The best books I read in 2025

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Here are the most memorable of the books I read this year, listed in roughly the order I read them. It seems like reading 19th century authors was a theme in the culture this year, and I ended up participating in this trend without really planning to: Twain, Stevenson, Whitman were some of my highlights. Fiction Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest. I re-read all of Hammett’s novels this year, and this, his first, held up the best. The later and better-known books seem more and more artifacts of their time: The Maltese Falcon is implausible and its plot famously incomprehensible; The Thin Man‘s clever repartee feels empty. Red Harvest has both a harsh portrait of the breakdown of state capacity and the effects of social violence (the setting is based on Butte, Montana) and a truly harrowing detective plot (the narrator suspects himself). Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I read this in tandem with Percival Everett’s James, which re-narrates the same events from a different perspective. Despite all the accolades for James, Twain’s original is, still, the better book. What is remarkable is how much the flaws and virtues of the two novels mirror each other: both start strong, with an immediately captivating narrative voice, and then fall apart at the end, as the characters perform unrealistic actions in service of some authorial conceit. Samantha Harvey, Orbital. One of the most perfectly crafted pieces of prose I’ve ever read; short, basically plotless, almost unbearably intense. It is hard to call the book anything other than science fiction, since it is literally fic…