Maybe My Top Ten Books of 2025????

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Every year, I get further and further away from the concept of an actual “Top Ten” list. I read so many books (usually between 100 and 120) every year. Tons of them are fun but forgettable, a few are challenging but worth it, and lot (more than ten, for sure) are both a delight to read, and a joy to think back on months later.

In the end, it’s probably the “thinking back” effect that most influences which ten books make this somewhat-arbitrary list. Which books can I still remember details from, weeks or months after reading? Not just details of what’s between the pages, but details of where I was and how I felt when I was reading them? I’m pretty sure Jo Harkin’s The Pretender was my absolute favourite novel this year, though even that’s hard to say, but what I can say for sure is that I read a lot of it in bed in the bunkie at Coley’s Point where I was sleeping during my June getaway weekend with my friends, the Strident Women, and the feelings the book evoked in me are imprinted onto mental images of the pillowy white comforters that cover all the beds in that house. Then there was listening to the audiobook of John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis on my headphones while hosing dirt off a bunch of salvaged bricks in my daughter’s driveway to help her build a brick-and-plank bookcase. Or diving into a bookstore in Gatwick airport just before we had to go to our gate, discovering that they had a copy of A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering by Andrew Hunter Murray, and reading it all the way home on the excruciating plane ride from London to St. John’s because we bought the cheap seats and I had to sit sandwiched between two strangers — a situation only made bearable by the sharpest and funniest mystery novel I read this year.

I love the way books, and book memories, are woven into the fabric of my life. So these are ten books I read this year that I would unreservedly recommend to anyone who likes the specific type of book category they fall into, books I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of reading, and books that have stayed with me and become part of my memories of this year. Here are links to my reviews of them (list is in chronological order of when I read them during the year):

Act of Oblivion, by Robert Harris
The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, by Emma Knight
Everything is Tuberculosis, by John Green
A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering, by Andrew Hunter Murray
The Pretender, by Jo Harkin
How to Survive a Bear Attack, by Claire Cameron
Encampment, by Maggie Helwig
The Bright Sword, by Lev Grossman
Written on the Dark, by Guy Gavriel Kay
The Husbands, by Holly Gramazio

I could do a whole list of honourable mentions, but honestly, you can just scroll back through this blog and see reviews of most of what I read this year. You can also see a quick visual overview of pretty much all my 2025 reading here. I guess in the category of honourable mentions, I will just say that I didn’t have any local authors on my alleged “top ten” list this year, but my two favourite books by Newfoundland writers were Angela Antle’s The Saltbox Olive and Debbie McGee’s Cautiously Pessimistic, and that I’d also highly recommend you listen to my podcast interviews with Angela and Debbie, who are great, smart, fun women to talk to.

I’ll also say that while it wasn’t one of my top ten favourite books of the year, my favourite blog post that I wrote about a book was about All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert. Just as Liz is her most unvarnished self in her memoirs, I am my most unvarnished self in this review.

Also, when I went to look for the link to my review of Encampment, I remembered there’s a small sub-category of books that I don’t post my reviews of on this blog, simply because I get paid to review them for Spectrum magazine. These are usually books that touch somehow on the topics of women and religion. In addition to the above-linked review of Encampment, here’s a list of links to those reviews, if you like that kind of thing:

Voices of Thunder, by Naomi Baker
God’s Monsters and Women and Divination in Biblical Literature, by Esther J. Hamori
Awake, by Jen Hatmaker and I Thought it Would Be Better Than This, by Jessica N. Turner (this one is a runner-up for “favourite review I wrote this year”)
Practising Justice, by Nathan Brown
Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson, by Claire Hoffman
A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, by Tia Levings
Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America, by Talia Lavin

There Are Rivers in the Sky, by Elif Shafak

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This novel weaves together three stories, all tied together by proximity to two rivers: the Tigris and the Thames. After a prologue in the court of Mesopotamian king Ashurbanipal, we meet Narin, a Yazidi girl living in Turkey in 2014; Arthur, a young man growing up in the slums of London in the mid-1800s; and Zaleekah, a hydrologist who has just left her husband and moved into a houseboat on the river Thames in 2018.

