A Year In Reading

I'm back. Sorry I was gone.

Hey, it’s been a while. I took a couple months off from this newsletter mainly because working somewhere at the intersection of queer advocacy and economic stability finally caught up with me, and I need a break from writing anything that wasn’t work. I could get more into the jaded pessimism of this moment and the toll it’s taken o me, but it’s the beginning of a new year, and that’s not something we do. I’m going to be back at a regular publishing schedule now that I’ve got some things within my cranium in order, so I hope you’ll forgive the absence and stick around a bit, again.

As for my year of reading, it felt kind of meh, no? I feel like I was looking forward to so much that just barely reached a B+/B level for me. Several of my favorite authors I seek out released works that were their 3rd or 4th favorite of mine in their oeuvre. Maybe everything was dulled slightly by the horrors of the world around us. Maybe I need to fully explore why I couldn’t FEEL the way I usually do. Who knows? But still there were some highs, and I’d love to offer 15 reading experiences below that hit hard for one reason or another and that I’d highly recommend picking up.

These are the best, my favorites, or the ones that stood out the most out of the 74 books I read this year in no particular order.

THE LIBRARY (of 2025) IS OPEN (but about to close.)

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy may end up being my favorite novel of the year. At once a meditation on the way friendships ebb, flow, bloom, and evolve over the years and a genre-shifting novel that foretells how communities must depend on one another as we enter ever-darkening times, it was one of the few things that made me cry this year. Following four friends who happen to be Black women over decades, it’s just as much a focus on the power of friendship as it is a tribute to Octavia Butler.

Heart the Lover by Lily King is a nominee for best novel of the year with the worst cover. But we do not evaluate the insides of our books by their covers in these parts, and thank goodness. This one also made me cry, quite a bit. I didn’t think that was possible, but if you don’t believe me, you can ask the many Japenese people at Tokyo station who watched me whimpering as I waited for a train to Kyoto. A woman recounts a college love triangle of sorts from the past that informs the way they handle the way they grieve in present day. Do you know how clever and efficient a novel about straight relationships has to be to move me so much?

Woodworking by Emily St. James is one of the rare pieces of art that can change the world right now. In trans culture, woodworking is the act of a transgender person blending seamlessly into their affirmed gender, essentially becoming invisible in the "woodwork," often for safety or to avoid scrutiny. In this novel, a newly transitioning teacher interacts with a trans student, and their lives become intertwined in their small South Dakota town. I loved this novel for countless reasons but especially in showing how queer people exist everywhere - even outside large cities. If Somebody Somewhere could be a novel, this one would come close.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad is the winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and there’s a reason why. It’s a terribly important book that critiques the entire western world for hypocrisy. It’s an indictment of moral superiority of imperialism combined with a personal biography. Moving, shocking, and necessary.

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann is terrifying in its relation to our current times, and it tells a fictionalized account of the real life director G.W Pabst. A Hollywood stalwart who consorted with the likes of Louise Brooks and Greta Garbo, Pabst fatefully leaves California for his childhood home in Austria to take care of his ailing mother and becomes stuck there as the Nazis invade and takeover, leaving himself and his wife and son captive in the reich. His filmmaking talents are eventually put to use by the regime, he must navigate the dictatorship as an artist and keep his family alive. The parallels to today’s news cycles are jarring.

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy is a climate crisis mystery that takes place on a remote island near Antarctica where the lone family that lives there, as custodians of the of the research facilities, is shocked when a woman washes ashore. As they nurse her back to health, the family falls apart at the seams while secrets are revealed and the island rapidly becomes uninhabitable. Beautiful and foreboding.

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar is a slim novel that tells the story of a not-so-distant future in a climate-ravaged Kolkata where a mother with a climate visa to travel with her child and father to America. Her life becomes entangled with a client at the shelter where she works - a young man who breaks into her home to take back something he believes is not hers. A cat and mouse game with horrible consequences is built in just a few pages, and it couldn’t seem like a more plausible outcome in our world. I flew through this one.

Audition by Katie Kitamura is banger from this author where you never exactly know what’s going on, but you’re happy to go along for the ride. It’s nearly impossible to talk about the plot of this one - an actress meets a young actor for lunch and they discover something about their connection that evolves over the course of the book. Halfway through the novel, the floor drops out beneath us and all we know changes. Kitamura is the queen of establishing a vibe, and this one weaves us through the concepts of truth, art, family, relationships, and performance.

Open Heaven by Sean Hewitt is one of those “a poet writes prose” novels that sings about a specific experience that maps elegantly over the lives of so many queer people. Recalling his time as a young child coming of age in his small, rural British hometown, he tells the story of his first time falling in love with another young man, a visitor to a farm who is beautiful, charismatic, and impulsive. If you’re in the market for flowery descriptions of yearning, desire, and our first loves, this is the book for you.

I Leave it up to You by JinWoo Chong is a sad, funny little romcom about a man who wakes up after a coma seeing that everyone in his life - including his employers, his landlord, and the love of his life - have moved on after two years. He moves home with his family where his father hopes he’ll take up the mantle of the sushi restaurant where he’s the head chef. While he puts his life together, the nurse who took care of him while he was in a coma may be the romantic partner he needs to help him put everything back together.

The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers is my exception to avoiding novels about New York millennials who bemoan their inability to maintain create careers and explode their lives apart. A couple moves to upstate New York and the wife in the marriage, shortly after having a child, dreams of having an affair with a father who shows up to her baby group. What follows is a formally inventive novel with several paths showing what happens if the affair happens or it doesn’t. Everyone’s insufferable, but that’s fine. What sets this one apart is the crackling, droll dialogue that’s laugh-out-loud funny.

Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin is the announcement of a new talent. The novel tells the story of a rich, Black college graduate who gets arrested for cocaine possession while he deals with the aftermath of the death of his wildly charismatic and tabloid-fodder roommate. It’s a beautiful examination of a queer man who exists at the intersections of so many worlds. Can’t wait to see what he writes next.

Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion by Chris DeVille is a music criticism book that chronicles the evolution of 21st-century indie rock, exploring how the genre influenced and was influenced by the mainstream through the internet, blogs, and cultural shifts. I don’t listen to audiobooks often, but this one was so great - and it comes with playlists for each of its chapters. If you grew dancing in the 2000s/10s, this is a must-listen celebration.

An Exaltation of Larks by Suanne Laqueur is a backlist novel that came to my attention this year, and I can’t believe I missed it when it came out. It covers the intertwined fates of Alex, a young refugee from the 1973 coup in Chile; Val, the daughter of a benevolent doctor in an idyllic small town in upstate New York; and Javier, an aspiring writer who supports himself as an escort to wealthy women. Both sexy and heartbreaking, the way I like my sagas. It’s the first in a series that I can’t wait to continue in 2026.

The Rachel Reidiverse. Listen, I’ve always read queer romances, but this year I was turned on to the gay hockey romance world and, forget Wicked, I have been changed for good. I read The Shots You Take first, and it was the sad horny spectacular I needed. Retired hockey players who had a youthful dalliance come full circle later in life. Then knowing that Heated Rivalry was going to be adapted (and save my year - I’ll write about this masterpiece, a perfect show I’m obsessed with, in the future), I read that and it’s couple-focused sequel The Long Game. I snorted them like drugs. Are they Spakespeare? No. They don’t need to be. In a year of horror, I was so happy to lean into feelings, earnestness, and queer joy. I’ll be exploring more of this in the year to come.

Can’t wait to tell you about more books you should read soon.

In the meantime, happy reading !