2025: A Year in Books. My Favourite Books of the Year So Far

Each year, I keep a simple reading note. What I read tends to reflect how I am moving through the world that year, what I am wrestling with, and what I am trying to pay closer attention to.

I am on track to read about 35 books in 2025. Compared to past years, the mix skewed much more toward fiction. That is a shift for me. I usually default to non fiction.

That is a mistake.

Fiction slows me down in a way non fiction rarely does. A good novel pulls you out of your own head and drops you somewhere else. I often struggle through the first fifty or sixty pages. Then, if the book is good, something clicks and I am fully absorbed.

If you are looking for the best books of 2025 so far, or thoughtful book recommendations across fiction and memoir, these are the six that stayed with me.

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

This novel follows a loose network of families and friends in the UK as they wrestle with immigration, identity, and the long shadow of colonialism.

What makes White Teeth work is that it never lectures. Zadie Smith is funny, sharp, and generous at the same time. She captures both the first generation immigrant experience and the confusion of the second generation, caught between inherited history and present day reality.

The book feels alive. Messy families. Bad decisions. Big ideas handled lightly but seriously. It is easy to see why White Teeth remains one of the most recommended contemporary novels.

Isola by Allegra Goodman

This novel pulled me in quickly. I read it in just a few days.

Isola tells the story of Marguerite de La Rocque, a French aristocratic woman stranded on an island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence for two years with her lover and a servant. Against all odds, she survives brutal winters, isolation, and constant danger. The story is based on a sixteenth century historical account.

It is a gripping novel about survival, faith, and resilience. If you enjoy historical fiction grounded in real events, this is one of the strongest books I read this year.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Each year I try to read at least one classic novel. If a book is still widely read more than a century later, it has earned attention.

This one earns it.

Although Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov in the nineteenth century, the book feels unsettlingly current. The three brothers, and their deeply flawed father, represent competing ways of seeing the world. Faith, doubt, rationalism, selfishness, moral responsibility. You can recognize parts of yourself in all of them, which is not always pleasant.

What stayed with me most is the focus on responsibility beyond direct action. Not just what you do, but how your beliefs and indifference shape others. It is demanding. It took me time to get into it. I am glad I stayed with it.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

This memoir appears on many best books of 2025 lists, and for good reason.

Arundhati Roy brings her mother to life in full complexity. Intelligent, difficult, loving, sharp edged. She also vividly captures life in India in the late twentieth century, both private and political.

Roy describes her mother as both her shelter and her storm. That line alone captures the book. If you are looking for a literary memoir about family, memory, and identity, this one stands out.

The Place of Tides by James Rebanks

The premise sounds narrow. James Rebanks travels to rural northern Norway to meet Anna, an older woman who has devoted her life to preserving the tradition of collecting eiderdown.

Eiderdown is gathered from duck nests after the birds have left. For centuries, people in Norway have built shelters for ducks and protected them from predators in exchange for the feathers.

This is not really a book about ducks. It is about place, tradition, and choosing to live at a slower human scale. It is a reminder that not everything worth preserving needs to be optimized or scaled.

Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod

Craig Mod is an American writer who has lived in Japan for much of the past two decades. On the surface, this is a travel memoir about long distance walking on the Kii Peninsula. At a deeper level, it is a letter to his childhood best friend Bryan, who was murdered as a teenager.

The book blends grief, friendship, and attention to place in a way that feels honest and grounded. It taught me a great deal about Japan, and even more about how people carry loss.

These books stayed with me long after I finished them, shaping how I noticed people, place, and my own attention, which is ultimately the only test that matters.