Arthur is based on the real-life George Smith, an Englishman of working-class origins who, like the fictional Arthur, was fascinated with ancient Mesopotamia, worked for the British Museum, and had a key role in discovering and translating the Epic of Gilgamesh. Though the other two characters are not based on specific people, Narin’s story intersects with the real-life Yazidi genocide carried out by ISIS between 2014-2017. Zuleekah’s work with water and the water crisis facing many countries today, ties in to the theme of water and rivers that weaves these stories together. This was a lovely and satisfying read.

What Does it Feel Like? by Sophie Kinsella

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Full disclosure: This is the first book by Sophie Kinsella that I’ve read. I picked up a copy of one of the Shopaholic books (maybe the first one) in a bookstore years ago, read the first few pages, and thought, “This is not for me.” Something about exploring the comic side of compulsive shopping and spending just didn’t sit right with me, even though I know a lot of people see these books as thoughtful commentary on women and consumerism wrapped inside the lighthearted comedy. Anyway, it just didn’t grab me, and I never went back to her books.

But when I heard that Sophie Kinsella (real name: Madeleine Wickham) had died of brain cancer a few weeks ago, aged 55, I did have that — “Oh, how said — and she was younger than me!” reaction. And when I found out that she had written a book about the experience of having brain cancer before she died, I suddenly wanted to read it.

Sophie Kinsella was diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2022, and given the type of prognosis that usually goes along with glioblastoma, she was fortunate to make it to the end of 2025 and to have the capacity during at least some of that time to write about her experience. How Does It Feel? is a short book, framed as a novel rather than a memoir but tracking very closely with Kinsella’s own experience (in an interview, she said that changing the names of the characters and writing in third-person rather than first gave her a necessary bit of distance and the freedom to change a few details; however, Eve’s experience in the novel is essentially Sophie/Madeleine’s real-life experience).

It’s a short book, with a prologue establishing the character’s career as a writer, then jumping to her waking up in hospital after surgery with no memory of anything that preceded the surgery. She then takes us through the slow steps of recovery, the frustration of lost memories and the need to relearn simple skills, and the terror and dread of learning that this kind of tumour almost always returns despite surgery and chemo, and usually kills in less than two years. As a woman with a busy career, a loving husband, and five still-growing kids, Eve/Sophie/Madeleine writes about navigating both the practicalities of illness and also the deeper fear of losing the life she loves so much.

The book ends, as it must, on a high note, with Eve substantially recovered from surgery and chemo, having regained much of her strength, skills, and memory, on a day when she and her family take part in a 10K walk/run to raise money for a brain cancer charity. On a more meta level, it also ends on a high note, with author Sophie Kinsella having the time and ability to complete this short but powerful book.

The real ending lurks unspoken behind both the fictional and the true stories: a reprieve and brief remission may allow a person with glioblastoma to write a novel or complete a fundraising walk or run. Or, like my uncle who died more than 20 years ago of the same disease, to finish (with help) writing a long-planned family history, and make some wooden toys as Christmas gifts for the young children in the family — a Christmas still remembered with great love in our extended family, and toys that my now-grown children cherished throughout their childhood. Eventually the reprieve ended, as it always does — for my uncle, for Sophie Kinsella and for her fictional alter ego Eve. But while only a few cancers are as vicious and inescapable as glioblastoma, all of life has the same inevitable ending awaiting, though we don’t know on what page — the point, this book suggests, is in the moments we are able to live before that happens.

Babel, by R.F. Kuang

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My previous experience with R.F. Kuang began with reading Yellowface, which I was totally absorbed by while reading though had some critiques of afterwards (still absolutely recommend it though), and continued on to The Poppy War, the first volume of her fantasy trilogy. I was initially really engaged by The Poppy War but ended up deciding not to go on with the trilogy because the bleakness and darkness were just too much. Bad things need to happen to characters, but I like there to be a shred of hope, even a small one, and for me there was none in that book, though I did think it was well-written.

