2025’s best reads in review

During 2025, a tumultuous and difficult year for many, what grounded me most were the stories I read — pages containing tales of lives parallel and opposite to mine. Here are a couple of stand out works that defined the year for me:

“Angel Down” by Daniel Kraus

Daniel Kraus takes an inventive leap of faith with his thriller novel “Angel Down,” and it certainly pays off. The book is written in one long, unrelenting sentence. Each paragraph begins with the word “and.” The structure truly works for this book, which chronicles a soldier’s experience during the Great War, and reminds the reader of the emotional toll of engaging in a seemingly endless conflict. 

The carnage of war, Kraus writes, is “a sentence in a book careening without periods, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, once begun, can’t ever be stopped, a sentence doomed to loop back on itself to form a terrible black wheel that, sooner or later, will drag each and every person to their grave.” 

Gruesome and sparing the reader no details, “Angel Down,” is reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war novel, “Slaughterhouse Five.” Like in Vonnegut’s work, the disjointed form does most of the heavy lifting in imparting the tragedy of the era on readers. 

Though I was uncertain of where the book was going to go at every turn, I found myself hooked nonetheless. “Angel Down” is not a book for everyone — it’s not easily digestible or breezy. With its unconventional structure and gory content, it’s also often a rather frustrating read. But whatever it lacks in palatability, “Angel Down” completely made up for in memorability and impact. 

“Audition” by Katie Kitamura

“Audition,” a suspense novel by Katie Kitamura, may be short — but it’s mighty. The book is split into two halves, two distinct storylines that quickly bleed into one another. Depicting the unwinding of an amorphous relationship between the unnamed main character and a mysterious figure named Thomas, it packs in complex questions in just 208 pages. 

To what extent are we just actors in our lives going through the motions of what we think we should be doing? How truly defined are our relationships? What does it mean to be a mother? A lover? A friend? Kitamura will leave you asking all of these questions and perhaps even seeing those around you under a completely new light with this book.  

Reading this book felt incredibly intimate. I got a glimpse into this messy world of Kitamura’s creation. I often felt like I was standing right in the scenes described in her pages, hearing dialogue first hand and even participating in it. It felt like there was no barrier of separation between me, the characters and Kitamura. 

“Tom Lake” by Anne Patchett

Anne Patchett’s “Tom Lake” is an incredibly addicting and all-consuming read. It is moving yet thought provoking. It’s a romance novel, but more than anything, it’s a study of love. In “Tom Lake,” mother Lara Kenison recounts the story of her summer fling with famous actor Peter Duke to her enthralled daughters. Simultaneously, the book examines brotherly love, marriages and motherhood — as well as many other manifestations of human connection. 

Patchett creates a perfectly harmonious plot-driven book that has the power to completely reverse your perspective on love. She places the concept of a “fling” under a microscope, conveying an incredibly nuanced perspective on the significance of the passage of time in a relationship: love can be life-changing but not everlasting.

As someone who’s often (unjustly) wary and avoidant of romance novels, I was pleasantly surprised by this read. “Tom Lake” was so much more complex and impactful than I ever could have imagined a love story to be. I felt so moved by the intertwining storylines Patchett laid out that I was devastated to let the characters go on the last page. 

“Martyr” by Kaveh Akbar

As the title suggests, Kaveh Akbar’s “Martyr” is an incredibly stunning work that centers around death and martyrdom. Telling the story of poet Cyrus Shams’ reckoning with personal loss and purpose, this book is infused with humanity and contends with questions we have all asked ourselves about morality. What is the point of death? Is it selfish to want your death to matter?

Though the ending falls a bit flat, coming across as unnecessary and forced, up until those last 50 or so pages the book feels like a roller coaster you could spend your whole life on — new, exciting, but also eerily familiar. 

The experience of reading this book was my favorite part about it. Right until the end, I was in a state of pure enjoyment. Yes, the book lent thoughtful personal reflections and information about different cultural treatments of death. But to me, what remains almost six months after reading “Martyr” are the memories associated with it, when I flipped the pages on the New Jersey Transit on the way to see my grandfather or while riding the B train on my way to school in the Bronx. I carried this book everywhere, despite its hefty hard cover, because I was that addicted to being in the story. 

What books will 2026 bring? Will I finally finish “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace? Will I tackle the stack of Christmas-gifted books on my desk? Is it a year of historical fiction? A year of memoirs, perhaps? I’m not entirely sure. But either way, I certainly hope it is a year filled with more wonderful stories. 

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