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2025, A Year in Reading: Best Books of the Year

I read 183 books in 2025, a little less than last year but still in the same ballpark. Despite—or perhaps because—of this breadth of reading, I find that I'm struggling to sum up my year in books. 2025 was a good reading year, with lots of satisfying reads in a variety of genres. But it has not been a year that cohered around any of one of those genres, around a particular series, or around one or even a handful of books. The books that have lingered with me over the course of the year have been esoteric and even unique, especially when it comes to the fantastic genres. A lot of the books in the list below are what I'd consider science fiction or fantasy, but only one of them is a title I expect to see on awards lists in the coming months. The others are too weird, too experimental, and sometimes just published by the wrong people. All of which is to say, to any of the editors who have queried me over the last month for essays or paragraphs about the state of the genre, or even...
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The Great Tolkien Reread: A Long-Expected Party

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"Eleventy-First Birthday" by Nicole Gustafsson He stepped down and vanished. There was a blinding flash of light, and the guests all blinked. When they opened their eyes Bilbo was nowhere to be seen. One hundred and forty-four flabbergasted hobbits sat back speechless. Old Odo Proudfoot removed his feet from the table and stamped. Then there was a dead silence, until suddenly, after several deep breaths, every Baggins, Boffin, Took, Brandybuck, Grubb, Chubb, Burrows, Bolger, Bracegirdle, Brockhouse, Goodbody, Hornblower, and Proudfoot began to talk at once. We begin the tale of The Lord of the Rings with a chapter that quite deliberately recalls and reverses the opening events of The Hobbit . Instead of an unexpected party, there is a long-expected one. Instead of Bilbo rushing out of his home towards adventure without even a single handkerchief, there is a minutely-planned and carefully-orchestrated plan of disappearance and departure. And instead of the incursion of weirdn...
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Review: Orlanda by Jacqueline Harpman, translated by Ros Schwartz, at Locus

One of the unexpected curiosities of growing older is watching the train of "rediscovered" books come back around for a second try. In my teens, I read a book called I Who Have Never Known Men , by a Belgian-Jewish author named Jacqueline Harpman. A gender-based dystopia about a young girl who grows up in an underground bunker with a group of women, it was a dark, elliptical novel (one that many critics have tied to Harpman's experience of fleeing the Nazis as a child). I didn't particularly get on with it, but it has lingered with me for decades. Flash forward an undisclosed number of years, and I Who Have Never Known Men has become a BookTok sensation and a runaway bestseller. Naturally the response by publishers is to see if the rest of Harpman's voluminous catalogue might prove a similar hit. They are now testing the waters by reissuing a novel that was already translated into English in the 90s, Orlanda . Pitched at a very different emotional register than I...
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The Great Tolkien Reread: Introduction

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"The Doors of Durin" by J.R.R. Tolkien This tale grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it. It was begun soon after The Hobbit was written and before its publication in 1937; but I did not go on with this sequel, for I wished first to complete and set in order the mythology and legends of the Elder Days, which had then been taking shape for some years. I desired to do this for my own satisfaction, and I had little hope that other people would be interested in this work, especially since it was primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues. It's Hannukah, and for me this has always been a time to revisit The Lord of the Rings . I don't reread it every year, but always when the candles are lit and the days grow darker, I find myself feeling the urge to return to this story....
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House of Open Wounds, Days of Shattered Faith, Lives of Bitter Rain by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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After I published my effusive review of Adrian Tchaikovsky's City of Last Chances , I received a comment from Tchaikovsky on twitter noting that he intended to continue writing in the novel's world without continuing directly from its story. This made sense to me, both because the breadth and complexity of the world revealed in City could clearly support many different stories in many different settings, and because the novel that City most reminded me of, Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, had similarly spawned standalone sequels in separate settings. Two years later, we are four books deep into what has become known as the Tyrant Philosophers sequence (with a fifth book coming next year), and the project that seems to be emerging from this series feels more complex than what I had originally imagined. While each of the novels in this series stands alone and has a different setting and protagonist to the others, there are progressions that become clear when you r...
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Recent Reading: Big Time by Jordan Prosser

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There's something almost irresistibly appealing about the musical biopic. It combines melodrama and genuine accomplishment. It conveys profound importance—this is about music, after all, the kind of music that worms its way into people's minds and hearts and becomes part of the set dressing of their psyches—while at the same time being unbelievably trivial and soapy, reveling in the bed-hopping and drug habits of a bunch of self-absorbed people of moderate talent. It was almost inevitable that fiction writers would begin embracing the form, as seen in books-turned-TV-series like Daisy Jones and the Six , but I don't think I expected science fiction to get in on the action. Or, at least, not in the form that Jordan Prosser has done in his debut novel Big Time , which is making its way to UK publishers this year after its Australian publication in 2024. For Prosser, the gargantuan importance of art, and the silliness of the people who make it, are both shades with which he i...
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Reviews: The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar, and Moonflow by Bitter Karella, at Locus

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I waited most of September for my review of The End of the World As We Know It to appear on Locus 's website, and now my two other reviews from the August issue have both turned up in quick succession. First up, The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar, a Ruritanian fantasy in which a court magician must save a pair of star-crossed young lovers. There's always been a certain "you know it when you see it" quality to YA fiction, and all the more so in the decades since it has become popular for adult readers to consume it alongside its intended audience. Louis Sachar, author of the beloved YA classic Holes (1998) as well as a raft of novels for younger readers, describes The Magician of Tiger Castle as his first novel for adults. Which of course encourages the critic to read the novel with an eye towards identifying those aspects of it that distinguish one reading category from another. Is it simply that Anatole, our narrator, is a man nearing middle age, a self-d...
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