For a writer who is one year older than my eldest child (ie, not yet 30), Rebecca Kuang is a fantastically productive and prolific writer. The Poppy War, her first novel, was published when she was just 24. Between that and Yellowface (her first non-fantasy novel), lie not just the two sequels to The Poppy War, but also Babel, a standalone alternate history/fantasy novel set in 1830s Oxford. My mixed feelings about Kuang’s books plus my love of anything set in Oxford eventually led me to give Babel a try, and the book quickly drew me in.

As an alternate history, it’s not all that alternate — many aspects of Oxford, England, and the British Empire in this novel are factually the same as they are in real history. The main difference is a single magical element — the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s geopolitical dominance have all been fuelled by magical silver, which can be activated to make things work better, go faster, shoot farther etc etc, by incantations formed by word-pairs in different languages. This means that Britain’s most important import by far is silver (and they are willing to ravage the world and destroy other countries to get it, just as historically they were willing to ravage the world and destroy other countries to get … well, anything they wanted). But its most important institution is Babel, the name given to the Tower-of-Babel-like school of translation at Oxford, where brilliant linguistic scholars from around the world learn the magic of working silver through the power of words.

The story’s main character, Robin, is a half-Chinese, half-English child brought to England from his home in Canton and raised to become one of these scholars. When Robin finally goes to Oxford, he forms a close friendship with three other young scholars: Ramy, Victoire, and Letty (in this version of history, some women are allowed to attend Oxford in the 1830s, but only at Babel, and even then, they dress in trousers and try to pass as men when they’re out and about). Babel is also the only place in Oxford where non-white, non-English students are welcomed — besides Robin, there is Ramy, who is from India, and Victoire from Haiti, as well as several minor characters.

Much of the book is a reflection about being a person living on the uneasy margins of empire, enjoying its privileges while knowing that you and people like you are never going to be fully accepted. I found those reflections, and the general theme of struggling with the evils of imperialism and capitalism while also being complicit in them, fascinating. I’ve heard people describe this book as preachy, and I initially assumed that was just because people didn’t like the fact that it’s about people from colonies criticizing (and eventually trying to bring down) the British Empire. But on reflection, I think the problem is not Kuang’s (and her characters’) absolutely justified critiques, but the fact that they are sometimes expressed in a very unsubtle way, where a bit of nuance would have made the point more effectively. However, this is something I put down mainly to a very young author, eager to get all her talking points out there on the page through her characters’ dialogue.

Fortunately reading two previous Kuang books had prepared me not to hang on in hopes of a happy or even particularly hopeful ending (though there is one note of faint positivity at the end of this one). Indeed, any attempt to bring down the British Empire in the 19th century, whether magically or otherwise, is almost definitionally doomed to fail, so as soon as rebellion begins we know it’s not going to end well. But I did really enjoy the ride. This isn’t a flawless novel, but it did keep me engaged throughout.

Wild Hope, by Joan Thomas

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I enjoyed reading this novel about Isla, Jake, and the tortured relationship they both have with multi-zillionaire Reg Bevaqua. Jake and Reg were childhood friends, but while Jake has rejected his wealthy family’s values and gone on to become a visual artist whose work queries the environmental devastation wrought by people like his own father, Reg wholeheartedly embraces those values and rises from his working-class background to make his fortune selling bottled water. Isla is a chef and co-owner of one of those incredibly high-end restaurants in a Northern Ontario town that uses only locally-sourced ingredients. Jake and Isla fall in love, but Isla finds herself increasingly unable to break through his despair and creative stagnation. Meanwhile, Reg comes back into their lives — not originally as Jake’s former friend but as one of the most frequent customers whose patronage keeps Isla’s exclusive restaurant alive. All these converging lines of love, resentment, and anger converge when a mysterious explosion damages Reg’s country house, Jake goes missing, and Isla decides to find out what happened and where Jake is.

I’m not sure all the big thematic ideas behind this novel gelled as well as they could have, though there are some intriguing reflections here on capitalism, climate change, and complicity. But as a story on the human level it was compelling and kept me turning the pages.

