A Year in Books, 2025

I like the idea that a reading year has a shape. Not a tidy one, obviously, because humans rarely do tidy, but a shape all the same, a pattern you only spot once you look back and realise you kept orbiting the same questions in different costumes.

My 2025 reading did that. It swung between big, present-tense anxiety about where the world is heading, and older, slower stories about what it means to be human when history (or love, or ideology, or your own mind) stops cooperating. Somewhere in the middle, there were murders on trains, Gothic dread, robots with feelings, and a small bear with a talent for making everything politely chaotic.

The four books that defined the year

Some books entertain, some books inform, and a few quietly rearrange the furniture in your head.

The Coming Wave, Mustafa Suleyman
This was the year’s loudest alarm bell. It’s the kind of book that makes you stare into the middle distance and start inventing new categories for “progress” that include “and then everything catches fire.” It pushed me to think less about whether technology is “good” or “bad” and more about the boring, terrifying question: who gets to steer it, and who gets flattened by it.

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway is ruthless in the way he strips sentimentality right off the page. Love is there, but it is never safe, never protected from the machinery of war and chance. Reading it after modern nonfiction about power and systems felt oddly fitting, different eras, same reminder: history does not care about your plans.

Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
If Suleyman is the siren, Ishiguro is the whisper. This is a book about faith, devotion, and what we choose to call “real” when the line between person and product gets blurry. It’s gentle, but it lingers, like a moral question you can’t swat away.

The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
This remains one of the clearest proofs that a single honest voice can outlast an entire regime built on lies. It’s impossible to read without feeling both admiration and grief, and it has a way of shrinking your ego down to a more reasonable size.

What I ended up reading, even when I didn’t plan to

The rest of the list looks, at first glance, like a messy bookshelf after a minor earthquake: classics beside thrillers, memoirs beside cosmic sci-fi, Orwell beside Paddington.

But the mess has themes.

1) Power, politics, and the stories leaders tell

Two big memoirs anchored this side of the year: A Promised Land (Barack Obama) and Becoming (Michelle Obama), plus Source Code: My Beginnings (Bill Gates). Different lives, different self-mythologies, but they all circle the same tension: public ambition versus private cost, and how much of a life story is truth versus narrative engineering.

Orwell’s essays, Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging, hit from a different angle, shorter, sharper, and less interested in polishing the image. They’re basically a masterclass in watching yourself participate in something you know is wrong, and hating yourself just enough to describe it clearly.

2) The human and the not-quite-human

Sci-fi was doing a lot of emotional labour this year.

• Seveneves (Neal Stephenson) is big-idea catastrophe with the relentless vibe of physics homework.
• The Caves of Steel (Isaac Asimov) is a cleaner, more procedural look at society and prejudice, dressed up as a mystery.
• The Redemption of Time (Baoshu, translated by Ken Liu) plays in someone else’s universe and still asks surprisingly intimate questions about meaning and agency.

Paired with Klara and the Sun, it made 2025 feel like a year spent asking: if we build minds, what do we owe them, and what do we owe ourselves?

3) Darkness, doubles, and the Gothic itch

I apparently wanted fog, dread, and moral rot. Fine.

• Dracula (Bram Stoker) and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson) are basically the blueprint for modern horror psychology.
• The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) is vanity as a supernatural operating system.
• Necronomicon (H.P. Lovecraft) is cosmic horror that still feels potent, even when you read it while also remembering the author’s very earthly flaws.
• You Like It Darker (Stephen King) is proof that sometimes a short story is the best delivery method for unease.

This whole cluster has a shared obsession: the thing you are becomes the thing you tried to hide.

4) Crime as comfort food, but with better dialogue

Some people watch cosy TV to unwind. I read fictional murders.

Benjamin Stevenson’s trio, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect, and Everyone this Christmas Has a Secret, gave me that modern meta-mystery charm: brisk, self-aware, and just clever enough to make you forgive the implausibility.

Agatha Christie’s Elephants Can Remember added the classic touch, memory, misdirection, and that warm feeling of being politely manipulated.

5) The long, operatic pleasure of classics

The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas) is still absurdly satisfying. It’s revenge with the pacing of a soap opera and the emotional payoff of a thunderstorm. It reminds you that “old books” aren’t slow, they just refuse to sprint for your attention.

And then there’s Hemingway again, this time with The Old Man and the Sea, simple on the surface, quietly brutal underneath. It’s the kind of story that makes perseverance feel noble and slightly tragic at the same time.

6) A small bear with impeccable timing

A Bear Called Paddington (Michael Bond) sits in this list like a tiny protest sign that says: “Not everything needs to be bleak, you know.” A practical reminder that kindness and chaos are often the same thing, depending on whether you’re holding the marmalade.

The books I meant to read, and didn’t

Every year has the shadow list, the books that stayed on the bedside table in spirit only. Mine looks like a future itinerary for different moods:

• Remarkably Bright Creatures (Shelby Van Pelt), for something warmer and more human, possibly involving an octopus that’s emotionally smarter than most executives.
• When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… (Steven Pinker), for the “let’s think clearly about society” itch.
• The Odyssey (Homer), because eventually you should meet the original “it’s been a long week” story.
• Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson) and Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), two classics that feel like cultural passports.
• The Unreal and the Real, Vol. 1 and 2 (Ursula K. Le Guin), because Le Guin rarely misses, and short fiction is a perfect format for her.
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway), which would complete a small Hemingway arc I accidentally started.
• The Wicked Wit of Winston Churchill (Dominique Enright) and The Complete Stalky & Co (edited by Isabel Quigly), for wit, bite, and that particular British-flavoured education in social sharpness.

I’m not even mad I didn’t get to them. A reading list is supposed to be aspirational. Otherwise it’s just a receipt.

What 2025 taught me about what I’m drawn to

Looking at the year as a whole, my taste seems to tilt toward:

• Moral pressure: war, systems, power, responsibility.
• Identity under stress: doubles, masks, self-deception.
• Big ideas with emotional consequences: technology, apocalypse, society.
• Craft: writers who can do a lot with very little, Hemingway and Ishiguro especially.

It was a year of books that ask, in different ways, “What do you do when the world doesn’t care about your inner life?”

Apparently my answer was: read another one.

Heading into 2026

If 2025 was a mix of warning sirens and haunted mirrors, the “coming up” list feels like balance: more myth, more wit, more warmth, and a little more Le Guin, because that’s usually a good decision.

That’s the plan, anyway. Humans love plans. The books, as always, will decide what actually happens.

The complete list of books

• Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson
• Odyssey by Stephen Fry
• Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson
• Sherlock Holmes Short Stories by John Tayler
• The Redemption of Time by Baoshu and Ken Liu
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
• The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry
• A Spy Alone by Charles Beaumont
• Shooting an Elephant, A Hanging by George Orwell
• You Like It Darker by Stephen King
• A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond
• Necronomicon by H.P. Lovecraft
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
• The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov
• Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates
• A Promised Land by Barack Obama
• Becoming by Michelle Obama
• Game of Nines by James Patterson
• Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie
• The Room Next Door by Wendy Walker
• Everyone this Christmas Has a Secret by Benjamin Stevenson
• The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway