Spring Retrospective

A late look back at my best reads of 2025

In the category of better late than never, although we’re already a quarter of the way into 2026, this weekend I’m glancing backward to tell you about some of my favorite reads of 2025, which I never properly did. In particular, as I looked over my list, I was curious about a question that rose at the end of 2024: Is audio now giving me more enjoyment as a reader than print?

The spring forsythia hasn’t bloomed yet, so maybe it’s not too late for a roundup of last year’s reading!

I asked that question because when I rounded up my favorite books of 2024, I realized something odd. Four of the five were books I had listened to on audio. Was that just a fluke, I wondered, or would it happen again in 2025?

Before I answer that question, here’s a look at my favorite reads of 2025. I read only half as many books for pleasure (as opposed to research) as I had in 2024, but five of them still rose to the top as books I really loved and would recommend to all of you. There were many others I enjoyed and only a couple that were total misses.

This year, four of my five faves were novels. I don’t know why I had especially good luck choosing what, for me, were winners in a year when I read half as many books. It may be because I chose a couple of novels by writers I already know I like—George Saunders and Michael Chabon. Both are excellent craftsmen who create fully realized characters and quirky but deeply moving situations.

Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo sat on my shelf for a long time before I finally committed to it because I knew it was going to be sad—the story of President Lincoln mourning the death of his young son Willie. But there is so much more to Lincoln in the Bardo than that. It’s a galloping, supernatural comitragedy that’s nothing short of brilliant. Now I hear it’s being adapted for film, which is going to require an equally brilliant director to pull it off.

Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue aligns more with the tradition of Middlemarch, a sweeping narrative that knits together a diverse cast of characters all connected by place and circumstance. Chabon takes his time with each of their stories, making Telegraph Avenue a more luxurious read—just the kind of novel I love to spend time with. In both cases, I read these novels as they needed to be read, in big chunks, not little bites, which I’m convinced always makes a book better, even a book you don’t end up loving.

Daniel Mason’s North Woods also makes my list of the year’s favorites. I totally forgave the fact that it was a little bit uneven—the strongest chapter, in my opinion, tells the story of sisters Mary and Alice, the daughters of an 18th-century apple grower—because it was so original in its telling of the many people who found their way to a house in the north woods of Massachusetts. Like Lincoln, it too has a supernatural element. Flipping through North Woods in order to write this for you makes me want to read it all over again, it’s so richly constructed not only with stories but also with ephemera like layers of tissue paper between treasures packed in a traveler’s chest.

Orbital was one of those books everyone seemed to be talking about in 2024, when it won the Booker Prize, so I don’t feel like I’m telling you anything you don’t already know when I point to it as one of the best books I read last year (a year late). It’s a simple, thoughtful, quick read. What made it compelling to me was the unique setting—the international space station—and its meditative nature. I don’t think any other writer of realistic fiction has taken me into outer space before. The trip was fascinating and thought-provoking.

And speaking of looking at Earth from outer space, the best non-fiction read of the year for me was David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet. He lays out more clearly and convincingly than perhaps any other current author the situation we’re in, living on a rapidly changing planet—our only home. He does so with seriousness but also, importantly, optimism. It’s the one book I read in 2025 that I went so far as to say everyone should read.

As to that question of print and audio: I reported that in 2024, one-third of my list comprised books I read on audio. In 2025, that figure was only 12%. I’m really not sure why. Maybe I was listening to too many podcasts about trees! While the vast majority of my favorites in 2024 suggested that somehow audio might be influencing my enjoyment of what I read, 2025 did not confirm a trend. Every book on my favorites list was a book I read in print.

Print requires time set aside. You can’t read it while you’re driving or walking or gardening or cleaning the house. You have to give it your full attention. In turn, it rewards you with entry into an alternate universe. That’s not always easy to achieve in our go-go-go culture. I wouldn’t give up that experience of losing myself, undivided, for the greatest audiobook narrator.

Finally, this wouldn’t be a retrospective post without thanking all of you for your contributions to my reading life over the past year. Though 2025 was, out of necessity, light on pleasure reading for me, many of you contributed to that treasured time. Mark was my most influential reading buddy last year, sending me to The Hunter, Audition, and State of Paradise. And Susan stuck with me and pulled me through a long reading of Proust’s Swann’s Way. Recommendations from many of you are sitting on my TBR list for the future as well. A special thanks goes out to everyone who stepped into the gaps to write guest posts for me: Rebecca Stultz, Joanne Battipaglia, David Nash, Diane Charney, and Rita McCleary. (I’m always open to readers who want to write a guest post!)

We now return to our regularly scheduled reading year. Enjoy!