The Husbands, by Holly Gramazio

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I absolutely loved this ridiculous, high-concept book about an unmarried young woman who comes home one day to discover her husband waiting in their apartment. The husband has simply spontaneously generated in the apartment, as if she’s opened the door into an alternate life in which she’s married to this man. Some time later, as she’s still adjusting, he goes up into the attic to get something and a different husband comes down, which is how Lauren realizes that her attic is somehow manufacturing husbands.

I found this story great, and very engaging. It’s a very fresh take on the “all the alternate lives you could have lived” idea, much like The Midnight Library but far less preachy and predictable — while I knew from page one how The Midnight Library was going to end, I was unable to predict right up to the very end what the solution to The Husbands would be, or where (and with whom) Lauren would end up. Yet I found the ending very satisfying when it came. It’s also a bit of a commentary on the age of online dating – not that Lauren is finding these men through Tinder; she’s getting them out of the attic, but she does go through a stage where she’s getting a new husband and quickly sending him back to the attic for a replacement every day or two, simply because she wants variety or thinks the next one might be better.

Great premise; great execution; no notes. Loved this book.

The Eights, by Joanna Miller

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I really loved this book about four young women attending Oxford University in the year 1920, just as women were being granted degrees for the first time (though with many, many strictures and stipulations that did not apply to male students, including needing to have a chaperone virtually anywhere they went outside their college, and receiving their degrees in a separate ceremony from the one in which the men were granted theirs).

It reminded me, of course, of my favourite novel, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, which is set about 15 years later than this book (and written in the year it’s set, 1935) as Harriet Vane is returning for a reunion — so Harriet would have been a contemporary, more or less, of the young women in this novel. Unlike Sayers, Miller puts her undergraduates at a real, rather than a fictional, Oxford women’s college (Sayers, living in the time she was writing about, probably felt she needed the shield of a fictional college to avoid the criticism of writing too closely about real people) and she mixes some actual historical figures in with her fictional characters. The excitement and ambiguity the girls themselves feel about being at Oxford, along with the way the recently-ended Great War still casts its shadow over everything, made this novel feel like a very realistic depiction of place and time.

We Could Be Rats, by Emily Austin

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We Could be Rats is the newest book by Emily Austin, whose novel Everyone in This Room Will Someday be Dead I read and discussed on a Bookswap! podcast episode with my daughter Emma a few years ago. Everyone in This Room was Emma’s book pick, and fits neatly into the category of books that, around that time, made me ask Emma, “Are all the young people really so sad?” to which she replied “Maybe it’s just the writers.”

While “sad young people” is a broad genre in contemporary literary fiction, some writers carry it off better than others, and Emily Austin is one of the good ones. The Sad Young Person in this novel is Sigrid, who is writing a very, very long and frequently revised suicide note explaining why she is in such despair that she is taking her own life (big content advisory on this one, obviously). The letter is addressed to her sister Margit, the one who seems to always have her act together, unlike Sigrid, who hasn’t finished high school, doesn’t have a good job or a steady relationship, and mostly seems a little lost.

There’s a great twist partway through this novel, which I felt the author could have leaned into even a little more through the narrative voice, though I can’t explain further what I mean by that without giving away the twist, and I’m not going to do that. Despite that one caveat I found this book well-written and moving.

Precipice and Munich, by Robert Harris

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These two books by Robert Harris, one of the masters of historical fiction, are not a series or even officially linked, but I read them within a few weeks of each other and it makes sense to discuss them together. Precipice is about the weeks leading up to the outbreak of WW1, focusing mainly on UK Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and his relationship with his muse/mistress/hard to say what exactly she was, the much much younger Venetia Stanley. Munich is about events leading up to the outbreak of WW2, specifically the infamous Munich Conference at which Britain, France, and Italy agreed to allow Germany to annex the Sudetenland, without inviting Czechoslovakia to the conference. This novel focuses primarily on two fictional characters, an English civil servant and a German one, who were close friends in university years and now meet again at this tense moment of international intrigue.

