A Year in Reading: 2025

The Millions has been on hiatus for the last year, so we’ve had to scale back our editorial output to just our seasonal Most Anticipated lists. But we couldn’t let 2025 go by without bringing out our annual Year in Reading series, where we check in with some of the most interesting writers and thinkers working today about their noteworthy reads of the last 12 months. This year, the series is taking a more condensed form—we asked contributors for shorter reflections, and are publishing them all simultaneously—but we hope it will nevertheless help you discover your next great book. I, for one, am newly determined to finally read some Muriel Spark—thanks, Sebastian Castillo. —Sophia Stewart, editor * * * Caleb Gayle author, Black Moses It’s usually impossible to find time to read much during a book launch. But when a book like Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement by Brandon Terry landed on my doorstop, I knew that I would need to make the time. In it, Terry upends our too-often romantic, or at other times, deeply ironic memories of the Civil Rights Movement. It isn’t the kind of book that one breezes through—I know I didn’t! But it is the kind of book that lingered with me, haunted how I revisit the past, and forced me to reconsider how that past informs the present. When I wasn’t reconsidering the past, I just had a blast reading Katie Yee’s Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar. What a fun and funny ride. * * * James Webster marketing director, Deep Vellum and Dalkey Archive Press I’ll be honest, this was an unusually contemporary year for me! Normally I read pretty widely, time-wise, but there were a handful of remarkably self-assured debut novels that couldn’t be ignored. First, I adored Stephanie Wambugu’s deliberately-old-fashioned Lonely Crowds, and have recommended it to so many people that they could populate an upstate college town like the one that features so heavily in the novel. I loved the flame-throwing Bad Nature by Ariel Courage, which is so furious in its voice, so cutting with its humor, that it’s almost intoxicating—like the buzzy lightheaded feeling you get from giving blood. And rounding out the trilogy was Cora Lewis’s Information Age, which is one of those fragmentary novels that we’ve all seen countless times, but incredibly, Lewis sacrifices nothing in the negative space. Elsewhere, Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is an exemplary biography, looking at both an artist, and the creation of that artist’s legacy—itself a sort of art form. I spent several months reading nothing but Italian women (Ginzburg, de Céspedes, Morante, Terranova, Raimo, Mazzetti), and I also enjoyed playing director while reading Karl Krauss’s delirious and impossible-to-stage Modernist play, The Last Days of Mankind. Finally, as the father of a two-year-old, I read the same 10 children’s books approximately one thousand times, each. Don’t miss Curious George Takes a Job, which contains a disquieting scene at the hospital, where George finds a bottle of ether and inhales the anesthetic until “everything went dark.” * * * Henry Hoke author, Open Throat I became a parent at the start of 2025, and although I was hanging out with my kid on the opposite coast, my heart and my reading choices were with my long-time home of Los Angeles. In an unimaginable and devastating year for the city, I was grateful to experience new work by some of my favorite LA artists. First, Season of the Rat by Elizabeth Hall, published by the freshly launched Cash 4 Gold Books. It’s a cutting marvel of hybrid prose that explores forgotten queer landmarks, sexual assault, recovery, burgeoning romance, and, of course, a rat on the roof. Then, the arrival of Sitting Vol. 2: Plein Air by Stacy Elaine Dacheux, the second in her series of illustrated chapbook memoirs. I adore the singular wit and succinct beauty of Stacy’s writing and art. This remarkable volume—much of it covering the direct aftermath of the fires, in which many of my friends lost their homes and businesses—becomes a meditation on resilience, how we shape ourselves by moving through. Lastly, Ottodokki by Patrick Michael Ballard, from art press Sming Sming, which is a pack of 24 randomized collectible cards by a visionary of material and myth. The cards’ uses are undefined, up to you. I had to buy one pack to keep sealed and one to crack open. My baby divined seven cards from the deck and we built a bedtime story with his choices. * * * Grace Byron author, Herculine I spent a lot of the year finally reading Thomas Pynchon and Barbara Ehrenreich, a pair that perhaps never seemed so omnipotent in their prophetic powers as they do now. I was delighted to find the former reference in the latter in Bait and Switch, her chronicle of white collar unemployment, a