The 8 best books of 2025 (so far)...
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TLDR: The world is crazy, and I am reading.
So far this year, I’ve started 32 books.
As a reminder, I read about 100 books a year, but I start a lot more of them. (See this post to understand why only martyrs finish all their books!)
In 2024, for example, I started 137 books. Of the ones I did finish, some were truly golden. See these round-ups of my 2024 faves here and here.
I would say that, on balance, I’ve had a great reading year so far, and am happy about a lot of the stuff going into my brain, swirling around, and making me think in new ways.
So far, here are my favorites:
What I Ate in One Year, Stanley Tucci
To be clear, I didn’t know anything about Stanley Tucci.
But then I was at an airport bookstore on a layover in Rome last month and I saw the big euro version of his new book. Thick, heavy. I remembered an Insta post of my friend Rory reading it on a beach in Sag Harbor last summer. I bought it.
Loved!
A diary of his life over the course of a year, it centers itself on food (spoiler: a lot at home, some in amazing restaurants, and almost never on movie sets). But the key is that the food diary is just a great organizing principle to carry the reader along with his interesting life as a well-connected actor in London with young kids, on a second marriage to a literary agent who is the sister of Emily Blunt. (Emily and John come to London a lot and they all do a lot eating).
After finishing, I did my thing, where I gorged on his Wikipedia, watched Conclave (great!) and immediately got his earlier book, Taste: My Life Through Food. Unfortunately, I’m still trying to get through that one. Without a good organizing principle, and with a lot of childhood stuff I find draggy, I’m finding it tougher.
(Side-note: A small call-out to organizing principles, which I love. Julie and Julia? The Jane Austen Book Club? Andy Cohen’s diaries? More of these!)
Things I Don’t Want to Know, Deborah Levy
The Cost of Living, Deborah Levy
Real Estate, Deborah Levy
I also knew about nothing about Deborah Levy.
Turns out she’s a bang-up powerhouse two-time Booker nominee writer, and this trilogy of books brings together a series of essays about her life as a writer and mother living (mostly) in an old apartment block at the top of a steep hill in London.
Background: Technically, I started Real Estate last year on my Kindle, ultimately getting distracted by something else (which is easier on Kindle, I find.)
Then, a couples months ago, I was in California and picked up a library copy of The Cost of Living in hardback to take to the mountains. This time, it clicked. As soon as I started, I wanted to finish it immediately. Instead, I went back in time, at the beginning of what is called “The Living Trilogy” with Things I Don’t Want to Know.
I don’t think reading in order is strictly necessary, especially since I did find the first the weakest of the three, but I do think reading them in order made it all that much richer.
I can’t wait to read more of her work.
The Abandoners: Of Mothers and Monsters, Begona Gomez Urzaiz
The concept of this one is right up my alley: a great writer explores the weird side of motherhood, in essays, dead (other) writers included.
From the back cover:
During the pandemic, trapped at home with young children and struggling to find creative space to write, journalist Begoña Gómez Urzaiz became fixated on artistic women who were able to overcome both society’s judgement and their own maternal instincts in order to leave their children. More than anything, she was fascinated by her own prejudice towards these women, so clearly tied up in a much wider cultural bias.
Using famous examples including Doris Lessing, fictional ones such as Anna Karenina, and interrogating modern trends like Momfluencers, Begoña reveals what our judgement of these women tells us about our judgement of all women.
I found this fascinating, and learned so much about the lives or some of my favorite writers. The author also shares great reflections on her own life as a mom and writer in Barcelona. It was only when I was deep into the paperback that I realized that it was originally written in Spanish (duh, says it’s a translation on the cover), so I ended up ordering that version as well, although I haven’t received it yet. The author is well-known, and has a podcast which I’ve also been checking out.
The Sparrow, Maria Doria Russell
So, this one is a story.
Twenty years ago, I spent three weeks in India, followed by one week in Slovakia, both doing some work for a nonprofit. After it all, I went to Budapest. I don’t remember much about my decision making at the time, but I know I was tired, and I hadn’t slept much for a month, and so I spent an entire week in the top floor room of a tall hostel outside the city, reading and sleeping.
I had been to Budapest before, so I didn’t feel the need to be all touristy. (To be clear, I never feel this need. I’ve also been to 60+ countries. Related?) This was a good thing, since I wasn’t. On the one (maybe two) days I actually got out of my tiny bed at the hostel, I went into Budapest because I had promised to take something to someone’s Grandma. I was not looking forward to this. The talking, the confusion, the long afternoon with an old person I didn’t know. I guess the universe granted me my wish (?), because the Grandmother wasn’t there, and pretty soon I was in a taxi, headed back to my hostel. At some point in all this confusion, I left the book on the backseat of the taxi. There is an image of it, on the backseat, seared in my brain all these years later.
For twenty years I’ve had the thought, on occasion, that I should try to find out what happened in the end. Since time has passed, and I read a lot of freaking books, this would mean I would need to start at the beginning all over again.
So I did.
I loved it, although did feel a tiny drag in the third quarter, and it was insanely fascinating to see the futuristic premonitions of a book about space written in 1997 about a world 30 years on come to pass and not pass, in equal measure.
I plan to try to sequel.
Lucy by the Sea, Elizabeth Strout
Lucy by the Sea is the fourth slim book in a series by Elizabeth Strout, and I fell for this one hard. I’ve read the one other Elizabeth Strout one everyone has, and I liked it, but wasn’t in love with this.
For more, Lucy by the Sea was different.
Lucy, the title character, is a famous author with a prickly ex husband she is still very close with, and during the pandemic they decide to leave New York and go to a house in Maine and quarantine together. Just spectacular writing and characters and setting, all in one. I couldn’t wait to start reading the others in the series. (I’m on #3 now, Oh William!)
The Wedding People, Alison Espach
The set up for this one— a woman who’s at the end of her rope goes to a fancy hotel to kill herself, only to stumble upon a wedding party, there for the whole week, and a bride who is dead-set on making sure she stays alive — is great.
That said, I am putting this on the list with a big caveat.
That caveat is this: the first half was great. Funny, sharp characters. Commercial fiction, yes, but well written and delightful. Rip-roaringly funny at times. And then the second half was…okay?
This is one of those books I’d love to talk to others about, because I’m so curious what the folks who loved it thought about the ending.
I love the idea of a forgotten book traveling around a city in the back of a taxi cab. This sounds like a great set up for a book all on its own. I love narratives that are loosely knit together, sometimes with similar characters and sometimes with an object that appears again and again. it just up, ends the expectations of and then what happened after that? And I hear what you’re saying about a second half of a book not fulfilling expectations. I just finished Chasing Beauty which is the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner and actually in that case the first half of the book before she started building her museum was in my opinion a lot of detail about foreign travel— where they ate who they ate with and other things that struck me as irrelevant to the main story. I feel that a lot of books should be 200 pages, but the demands of the publishing industry dictate otherwise.
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