There’s a lot to dig into with both these novels, and I really enjoyed both of them, but the big takeaway is that I came away with a lot more respect for Neville Chamberlain (at least, as he is portrayed in this admittedly fictional, but well-informed, depiction), who is generally associated with weakness, appeasement, and generally Letting Hitler Get Away With Things. As for WW1-era Asquith, I didn’t know enough about him before this to have an opinion, but whatever opinion I might have had would certainly have gone down after reading about how this middle-aged man behaved like a lovesick teenager over a woman young enough to be his daughter, to the point of regularly compromising national security by revealing state secrets in his letters to her.

All the Way to the River, by Elizabeth Gilbert

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My experience as a reader and, I guess, fan of Elizabeth Gilbert goes all the way back to Eat, Pray, Love, which I read and loved in the very early days of this blog. (She had already published a collection of short stories, a novel, and a non-fiction book before EPL catapulted her into celebrity, because like most overnight successes, she’d been working for awhile to get there. I haven’t read any of those).

I followed her through her exploration of marriage as an institution and her own second marriage in Committed. I adored her novel The Signature of All Things, thought Big Magic had some good things to say about creativity even if the woo-woo was a little much for me. I thought her novel City of Girls was good-but-not-great (understandable after reading her latest book and knowing the conditions under which she wrote City of Girls).

But now her new memoir is out, and the question is … can I follow Liz All the Way to the River?

This book has gotten a lot of attention, a lot of praise from Gilbert’s biggest fans, a huge amount of backlash, and some very bad reviews along with some good ones. It’s the story of Gilbert’s relationship with Rayya Elias, who was initially her hairdresser and then her best friend for many years, including the entire time while Gilbert was married to her Eat, Pray, Love/Committed husband. When Rayya discovered she had terminal cancer and only six months to live, Gilbert suddenly realized that this obsessively close friendship was actually both romantic and sexual (something she had been working hard to deny to herself for several years).

She left her husband, declared undying love to Rayya, and moved in to the house Rayya was living in, a house Gilbert owned and had been keeping her in rent-free for years. Gilbert’s plan was to spend the last months of Rayya’s life taking care of her true love and walking with her “all the way to the river” (the river is DEATH). This plan went a little off the rails when Rayya, a recovering heroin and cocaine addict who had been slowly relapsing with alcohol throughout their friendship, careened into full-blown addiction again in the last months of her life — and those months went on much longer than the six months Gilbert thought she had signed on for. Things got ugly, and everything fell apart, to the point where Gilbert seriously considered murdering her abusive, addictive, dying girlfriend — not to put Rayya out of her misery, but to release Gilbert from the misery of being with her.

It’s quite the journey, and it’s told in Gilbert’s trademark style: with some raw honesty, some great prose, some snark, and a more-than-healthy dose of uncritical woo-woo. The woo begins right at the start of the book with a much-too-long scene in which Gilbert is visited by Rayya’s spirit several years after her death, and “Rayya” gives Liz permission to write this book. I’m always mind-boggled when anyone interprets messages from the dead in such an unsuspicious, naive way, but particularly when the beloved dead person is sending you messages that are so perfectly aligned with what you obviously want to hear. Did Liz Gilbert ever, at any point, think “The voice of Rayya that I think I’m hearing is maybe just my own brain taking on her voice and telling me to go ahead with the book project”???

Apparently not.

Gilbert, who takes an eclectic path to spirituality (hence her time in the ashram in India in Eat, Pray, Love, which followed several years of studying mediation with a guru), also talks to God. A lot. And God talks back — though God’s voice, like Rayya’s, sounds suspiciously close to Gilbert’s own voice, or at least what you’d think she’d like to imagine God saying. The interspersed short chapters where Gilbert records her conversations with God are the worst writing in the book: twee, cloying, and cringe-worthy. I’m sorry, maybe for someone else they were enlightening and inspiring. I also talk to God, and sometimes think maybe I’m getting answers, but I can’t imagine putting these conversations in a book for other people to read. Whenever anyone poetically writes what they think the voice of God is saying to them, I just want to turn the page, or in this case skip ahead in the audiobook till I get to the next chapter of the actual story, which is what I did.