spiritual sequel of sorts to Nickel and Dimed. I also tuned into Philip Roth for the first time; I found The Counterlife a fascinating experiment in fiction and adored Portnoy’s Complaint. I read less contemporary fiction than usual but I adored Information Age by Cora Lewis, Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood, and Hothouse Bloom by Austyn Wohlers. And, since this is a list, Things In Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li is a moving archive of grief, a list that unspools great beauty and gripping love. * * * Peter Mendelsund author, Weepers and Exhibitionist I stopped reading about four years ago (it’s a long story). But I’m recently back in the game. I still don’t read contemporary literary fiction, which is especially ungenerous of me having just thrown my new novel onto the toppling pile. What I do read is philosophy, poetry, fanfiction, sci fi, and fantasy (I’ve dipped my beak into romantasy this year as well). Which is to say that this list will be a mixed bag. Though as John Ashbery says, “good things sometimes come in mixed bags.” Speaking of Ashbery, this year I read his 1989 Norton Lectures: Other Traditions. I’d read very little poetry outside of those works anthologized in my high school and college textbooks, so decided I should educate myself. Ashbery is, in many ways, a surprising guide here, as his own poetry is daunting and hermetic. (Once, after he spoke to Richard Howard’s class at Columbia, Howard told him the students “wanted the key to your poetry, but you presented them with a new set of locks.”) Yet Ashbery’s lectures have helped me quite a bit—specifically due to his reluctance and self-professed inability to explain anything. I am trying to follow his example, relinquishing my compulsive need to have a poem reveal itself completely. I sit with a poem now, let it wash over me, hear its music, and take from it what I will. Ashbery discusses six “lesser-known” poets in the book, including David Schubert, whose work I now find myself reading obsessively. The Horus Heresy is a set of sixty-four fanfiction novels based on—and contributing to—the lore surrounding a tabletop miniatures game called Warhammer. My YouTube algorithm decided I’d like to watch videos of men meticulously painting miniature models of blood-spattered space warriors and tentacular aliens. Wanting to learn more about these characters and the world they inhabit I dove headfirst into the history of a war-torn 31st millennium. This has been my year of considering “the object.” I’ve been reading anything I can get my hands on that contends with the ontology and phenomenology of stuff. A sampling would include, of course, Plato, Kant, Wittgenstein, etc., but most recently I’ve read Heidegger’s wonderful (though at times inscrutable) “The Thing.” Also, I reread the excellent Alien Phenomenology by Ian Bogost as well as A Philosophy of Sport by Steven Connor, which includes a wonderful chapter on sports equipment and the philosophical implications of human/object interaction. A piano is an object, but also quite a bit more than an object. I read Sophy Roberts’s beautiful, elegiac book The Lost Pianos of Siberia, as well as the late pianist and polymath Alfred Brendel’s Music, Sense and Nonsense. I read eight novels by Terry Prachett this year. I recommend The City Watch series, which follows a motley police force in the fantastical city of Ankh-Morpork as they contend with dragons, golems, assassins, and interspecies warfare. Pratchett also takes on larger questions around what a city is, and how it can, against all odds, function. These books are smart and wickedly funny. I also read Cyrill Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, a book at once ingenious and utterly terrible. There are passages that fit neatly within a genre I love: the author discussing ideal conditions under which he will—but ultimately can’t—write his future masterpiece. See under Barthes’s last lectures Preparation for the Novel. Which I also re-read. Anyway, the degree of bellyaching and bathos alongside the extreme erudition in Connolly’s book is delightful. * * * Eliana Ramage author, To the Moon and Back I’ll Tell You When I’m Home by Palestinian American poet and writer Hala Alyan exists in the urgent space before the birth of a child, as Alyan waits in a separate country from her surrogate Dee. With breathtaking precision, Alyan gathers and considers her daughter’s inheritance. She maps a family legacy of displacement—from Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, and Lebanon. She weaves in her own coming-of-age—in Kuwait, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Dallas, and Oklahoma City—and stories of addiction, sobriety, pregnancy, and loss. Meanwhile, her daughter is the size of a grain of rice, and then a raspberry. Alyan’s writing is lyrical and surprising, open-hearted and unwavering. A tender and honest exploration of peoplehood, personhood, endings, and beginnings. * * * Erin Somers author, The Ten Year Affair I published a book this year which makes a person—how to put this?