Story Joy 2025
A bountiful reading year
Dear friend,
There were a lot of horrific things in 2025, but for me, there was also a surfeit of good books. It was one of my most nourishing reading years in recent memory. It was such a good year that I have a whole shelf of “runners up” that would have easily made the top 10 another year.
I started the year in the mood for dark literary fantasy, and set about making a “book menu” for the year that heavily featured this kind of thing. Although I phased out of this mood as the seasons turned warmer, the mood returned with the autumn and my menu got good mileage—as a result, I probably read more fantasy and speculative fiction this year than I have since I was a kid (albeit of a different flavor1). There’s something so compelling about weird and wonderful world-building that doesn’t shy away from the shadows, especially these days. My top list is dominated by this.
I read 77 books and am featuring about 402 of them here. The speculative fiction/fantasy crowd are mixed in with standout classics (Moby-Dick), historical fiction, French comics, nature writing, postmodern puzzleboxes, short stories, translated fiction, and more. I’m including condensed versions of my Goodreads reviews for the first 10 or so, with links to the full reviews (where they exist) in the titles. Enjoy, and chat up books in the comments!
Top reads
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
At the beginning of 2025, something told me it was finally time to read Moby Dick. I’m so glad I did. Such a rich book, and ahead of its time with its genre-bending structure and meta flights of fancy. Any given chapter might contain a comic set piece, lyrical scene-setting, dramatic monologue, actual script for a scene from a play, natural history (the famous whale facts) or anthropological monograph, historical commentary, moral allegory, soul-wrenching encounter with grief, or existential spiral—and all of it done with utter panache. (The whale facts are actually not boring, my friends! Some of them happen to be wrong…but it’s all virtuostic storytelling and a fascinating time capsule.) Despite the violence of the subject matter, there was real, nuanced respect for the creatures of the deep (tragically flawed by a 19th-century sense of infinite abundance), and an equal amount of respect for the craft of whaling and what it demanded of its practitioners. Plus, plumbing the depths of the human psyche.
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
For a fan of the surreal, the lyrical, landscape, and wordcraft (i.e. me), this was such a treat. It had strong Dickens vibes + a setting worthy of Lewis Carroll + overtones of Terry Pratchett. The setting, the gothic, sprawling, inscrutable castle of Gormenghast and the surrounding woods and marshes, is a major character in itself, and its rooms and rooftops and stairways are described in the same kind of exquisite topographical detail as a natural landscape by a nature writer.
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Sola (translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem)
You might call this book psychedelic, but in earth and flesh tones. It's twisted and twisty and full of suffering, resilience, brutality, familial and female bonds, lust, life and death. Grounded in place and Catalan folklore; a house that is a character; full-blooded magical realism; purgatorial ghosts and shapeshifting demons. The kind of wild ride I'm on board for. The translated prose was impeccable.
Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
This was an unusual style for C.S. Lewis, without much allegory until the last quarter or so. I savored the complex heroine, the invention of a “barbarian” city-state sharing a world with ancient Greece and ambiguous gods, and the beautiful, economical prose. The spiritual landscape of the book is nicely blended with grappling more generally with what it's like to be human and to love.
On the Calculation of Volume I-III by Solvej Balle (translated from Danish by Barbara Haveland)
Condensed review for book I: I felt strangely in sync with this book: I deliberately read it on the day on which it’s set, the repeating-time-loop 18th of November, and it’s also set in France. But there’s more to it than that. Despite its gentleness and potential for nebulousness, the story had me riveted. The narrator sees the world the way I do—interested by mundane detail in an almost metaphysical way, feeling for and trying to articulate nuances in the textures of a day, both physical and psychological. Lots to reflect on about how relationships (of all levels of intimacy) shape our lives and who we are, and what becomes of them (and by extension, our identity) without shared memory or progression. Book II and Book III reviews
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
This was a big, rich, messy, heavy story. I was a big fan of the gorgeous, bizarre myth-infused fantasy setting with magical realism overtones, but what will really stay with me is the immersion in the chaotic, cruel mess that is human society, and the bitter yearning and miraculous resilience of coming of age in that mess.
