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Books of 2025

I did something I’ve maybe never done before this year: I read an entire series in the same year. Normally I try to spread out a series a bit more, to savor the books and stay engaged with the characters. But this year I read Hugh Howey’s Silo series with only about a month between the books.

I also joined The StoryGraph this year. It’s a Goodreads alternative that is independent of Amazon and, so far, has a lot less review bombing and competition for my attention. It reminds me of what Goodreads was back in the early days. You can follow me there if you want.

Wool, Shift, and Dust: Hugh Howey

I enjoyed this series and I’m glad Apple TV took the time to make the show and improve on a few things. Like a lot of science fiction, I suppose, the characters in Howey’s world are subordinate to the idea propelling the story. In this case, the circumstances and technical detail are well fleshed out into impressive detail. The twists and turns of how exactly people came to live in this silo are fascinating and Howey has a clever way of letting you forget details only to be reminded of them entire books later. The suspense and mystery of the whole world is compelling and had me tearing through these rather long books very quickly.

The Apple TV series improves on a lot of the human elements. Character motivations are more transparent, and the social dynamics more complete. In short, I recommend both!

Little Eyes, Samanta Schweblin

My first encounter with Schweblin and her translator Megan McDowell was Schweblin’s first English release, Fever Dream. I still think about that book often and I suspect Little Eyes will be no different. In its original Spanish, the book is called Kentukis, for the cute little digital friends that are the main characters of the book. They’re sort of like the robots you might see in a movie like Mitchells vs. the Machines or Rashida Jones’s companion in the show Sunny (which I quite enjoyed).

The difference in this book is that these bots are more like pets than friends or helpers, and they’re driven not autonomously, but anonymously: by individual operators you’ll never meet, but who will get to know plenty about you. It’s a fascinating and haunting meditation on surveillance, voyeurism, and anonymity.

A lot of journalists and public intellectuals spill a lot of digital ink these days trying to decipher what AI means for capitalism, the web, and different industries at the intersection of both. An important conversation to have. Here, Schweblin sort of skips all that and understands that people still want something to do, and imagines a fairly logical conclusion for what we’ll do with technology we basically have, how it will liberate us, and how it could imprison us. It’s prescient, creepy, suspenseful and, at times, tragic.

I’m now waiting in horror for Meta to “invent” the Kentuki IRL and convince whole swaths of the world it’s something we need. Go read this book first so you can prepare. Meanwhile, I’ll be digging into Mouthful of Birds.

All Fours, Miranda July

Where to even start with this one. It’s really hard to describe All Fours without spoiling it. Here’s Wikipedia’s attempt:

The novel follows a 45-year-old perimenopausal woman who, after having an extramarital affair during a road trip, has a sexual awakening.

It’s accurate, I suppose, but every word of that pithy summary is doing a lot of work. As my friend Joe put it: it is more and less than what actually happens in the book.

Storygraph’s summay says:

A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Also true. Also not giving the thrill of this book enough credit because as Danielle put it: It’s an impossible book to describe.

So I’m going to instead admonish anybody who might actually read this blog (thanks!) to go read the book. If you like unreliable narrators, messy characters, or just a fun romp through an author’s mind, this is for you. It’s quite a trip.

Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu

This one has been on my list for ages and I’m glad I finally got around to reading it. It’s another book that is difficult to describe without spoiling it. Willis Wu is a delightfully complicated character, trapped and limited by his own understanding of what’s possible as much as he is the real constraints and stereotypes he needs to escape. I loved every page.

There was also a TV adaptation of this book for Hulu. It took the characters in a bit different of a direction, and I enjoyed that as well.

Goodbye Vitamin, Rachel Khong

I think I actually read this book in 2024 but maybe it was early 2025.

Khong takes a topic that refuses to be funny and entertaining — the long death that is Alzheimer’s Disease — and accomplishes both while honoring the tragedy of the experience of living with and suffering from the condition as well. It’s one of those books that can make you laugh and cry on the same page. The family dynamics are well drawn as were the conflicts among and within each character.

Plus, you’ll never see endives at the grocery store without exclaiming “ohn-deevs!” in your head (or, maybe aloud).

Belonging, Norah Krug

Norah Krug is a German-American. She was born in Karlsruhe and grew up there in the late 1970s and 80s. As she aged into adolescence and adulthood she began to realize that being a German in the late 20th Century was complicated by War II. When she moved to New York, her accent gave her away. Eventually, she began a relentless pursuit of understanding her family’s relationship with the Jewish community in Karlsruhe and the extent to which any of them were complicit in the Nazi party’s atrocities, and how it shapes the meaning of “heimat,” homeland.

I loved this illustrated memoir (graphic memoir?) so much. I remember learning in middle school German class that the word heimat was complicated. Something to do with the war, nationalism, and a weaponization of the idea of a homeland by the Nazis. If I’m honest, it didn’t really connect with my 7th grade mind. In 2002 (when American flags flew in multiples from most windows at home) I remember asking my Bavarian host family why nobody in Germany flew a flag. Because of the war, they said, as if they shouldn’t need to elaborate further. This book brings all of that ambiguous discomfort together. It describes how the shame of the past still makes calling Germany a heimat uncomfortable, and how to reconcile feeling and history with calling the place and culture a kind of home.

Get this book. Give yourself time to read it and plan some walks in the woods to reflect on it, with a dog if you have one.

Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver

I false started this book once a couple years ago and it’s since sat on our bookshelf staring me down. I just couldn’t get into it the first time I tried. I almost gave up again this time around, too. It’s a slow burn at first with maybe too much establishment in the first hundred pages. After that, though, the book takes of with the familiar Kingsolver richness.

The level of detail she puts into describing the methods, tools, and settings of Dellarobia’s home, community and the occupations of both sheep farming and entomology is incredible. In particular, the parts focused on the work of lepidopterists working in the field read like an ethnography set to prose.

As with many of her other works, she also has some keen observations about poverty and privilege in Flight Behavior. She sharply contrasts the high tech lifestyles of the scientists and college students with the sheep farmers in Dellarobia’s family, who can scarcely afford to keep the land, equipment, and animals they need to earn their living, and live in circumstances designed to trap them in that poverty. Some critics may say she over did it, but I think she handled it with the appropriate humanity and rigor.

Barbara Kingsolver remains one of my favorite writers, and I am glad this was the book I ended the year on. I look forward to reading one of her other books in 2026. Maybe Lacuna? Demon Copperhead?

#barbaraKingsolver #books #charlesYu #hughHowey #mirandaJuly #norahKrug #rachelKhong #reading #samantaSchweblin