—go completely insane. Maybe not everyone. Does someone out there not go insane? Reach out via email. I personally go buck wild. I got excessively fit this year? Like ripped? I wrote 60,000 words of a new book? I could hear how I sounded describing to people that this was only a third of the planned word count. I sleepwalked every night for five months. I am still sleepwalking every night. My nightmares are of being publicly disgraced in some way, or that I’ve forgotten about a podcast interview. Imagine dreaming of podcast interviews! A new hell for the twenty-first century. You can get to wondering why you write for a living, if you are so ill-cut-out for it. If it fills you with horrible anxiety. If it chases you. If it sucks up all your time. If it takes you further away from the thing you liked doing in the first place, which was just reading. Why didn’t I go and make a job out of the thing I liked best? In this frame of mind, I read Howards End by E.M. Forster. Every year I try to fill some holes, read some classics I missed. I have been doing this long enough that I should know that whatever my notions are about a classic are likely wrong. But no, I never learn. Every time I’m like, what is this turgid artifact? From what dusty tomb was it unearthed? Howards End looks so, so dusty. It’s like they tried to make it look as dusty as possible. They should refresh the design. They must. But then when you crack it, it is funny and alive, a class novel inspired by the lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell concerning the fate of a country house. The refrain of Howards End is “only connect,” and it’s possible that this is corny, maybe the corniest part of the book, which is mostly a closely observed and perceptive novel about how different tiers of rich people interact in Edwardian England. The old rich hate the nouveau riche and vice versa. The old rich pity the poor, while the new rich loathe the poor, and so on. It is also about a set of sisters going around being charming and slightly eccentric. “Only connect” is Forster’s entreaty to connect the rational part of your brain with what might be called the heart. In my ragged, somnambulant, pointlessly shredded state I interpreted this as an argument in favor of art. If you go looking for the reason you do something, or a reason to keep doing whatever you’re doing, you’ll see it everywhere. You’ll hear it in a pop song or see it in a painting or in your kid’s face or in the pattern of a leaf. Do I write to connect? I hope so? Probably not though. If I’m being honest it’s just that I’m compelled to do it. It’s that stupid and that inescapable. I just feel like doing it. In spite of everything, the part that is good—purely and without complications—is sitting down and writing. If there were moments of gratification this year they were in one of two places: in hanging out and doing nothing and on the page. These are my two vocations. Nothing and typing on my laptop. But it’s nice, isn’t it, only connect? It gives a sort of nobility to the whole endeavor. Maybe I could be worthy of it one day. * * * Natan Last author, Across the Universe The year your first book comes out must always involve shameful rereading, pawing at the greats to avoid peering unconvinced at the competition, reviving the adolescent fantasies of reading made feeble and death-aware by the reality of publishing. I began the year with my third encounter of Nabokov’s Pnin, that sepia shambolic schlub double-fisting his laminated antiques, pride at newly-acquired U.S. citizenship and a full-time post at a college. I hacked my way through inauguration, its days pointy and gray and tragicomic like the pigeon-proofing spikes at a baseball stadium, with the cutlass imagery of Martín Espada’s Imagine the Angels of Bread (lightning jabbed the building / … scattering bricks from the roof / like beads from a broken necklace). John Berger’s About Looking was the perfect companion on a couple of cold-month jaunts to tropicality, first to Turks & Caicos for a residency (where the chapter on suits bent my eye from sea to sequin) and then to Colombia for a wedding (where everything from hummingbird sanctuaries to seating charts parroted the section on zoos). More recently, Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds emerged as the best new novel I’d read this year; each chapter ends, like a Tobias Wolff short story, with an eerie, inevitable spine-tingle, simultaneously slowed-down and propulsive. I work (to the extent the field still exists) in humanitarian