The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin
What a gorgeous, atmospheric, wise book. Mostly setting and character, artfully composed in a fairly small space from nature, culture, religion, and physical landscape, but equally satisfying story in the end. Darkness and light were overtly symbolized but in such a beautiful way.
The Locked Tomb series (Gideon the Ninth; Harrow the Ninth; Nona the Ninth) by Tamsyn Muir
Gideon the Ninth: Such a fun and—one could say—acrobatic read: an off-the-wall, spirited, hilarious protagonist; fascinating worldbuilding that blends necromantic and chivalric fantasy with sci-fi; writing that swings with ease between pun-tastic irreverence and gothic, sensory-rich prose; a seriously impressive grasp on human anatomy and everything that can be gross about it; a varied cast of well-drawn characters with satisfying arcs; on top of all that, a demented Agatha Christie-style plot. I've never read anything quite like it. (Harrow and Nona each has its own spin on these features. Ever awaiting the final book…)
Les Vieux Fourneaux series by Wilfrid Lupano & Paul Cauuet
This is a French comic book series, roughly translatable as “The Old Codgers,” about three old friends (a trade unionist, an anarchist, and a one-time rugby player) and their antics. It is so well done—humor, art, narrative details, dialogue, pacing, characters, intrigue, intergenerational and class conflict, rural French + Parisian setting—and so French. For example, in book 2 there’s a running gag about a Parisian boulangerie chain upselling baguettes with fancy names, and it ends up being a central plot point. Ha! I bought and read all 8 volumes in French and savored them all. (I believe English translations exist.)
Runners up for pure enjoyment
If on a winters night a traveler by Italo Calvino
This is how you lose the time war by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
Runners up for interest and excellence
L’Etranger by Albert Camus (in French!)
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Possession by A.S. Byatt
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
Here by Richard McGuire
Antarctica by Claire Keegan
Readalongs with Footnotes and Tangents
If you don’t already know, Simon Haisell runs a treasure trove of a readalong community. He does War and Peace and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy every year, and in 2025 he started adding new books. They were all stellar.
The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell
A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
Hidden gems
Afterworlds by Ronald Turnbull of About Mountains
Juste une dent en or (Just one gold tooth) by Léa Anaïs Machado
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
Challenging but worthwhile
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Candide by Voltaire
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
Excellent classic rereads
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Thought provoking nonfiction
Poetry as Enchantment by Dana Gioia
The Lion’s World by Rowan Williams
At-One-Ment by Thomas McConkie
Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane
Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
Struggled
Read the linked reviews to find out why these didn’t land for me.
Ex-Libris by Ross King
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Bonus: Throwback to October spooky reads
Stats
77 books
22,963 pages (avg 298)
Longest: Lonesome Dove (964p)
Format: 52% audio only, 11% audio+book, 27% printed, 10% ebook
Oldest: Paradise Lost (1667)
Mean year published: 1984
Published in 21st century: 62% (48 books)
Published in 2025: 9% (7 books)
Translated books: 19% (15 books)
French language books: 17% (13 books)
In 2026, my main goal is just to keep reading for pleasure as I swim through the fire hose of my first year as a professor. But in an ideal world, I would try again on the goal I set and fail at every year to read more poetry collections. I’d also like to read one or two more French books to hold on to that skill. The dark literary fantasy mood may be mostly at rest now, but I’m sure speculative fiction will still find its way in. I think I will also naturally want to read more books about ecology and evolution (already working on On the Origin of Species at the moment) and how to be a professor.
Happy reading!
My childhood fantasy diet included books/authors like Harry Potter, Tamora Pierce, Eragon, Warriors (the cats), Shannon Hale, and a myriad of other middle-grade series. These were so fun at the time, but as my reading tastes matured I kind of gave up on fantasy for a while. Then I began to rediscover it—Lord of the Rings and Ursula K LeGuin’s speculative fiction in my early twenties, and more recently, the increasingly varied field of literary and off-the-wall fantasy and speculative fiction (both classic and new) which is just as concerned with wordcraft and moral imagination and character as it is with magic systems. I’ve now embraced the fact that imaginative, fantastical storytelling is thoroughly in my blood, much more than a childhood phase.
Actually, several of the featured titles are actually series, so I’m probably covering closer to 50-something.
Great list. Lonesome Dove is one of my favourites
Great list of reads Anne!