“It’s coming on Christmas/They’re cutting down trees/They’re putting up reindeer/And singing songs of joy and peace” So goes the Joni Mitchell song, River, and I find it circling in my brain as I sit down to review the books I read this year. 2025 was a difficult and extremely challenging year for many around the world. In the last week alone, there have been shootings from Brown University to Bondi Beach, Australia. War is escalating between Thailand and Cambodia, a country very dear to my heart. But I don’t have to tell you all that. You know it well enough. There has been good personal news though, most important of which was welcoming a new grandson into this world, making it healthily into another decade, and releasing my latest novel, Where We Find Ourselves, to find its readership. All this sheds light on my year’s reading and my mindset as I approached these books. And here they are (with the usual caveat that poetry books, of which there were many wonderful ones, are not included in this list).
With love, Sue
- James , Percival Everett
- Orbital, Samantha Harvey
- Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
- The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
- Wings of Red, James W. Jennings
- The Last to Die, Richard Osman
- The Gatekeeper, James Byrne
- You Dreamed of Empires, Alvaro Enrique
- Deadlock, James Byrne
- Chain Reaction, James Byrne
- Tortilla Flat, John Steinbeck
- Outlive, Dr. Peter Attia
- My Name is Emilia Del Valle, Isabel Allende
- A House for Miss Pauline, Diana McCaulay
- The Sisters, Jonas Hassen Khemiri
- Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal
- What We Can Know, Ian McEwan
- The Black Wolf, Louise Penny
- Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
- Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, Laura Spinney
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