2025 Retrospective: Literature

2025 was a great reading year for me. I read over sixty books (though that number is inflated by ten or more comic book trade paperback collections, which take about two hours to read end-to-end). A great deal of them were good, more than I can list here coherently. I covered quite a few of my most and least favorite reads on this blog, so I’ll pass lightly over those titles and throw a spot on the things I never got around to mentioning here.

Best of 2025

It’s easy to select the best book of 2025 because I only read two books published in the year 2025. You’ve already heard a great deal about The Rose Field, and I won’t go so far as to say it’s the best book of the year because it was sooooooo odd.

Luckily, the other 2025 book I read this year was excellent. Henry Lien’s Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling is a brief, compelling analysis of story-telling patterns and narrative structures common in East Asian creative traditions. Lien argues that the norms of these structures run counter to the ultra-linear triumphalist Campbellian tendencies of commercial Western storytelling, and can be used to diverse and different effect. The real pleasure of this book is Lien’s clarity of explanation and his fresh, clever analyses of example narratives. These examples range from video games to movies to classics of world literature, freely and easily, and Lien draws new meaning from every text via the very interpretive frames he lays out. The result is an enriching mini-treatise that will add interesting new tools to your analytical toolbox. I returned to this book’s ideas frequently for the rest of the year after reading it, and it empowered me to have armageddon-grade stupid thoughts like “Is Riverdale the same as The Dream of the Red Chamber?”

Best Published After The Millennium (That I Forgot to Mention Previously)

I already produced a significant amount of coverage on my 2025 reading, so here I will simply round up some of the books I forgot to tell you about. The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain by Sofia Samatar is a searing view on the violence of class and racial hierarchies and how they operate through academia and the practices of knowledge formation. I tried to read R.F. Kuang’s Babel late in 2025 and bounced off of it due to the patronizing tone and molassesory pacing. Samatar asks many of the same questions as Kuang, but at speed and with faith that you the reader are aware and intelligent. Why read a 500-page book when a novella will do and do better?

All the Birds in the Sky is the first full-length novel I’ve read by short story wizard Charlie Jane Anders. I’ve read a number of her short stories and they are at minimum insightful and likable, and at their best unbeatably entertaining and paradigm-shifting. All the Birds in the Sky brings all of Anders’ best to the party. While the story takes numerous wild twists and turns to reach its unexpectable ending, Anders’ control over her theme and goals keep you along for the ride. Her sense of humor and her attention to the details of daily life keep you believing in the truth of the other passengers.

Wayyyyy early in the year, I read Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword. Due to the interests of several of my associates, I’ve been on a multi-year Arthuriana journey which loops relentlessly back around to Excalibur (1981). I admire Grossman’s heroic effort in The Bright Sword to say something new about the Arthur idea and to explore all the edge-case knights. He writes quite a long book here, but it all pays off with an affecting image of post-lapsarian living. There is still a need for heroes after the Age of Heroes. I’m planning a post for 2026 considering connections between this book and--yes--Farscape. Live in fear.

The very, very first book I read in 2026 was Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford, a book which is just plain cool. Spufford produces a convincing alternate America which churns with all the same ingredients of our current toxic cocktail, but reframed and refreshed by the altered ratios of another history. I used to live not far from our world’s Cahokia, and so the shape and the look of the city came alive for me in a particularly beautiful way through Spufford’s writing. And it’s cool: it’s noir, it’s jazz, it’s a message about other structures we could build to shape our world. 

For example: mounds.

Best Published Before The Millennium

You heard about all these before. If you want to go insane while ensconced in beautiful, beautiful words, hit up The Innkeeper’s Song or Little, Big. If you want to fight your way through the near-intolerably dense world of a guy with too many ideas sizzling out of his dome, a good third of them Christ-infused, another third about the horrors of war, hit up War and Peace or Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. The War is not the most exciting part of either of them.

Best Nonfiction

Tempted though I am to say Dreammakers II, that would be false. I made a beautiful discovery at the friends of the library bookstore, and that was a copy of a book I used to peruse regularly at another library: The Assassin’s Cloak. Imagine an endless stream of blats from depraved European historical figures arranged in a mad jumble spanning four hundred wacky years. It’s an anthology of diary entries. It’s a collage of human life. It’s a book in which Brian Eno admits to drink his own piss. It’s The Assassin’s Cloak.

But it’s less a book and more being tricked into taking shrooms at the Special Archive section of your local university library. The best actual nonfiction book I read in 2025 was Aftermath by Harald Jähner, a distressing account of life in Germany in the years immediately following the Second World War. The German people suffer in enormous and meaningless ways, which I’m sure many would frame as just punishment for the crimes of the Third Reich. But in the end the majority of people who supported the Nazis go back to being regular people in one Germany or the other and face no meaningful consequences. All the people just suffer and then, to preserve the state and the necessary structures of modern society, the perpetrators disappear themselves with the help of everyone else. None of this pain redeems the deaths in the camps and at the front. It just adds more pain to the world.

Aftermath provides a wide-ranging account of a pivotal time and circumstance. It reveals the mental and social contortions a society must perform in the wake of atrocity. It describes, in great detail, how willing and able people are to put aside the conflicts and ideologies which once animated them when they become hungry and broke. It tells you, in no uncertain terms, how violence and change at this scale will deform you.

When this book came out in Germany, its title was Wolfszeit. I think this title better evokes the book’s subject matter and content.

We are in a very bad spot right now, world-historically-speaking, and we are not close to the other side yet. It is not clear that the other side exists. If it does, when we’re there, let’s try building something new instead of rebuilding what we had before. We’ll find plenty of inspiration in the books I’ve mentioned here.