

The best non-fiction I read was Claire Cameron’s memoir How to Survive a Bear Attack. Yes, it is actually about how to survive a bear attack, but it is also about confronting fear and illness and death.

Yiyun Li’s  Things in Nature Merely Grow is as hard-headed and devastating as her previous writings about  suicide—more so in a way, because this is about her second son to die by suicide. Ordinarily I don’t dislike sentimentality, and there’s a coldness to Li’s voice that is sometimes alienating, but there is also something bracing about her clarity and her refusal to cater to people’s desire for there to be meaning where she finds none, or for grieving parents to offer those around them implicit solace by seeming to get over it, “as though bereaved parents are expected to put in a period of hard mental work and then clap their hands and say, I’m no longer heartbroken for my dead child, and I’m one of you normal people again.” The line from this book that has echoed in my head since I read it is so simple and obvious it might seem strange that it has so much power for me: “children die, and parents go on living.”

An honourable mention definitely goes to Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare.

Fiction 

Other novels that really stood out to me this year:

Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional

Salena Godden’s Mrs. Death Misses Death

Rumer Godden’s Black Narcissus

Helen Garner’s The Spare Room

Carys Davies, Clear

Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

A near miss: Sarah Moss’s Ripeness. As I said in my post about it, “I would not say I loved the novel, but I have never read anything by Moss that isn’t both meticulously crafted and convincingly intelligent.” Moss remains an auto-buy for me; perhaps anything would have been a bit of a let-down after the extraordinary memoir she published last year, My Good Bright Wolf.

I did a fair amount of what I call “interstitial reading” in 2025—books I can easily pick up and put down in between work or chores, or before bed. This year these were mostly romances or ‘women’s fiction,’ writers like Abbie Jimenez and Katherine Center. I didn’t read many mysteries, except for the occasional comfort read of a Dick Francis or Robert B. Parker. I read for work, of course; this is always rereading, which has its own challenges and rewards. This year I found myself wondering what my relationship will be to some of these books when I eventually retire. Will I stop rereading Jane Eyre or Bleak House or North and South? It is hard to imagine that I would never read Middlemarch again.

And on that faintly elegiac note I will add that I reread my year-end post from last year in which I talked about having to “downsize” my book collection when I moved, and it continues to be the case that my relationship to books has changed as a result. It’s not just that “my attachment to (most) books is just lighter” but that sometimes I stare at my shelves and wonder why I am hanging on to most of the books on them! I’m not about to live without any books, and it still means a lot to me to browse in them and remember reading them—or make plans to read them, as yes, I do have books that remain, shall we say, aspirational! (Hello, War and Peace.) The yellowing paperbacks of Elizabeth George mysteries, though, which my aging eyes tell me I will never read in those copies again? or even some of the newish books I was excited about and then kind of disappointed in? Why shouldn’t they go back into circulation, so that other readers can enjoy them (or be disappointed in them) in their turn? Also, speaking of eventually retiring, when that happens there are a lot of books now in my campus office that will come home with me. (Will I keep all of my different editions of Middlemarch? Maybe.)

And that’s a wrap on another year of reading and blogging here at Novel Readings. Thanks to everyone who read and commented or chatted with me on Facebook or Instagram or Bluesky, and also to those who keep up their own blogs. I keep up with them via Feedly these days and I realize this has meant a decline in my own commenting. I am wary of making bold resolutions, so I won’t promise to do better in 2026, but I love reading your posts and I continue to cherish the online community we have sustained for so many years.