immigration and keep up with the fictions and analyses its horrors generate; I really liked Vincent Delecroix’s non-judgmental experiment in Small Boat and Stephanie DeGooyer’s legal-literary history, Before Borders. Finally, Ellen Bryant Voigt, a poet I’m always imitating, passed this year, and I spent Thanksgiving re-experiencing the tractor engine of her synactic wizardy in Headwaters (it matters / what we’re called words shape the thought don’t say / rodent and ruin everything). * * * Sebastian Castillo author, Fresh, Green Life This was a great year for reading (they are all great years) and some favorites include Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure (delectable), Dag Solstad’s Novel 11, Book 18 (protean, confounding! a compliment), Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance (prismatic and devastating), as well as Ron Padgett’s incredibly sweet Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (it made me cry). But if I had to pick two books I think will stay with me for a while—and this is perhaps due to some recency bias—they are A Far Cry from Kensington and Loitering with Intent, both by Muriel Spark, which I read back to back. I’ve long been a great admirer of her work but I’ve never read novels so perfect as these two, with voices so utterly sui generis, with such an addictive tonal buoyancy that I now pace about my apartment and sulk, look out the window with a little vapor in my mien, because I am not reading Muriel Spark, when I should be. In fact, I am starting a new one today. And sorry, last one: I just finished Iris Murdoch’s The Bell last night, but so far my astonishment toward this work of art is too great to replace the experience meaningfully with words. And like Lyn Hejinian, I love to be astonished! * * * Hala Alyan author, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home I wasn’t ready for Tiana Clark’s Scorched Earth in the best kind of way. It’s rare for a read to be both raucous and poignant, but this collection manages exactly that. Her explorations of Black womanhood are incisive and heart-lifting at turns, continuously testing what else language can hold. I’m sure many have characterized her tone as “unapologetic,” but that’s not quite right. Clark transcends apology. She’s willing to be ashamed, to be wrong, to be afraid. She’s willing to sit with history—and her own heart—a beat longer than is comfortable, which means the reader has to be as well. That sort of co-curated courage is what I love most in poetry, and Clark excels at it. “The truth is: I lied,” she writes in the titular poem. “Did I have to be there for it to still hurt me?” The answer, of course, is no. Life marks us sometimes most in the act of witnessing. But more than the wound, Clark is interested in what grows around it. She writes joy with the same precision she brings to heartache—joy in femmeness, joy in Blackness, joy in restarting, in not getting what we want, and in getting it. The collection becomes a testimony to desire, to its unruly persistence, to the impossibility of a blank slate—and thank God for that. * * * Deesha Philyaw author, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies Denne Michele Norris’s When the Harvest Comes resonated with so many facets of who I am. There’s the lover-girl in me who can’t resist a sweet-but-complicated-but-genuine love story like the one Norris’s main character Davis and his husband Everett share. There’s the grieving daughter who has learned, as Davis learns, that there are unexpected and upending layers to that grief when the parent you lost hurt you when they were alive. And finally, there’s the reader-writer in me who hungers for a beautiful, breathtaking page-turner with emotional heft and narrative surprises. Norris’s debut is a powerful reminder of all the different kinds of love we’ll experience, if we’re lucky, and how those ever-evolving loves can both collide with and be shaped by important questions of legacy and identity. * * * Ethan Rutherford author, North Sun This has been a strange year—my father died, we moved, my book came out—and I’ve felt more adrift in my reading life than at any other point I can remember. I pick things up and put them down; favorite authors no longer do the trick. I feel like I’ve lost the ability to steer myself true. Luckily, I am blessed with friends who have impeccable taste, and who are incredibly thoughtful, and who, when I look back at what I read this year on their recommendations, seem also to be watching out for me, and to them I am grateful. Tongues by Anders Nilsen is my favorite book of the year and the one book I would press on anyone—it is beautifully drawn, beautifully told, complicated and strange, somehow feels even larger than it is. It’s perfect. I owe my favorite (or, most meaningful) reading experience