The story itself is compelling and well told: a love story, a story of passion and obsession, a story about codependency and love addiction, a story about an addict relapsing, a story about grief, a story about confronting the darkest side of your own nature when your life spins out of control. Gilbert brings Rayya vividly to life on the page, though, for me at least, the larger-that-life, vivacious, ruthlessly honest woman she depicts sounds like a rude, self-absorbed nightmare of a person — and that was before she started using drugs again. But attraction is famously subjective, and while I didn’t find Rayya’s character appealing at all, she was vividly drawn, and it was very easy to believe that Gilbert was head-over-heels in love with her.

Gilbert is also ruthlessly honest about her own mistakes: she sincerely believes she is a sex and love addict, and that her grand passion for Rayya was all about fulfilling her own needs, and this led her to do terrible things, including enabling Rayya’s slide back into active addiction and, oh yeah, almost murdering her. Gilbert is not celebrating any of this, or treating it lightly. She acknowledges that she screwed up, in dark and terrible ways, because this is what addiction does to people — as every memoir by an addict will tell you.

The story continues beyond the rock-bottom moment where Liz plans to murder Rayya (but doesn’t): Gilbert gets her shit together just enough to tell Rayya she can’t go on living like this; Rayya goes to stay with an ex-girlfriend who takes her in only on the condition she gets clean and ruthlessly manages her withdrawal and her medical care; Liz comes to stay, reconciles with sober Rayya, and soon after Rayya dies and Liz confronts the rest of her life. If you strip out the conversations with God and dead people, and ruthlessly edit down the chapters at the end when Gilbert gets into twelve-step programs in order to stop careening from one relationship to another, and if you entirely leave out the cringeworthy chapter about Gilbert learning to care for “Lizzie,” her inner child … then you’d be left with one hell of a memoir, which is what this book should be.

Unfortunately, because of the book marketing machine and to some extent the Elizabeth Gilbert Machine, it can’t be just a hell of a memoir. It has to also be a self-help book (memo to the world: memoirs don’t have to be self-help books! Writers, you can just tell us what happened to you, without telling us what we’re supposed to learn from it — we can decide that ourselves!). Gilbert has to address herself to all the codependents and sex/love addicts and anyone who’s been pulled into someone else’s addiction or used an addiction of their own to deal with their trauma and loneliness — spreading the net as wide as possible to convince everyone that they have Something To Learn from this book, rather than just reading a compelling story and taking our own thoughts and conclusions away from it.

I can’t buy into binary thinking on this one: this isn’t either a good book or a bad book. It’s a really good memoir wrapped up in the pink cotton-candy cloud of a terrible self-help/spiritual-guidance book. I want to read the gritty, painful story of bestselling author Liz Gilbert smashing up her life on the rocks of Rayya Elias, and a little glimmer of hope at the end to tell me she made it out alive and learned something. Cut the rest.

Has she learned something? I appreciated Gilbert’s honesty in admitting that the place of inner peace she reaches by the end of this book is very similar to the place she reached at the end of Eat, Pray, Love. One day at a time, and all that. Who knows where she’ll be in another 20 years, but I hope not still stuck in the same cycle all over again.

Recognizing her own fallibility and tendency to repeat destructive patterns, should Gilbert have written yet another book that will be hailed by some of her fans as a guideline for living better? Maybe, maybe not. Should she have written (and should she profit from) a book that exploits not just her own pain and darkest moments, but the pain and darkest moments of someone she loved? Is the book exploitative? At least one member of Rayya Elias’s family has gone on the record (though unnamed) to say she thinks it is, but others are OK with it (including Dead Rayya, if you believe Gilbert’s visions).

You can read it and decide, if you like addiction memoirs in which people do terrible things under the grip of their addiction, or grief memoirs that are honest about the messiness of seeing someone all the way to the river. Or you can not read it, and that would be OK too. You can even read it and linger thoughtfully over Liz’s conversations with God … though I, personally, still recommend skipping those.