of the year to my friend Jill, who, after my dad died, found a beautiful copy of Virgil’s Aeneid: Book VI, trans. by Seamus Heaney, and gave it to me. This small chapter of the story concerns the moment Aeneas travels to the underworld and meets the spirit of his own father. I thought I had processed things, but of course I hadn’t. I read this on an airplane, slowly, and quietly cried while everyone else slept, and I felt lucky to hold that book in my hands. The titles that follow are others I’ve read and loved this year (actually, this fall; spring was a mess), and are, in fact, some the only books now with me in our new apartment, far from home. I’ve come to think of them as cherished traveling companions, though they’re all new to me. I took a picture for accuracy. Can’t go wrong with any of these: Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro; Orbital by Samantha Harvey; Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck; Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro; Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West; Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert; O’Clock: Sixteen Stories by Quim Monzo; The Infatuations by Javier Marías; Palaver by Bryan Washington; The Week of Colors by Elena Garro; The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor; Los Cuarto Fantasticos: Mister Fantastico (I’m trying to learn Spanish); The Salt Stones by Helen Whybrow; State Champ by Hilary Plum; Magic Can’t Save Us by Josh Denslow; Look Out by Edward McPherson; States by Ciaran Berry; and The Understory by Saneh Sangsuk. And finally, I am currently reading The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, and I never want it to end. * * * Angela Flournoy author, The Wilderness At this point I might be becoming a broken record, but I really loved The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne, which is a debut novel that feels assured, and announces Fayne as a writer with a true storytelling gift. It’s an inter-generational saga that follows one family over more than a century—from West Africa to enslavement-era Tennessee to present day Tennessee. Alongside many memorable members of this family, we spend time with the devil himself, who functions as a kind of humorous, trickster guardian fallen angel for them. It is inventive, funny, and a book I still think about. * * * Emma Goldberg reporter, the New York Times There is something about New York that makes grit and shmaltz feel like two sides of one coin—the rat dragging its pizza on the A-train platform, the stranger holding open a subway door. The density of this place makes miracles feel more readily apparent, in the little kindnesses of people packed together like sardines and in the vastness of steel, iron, brick, and concrete. This year, I read three books about the history of New York, really about the underbelly of its miracles and about the people whose obstinance made the city as it is today, this ridiculous, jaw dropping grid of egos, lights and midnight sandwiches. One was The Power Broker by Robert Caro; the next was Gods of New York by Jonathan Mahler; the third was New York, New York, New York, New York by Thomas Dyja. Taken together, the books explain how the city climbed from a fiscal hole to soaring wealth, how the chasm grew between the martini-drinking, Page Six names of billionaires’ row and the packed homes of NYCHA. These books course with the ambition that built oceanside boardwalks, but also with greed and plenty of petty point-scoring. In each one, the mythic men of New York turn into flesh and bones, men whose wives bought their socks: There was Robert Moses staging a fist fight with an “exceedingly drunk” city administrator, Alfred E. Smith unlocking the gates of the Central Park zoo at night to commune with the tigers, Ed Koch finally moving out of Gracie Mansion and into his nemesis Larry Kramer’s Greenwich Village apartment building. New York has a way of turning its bosses into demigods, but the authors turn those demigods back into men, characters whose grit and patriotic city schmaltz built New York and also left so many behind. * * * T Kira Madden author, Whidbey Because I’m currently working on a story about senior superlatives, maybe I’ll try to slot some of my other favorite reads by this way of categorization; Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian made me laugh the hardest. Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch made me cry the hardest. The book that asked me to slow down in large and small ways was Richard Powers’s The Overstory, and the book that asked me to devour it all at once was Quiara Alegría Hudes’s The White Hot. The most astonishing sentences I read were in Che Yeun’s forthcoming Tailbone, and the horniest, queerest book which has lodged itself in my brain is Melissa Faliveno’s forthcoming Hemlock. Stop Me if You’ve Heard this One by Kristen Arnett made me most homesick for Florida, and Mariah Rigg’s Extinction Capital of the World made me most homesick for Hawai’i. Sophie Lefens’s forthcoming Her Kind felt the most like hanging out with friends when I didn’t have friends to hang out with, and I learned a new term in 2025, “competency porn,” which calls to mind Michael Jerome Plunkett’s mesmerizing, obsessively detailed Zone Rouge. Most times I’ve said “so and so needs to read this book” in a gossipy way: Melissa Febos’s The Dry Season (IMO her best); most times I’ve said “so and so needs to read this book” in a you’re-not-alone way: Trying by Chloé Caldwell. The most beautifully written and composed cookbooks I read were Samin Nosrat’s Good Things (how many cookbooks quote June Jordan?) and Hetty McKinnon’s Linger. * * * Canisia Lubrin author, Code Noir and The World After Rain I read some great books this year. Among them The Book of Records, You Will Not Kill Our Imagination, We, The Kindling, The River Has Roots and Under the Eye of the Big Bird. A year in reading can mean uncovering the nearly surreal layers of recent days and a book’s intersecting with the world in real-time. This year, it was Olive Senior’s Hurricane Watch, a poetry volume collecting one “New and Uncollected Poems” with four previously published books. Having read it in 2022, my rereading of it felt talismanic. If you’re a reader like me, you appreciate the long arc that is the life of a book in the world and how it might defy the logic of its pub season because it accompanies you through many years. As I read Hurricane Watch super typhoons swelled to terrifying girths in the East and a category five storm called Hurricane Melissa—queue memories of Katrina and Sandy—tore down the Atlantic basin with Jamaica, the poet’s island in its path, eye and all. All at once with Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic and Cuba were also hit with scale-tipping winds, carnage and heartache for those on and off island. The poems in Hurricane Watch—prescient and tightly constructed—manage playfulness without being performative. Their second-order wisdoms that should by now have swayed the human hand away from the risks of treating human life as preordained resound in Senior’s poetic world of interconnected life. * * * Oliver Munday author, Head of Household This is no exaggeration: I’ve been waiting for Maggie Gram‘s The Invention of Design for twenty years (maybe not this book exactly, but a worse version to be sure). As a graphic designer myself, I’ve found very few books that take a comprehensive look at design—and none that have done so with the rigor and wit of Maggie Gram. The book charts the ways in which design has gone from something decorative to potentially destructive, evolving from the Bauhaus to the boardroom over the last hundred or so years. Through this fascinating story, a history of the 20th century emerges, as we watch design contorting itself to serve the shifting demands of capital. Written with a sceptical Marxist bent, without ever being didactic, the book illuminates design as the overlooked phenomenon that it is: something so ubiquitous (and insidious) we often have no idea that we’re even engaging with it. Grounding her narrative with biographical sketches of figures like ceramicist Eva Zeisel and industrial designer Walter Teague, Gram gives us a deeply human sense of how design’s utopian ideals continued to be reimagined, and how we ended up endowing design with such faith to solve even society’s biggest problems. If you’ve ever wondered just how we got to this place where the facile language of Design Thinking has so deeply pervaded our culture, this is the book for you. I learned so much about something I thought I knew well. The single best book on design I’ve read. * * * Sophia Stewart Editor, The Millions Nonfiction tends to comprise the bulk of my reading diet, but my absolute favorite books of 2025 were two novels: Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice and Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair. Both are scarily smart and largely concerned with the unbridgeable gaps between our ideals, our fantasies, and our realities. Among my other Year in Reading–worthy encounters, I finally read Norman Rush’s Mating, a novel belonging to my preferred genre which my boyfriend calls “How Men and Women Relate.” I adored and cried reading linguist Julie Sedivy’s memoir Linguaphile, and made my first foray into audiobooks with my girl Martha Barnette’s impossibly delightful (and wonderfully narrated) Friends with Words. And finally, I continued to steadily work my way through Shelley Jackson’s Riddance, which is not just a masterpiece of stuttering literature, but a masterpiece, period. *